Gilly beamed. ‘That’s fantastic,’ she said. ‘You’re such a star, Ezra.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he grumbled. ‘Now get out of it before she sees us and comes out here to ask what we’re gossiping about.’

The next morning, Edie left at ten, but Gilly held off knocking at their neighbour’s door until almost eleven. She’d stretched the truth when telling him how long Edie would be out – the artist had said it wasn’t a large exhibition, so she’d probably only be a couple of hours.

‘The coast is clear and the kettle’s on!’ she called through Ezra’s open back door. ‘Let’s get this show on the road!’

Ezra appeared in a set of old blue work overalls that were spotted with dried oil. Gilly had a feeling he’d kept them from his days on the North Sea rigs. He’d told her enough stories of rough seas and stupendous storms to fill her fledgeling artist’s mind with images, and Gilly now had the kernel of an idea for a series of prints depicting rigs in the midst of nature’s most devastating powers.

‘I like that,’ she said, nodding at his outfit. ‘Very industrial.’

Ezra looked down at himself and smiled slightly. ‘I like it too,’ he said, ‘mainly because at the moment I can still fit in it. All this lazing around as a retiree is bad for the physique. Come on, let’s hop to it before the harpy gets back.’

Ezra examined the shed and decreed that the best thing to do was completely replace the old felt, and so he set about ripping off what was there. It came off in ragged black strips, creasing and cracking as they dropped it to the ground. They talked as they worked, Ezra asking Gilly about what she was studying.

‘Are you enjoying it?’ Ezra asked.

‘Yeah, I am,’ Gilly told him, surprised to realize that she meant it. Before, school had always been one more place where she didn’t really fit, where her clothes were never quite right, where the kids with parents who actually wanted them looked at her like an unusual bug they’d found. There but for the grace of God, etcetera.

‘Hey,’ Ezra said, noticing her lapse into silence.

Gilly jolted back into the present. ‘What?’

‘You all right?’

‘I’m fine. Just… concentrating.’

Ezra flicked an eyebrow up at that, as if he didn’t believe it for a minute. Gilly looked away and tore the last piece of felt from the roof. ‘What now?’ she said, to move the conversation on.

‘Best clear that lot up before we do anything else,’ Ezra said, indicating the rubble of old roof felt concertinaed in piles on the slabs beneath them. ‘There’ll be hell to pay if we miss any.’

Gilly duly climbed down the stepladder and began stuffing the bin bags she’d already brought out for the purpose. ‘I really don’t get it, you know,’ she said.

‘What don’t you get?’

‘You and Edie. Why you are the way you are.’ She sighed. ‘It all seems so…’ she picked out a word she’d heard one of her foster parents once use to describe her own behaviour, ‘unnecessary.’