She sits in the kitchen, waiting. She’s been waiting restlessly since yesterday—since Flo left, disgruntled, saying she couldn’t promise anything but she’d think about it, which, Lucy supposes, is all she can hope for. But she feels uneasy about what that conversation might have done. She’d begged Flo to be what she isn’t, to be other than herself; and she’d refused to participate, to work alongside the older woman who was just trying to do a good turn by Poppy. She’d seen it in Flo’s face: Flo knew Lucy was judging her. Trying to change her.

But the thing is, Lucy wants to go. She wants to go octopussing with Flo. She yearns to. She yearns to be in the water, to be doing something rather than stewing incessantly like she has been these last few days—to be doing something with Flo and chatting all the while, or not, because either way is just fine when you’re busy in camaraderie. She wants to rush over to Flo’s place and barge through the door and say, I’ll do it, Flo, and You’re perfect the way you are.

But she can’t. Won’t. She would, if she thought doing so would fix her, would knit her back into herself. But she knows it won’t. It would only tear her further apart because of the octopuses in the bay and because of Harry. Harry. Fuck, Harry—she can’t face him again until she’s sorted it out with Jem, who’s due back from the west coast any minute now and might or might not know he’s killed a man, or at the very least created the circumstances for a man’s death.

So she sits, waiting. Staring at the screen of her laptop, pretending to work. Feeling like she could cry or vomit or cry or vomit.

Manslaughter, Harry had said. She doesn’t know, yet, if that’s how she sees it. Abstractly, she knows it’s true. She knows that what Jem did is the definition of manslaughter. And she knows that, by concealing certain facts, she’s complicit to the point that she has become an accessory. No longer her own person, but Jem’s accessory.

The door bangs and she starts like a cat, slopping her tea over a pile of documents. She grabs a tea towel and tries, half-heartedly, to mop the tannin mess up as she listens to his approach: his footsteps on the floorboards growing louder.

And here he is, standing listlessly in the doorway.

He knows. Judging by the look on his face when he appears in the doorway, she knows he knows. And judging by the way he’s looking at her, he knows she knows, too. He looks old. Undone. His lips, his cheeks, his eyes all droop with grief and guilt, like the weight of the emotions has worried the elasticity from his face. She’s never seen him like this before.

Will he cry? she wonders, absently.

‘Jem,’ she says.

‘Zach called me,’ he says without preamble. ‘He’s stressing balls. He told me that … that …’