“You’ve been in here for half an hour.”

“I’m—” he cut himself off with another wave of nausea, head down into the bowl, his whole body clenched. Matter rose up from his stomach and splattered into the toilet.

“I’ll check again in a bit,” said the person, and went away.

With every heave, the pain in his head intensified, and with each bright burst of it, he pictured Constance coming toward him with the rock or whatever it was that she’d used to bash his head in. This picture was not a memory; he’d been hit from behind, he hadn’t even known she was there. After Ruby led him to Constance, the first thing he was going to do was make her pay for that.

The man had ventured from the bathroom a couple of hours into the journey, but he hadn’t been able to go far. He kept needing to dash back and hold himself over the toilet, though after a while mostly he’d been dry-heaving. When he first saw the lights of the island, he’d been convinced it was a mirage, but as they came closer, he saw that there were streetlights, and a few lit windows punched out of the dark, seemingly set into the dense blackness of rock. When the moon broke through the clouds for a moment, the island loomed from the sea, both bigger and smaller than he had expected, like the hump of an impossibly large whale; an ancient, treeless mound with the edges of cottage roofs silhouetted against the sky like giant limpets.

The boat tips very slightly and he loses balance, his stomach turning with the movement, but there is nothing left to come up. Leaning with one hand on the cool glass, the man hears the sound of the child’s—unmistakably Leonie’s—chatter behind him, and discreetly moves away to the other side of the ferry. The child’s noise is like an early-warning system; he can hear them coming and get out of the way before they spot him. There had been only one moment, about an hour ago, when he’d realized that Ruby was coming toward him, heading for the toilets without Leonie, and he’d had to duck sideways into the bar area to get away. There, he saw that Leonie was asleep under a coat on one of the benches at the edge of the room. He watched her for a minute, until he realized he too was being watched, by the bartender. When their eyes met, the man smiled, but the bartender did not. He just stared back steadily, continuing to polish a glass with a cloth.

“You feeling alright, mate?”