“When we met, at the party on the beach, at first I thought it was wild. The drumming, the dancing. We had a great time. The best. But once I got her away from the crowd, she was babbling such nonsense to me. I thought was she on drugs then, but it was just that she was so indoctrinated. She was malnourished and brainwashed, and when I took her back in the morning, they’d all gone without her. Good riddance, I said, but she was heartbroken, couldn’t accept that they’d done that, that they didn’t care about her and wouldn’t wait for her. She had nothing but what she stood up in, and I swear nothing she was wearing would constitute a coat. Anyway, I brought her home, got her some proper clothes, fed her up. She seemed to get better. We were so happy, for a short while. When she was about three months pregnant, that’s when the delusions took hold. She said I’d taken her coat, meaning her skin. It’s gotten tangled up in her mind. She thinks she puts on her coat and turns into an actual seal, Ruby.”

There was so much to take in. “So, her family … abandoned her there?”

He nodded. “So cruel. It sent her mad, I think. She needs therapy, a kind of decompression, anti-brainwashing. She never had the chance for that.”

Ruby felt it like a gut punch. It explained why she was losing her mind. Constance’s problems suddenly made Ruby’s seem trivial.

“What about all the seal stuff, though? It can’t just be about the name.”

He sighed. “Within the community, cult, whatever—there are stories. They’re all to do with seal worship. Their version of Bible stories I suppose. And they have rituals. When they come of age, there’s a ceremony. On the solstice or the equinox or whatever, they wrap a sealskin coat around themselves, throw themselves into the sea and swim until dawn. They’re convinced, when they come ashore, that they’ve been seals all night long, catching fish in their teeth, sleeping on rocks, all of that. Hallucinations brought on by the exhaustion, probably.”

“Must be freezing, the sea up there.” Ruby wrapped her arms around herself, shivering at the thought of it.

“It is. And the thing is, they don’t all come back.”

“You mean they drown?”

“Well, yes. But that’s not how they see it. If they don’t come back, to them it’s because they’ve decided to live as seals for the rest of their lives. The tribe are actually happy when that happens. The parents do a special ceremony, with dancing and feasting, and so on.”

“Wow,” said Ruby. “So, you lose your kid forever, and you’re happy?”