I don’t know how much time I have to set this down, so I’ve got to be quick. After Will left, Charlie came in to see me, and I had a disturbing conversation with him – one I’m afraid I will eventually forget. So here it is for future me, exactly as it happened.

“Did you see him?” Charlie asked. “Was he there at the lighthouse?”

I assumed he meant Conall and said, “Yes, but 336don’t worry, he’s gone. He won’t be able to hurt anyone again.”

Charlie shook his head vigorously. “Not him,” he said. “I meant Rory.”

I frowned. “Who’s Rory?”

Charlie’s face fell. “My brother. We talked about him back at the hunters’ camp, remember? You said you’d look for him inside the lighthouse, that you’d bring him home.”

I stared at him, a growing feeling of horror creeping over my body. “I don’t remember any Rory.”

Charlie started to cry. “But you promised!” he said. “And you have to remember him. You talked to him and played board games with us, and he showed you his pet snails and gave you a welcome drawing when you first arrived at the lighthouse.”

I shook my head. “That was you.”

Charlie looked morose. “I hate drawing. And snails.”

My head started to throb. “But do you mean … are you saying that he was there with us? On Bird Rock the whole time?”

“Right until Mummy and me ran away from the 337lighthouse and came to the guga hunters’ camp,” Charlie said. “I told you what had happened. You didn’t remember him then either, but you believed me and said you’d try to get him back.”

I remembered taking Charlie’s hand at the camp and promising him something, but when I wracked my brain I just couldn’t recall exactly what I had promised or what we’d talked about.

When I thought back over our time at the lighthouse, I remembered only one boy, but he seemed an odd mixture of things, as if he had a split personality. Not only that, but Dad and Kate were always saying contradictory things about him. Could that be because there had been two boys all along? It was just that my brain had merged them into one when I’d forgotten Rory.

Suddenly I thought of that board game Rosie and I had played with Charlie during the storm.

“Please?” he’d said, over and over again. “We need four people to play.”

It was a four-person game, yet somehow we’d played the game with only three of us. How had we done that? Or could it be that there had been four of us back then? I just couldn’t remember. 338

“I’m so sorry, Charlie,” I whispered. “I forgot that conversation. I don’t remember Rory, but I do believe you.”