Outside the rain had begun to fall and the bridge was slippery with it, sheets of water blown by the wind, sailors on the decks below clearing the chairs and battening down for a storm. I ran across the deck and as close to the bow as I could get, leaning into the metal rail, letting the rain drench me completely, the spray from the waves soak me. It was so thick I could not even see the sea beneath us but I knew it was there. How quickly it would hide me in this weather. It was my leaving which made this happen. If I had only stayed, if the family were still together, if our hope was unbroken, he would still be alive. He would have made it home. I put my foot on the middle rail, so the top pressed into my thighs. It was vertiginous, a dizzy feeling which kept my head quiet for a moment—two. Somewhere beneath the rain and crashing waves was the thrum of the ship’s engine, a sound so deep I felt it in my bones.

Then hands grabbed my waist and pulled me down, wrapped a coat around me. I was pressed against something smelling of wet wool and diesel fuel.

‘I promise it’s not the end of the world.’

I tried to twist away from him but pictured his kind face in the captain’s office, how he had pulled up a chair to sit beside me.

‘Let’s go inside. I’ll make you a cup of cocoa and fetch your friend. It’s an awful thing, war, but it will do your parents no good to lose you as well.’

I could not even speak to reply. Brynn’s cardigan was sopping wet, probably ruined from the rain.

•

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, half an hour later, as I passed it to her in a heavy bundle, along with the wet clothes which I had changed out of. My teeth chattered. It wasn’t even cold, but Jim said it was probably the shock of it all. We sat in the captain’s mess—empty, thankfully, apart from us—and as promised Jim had brought me towels, cocoa and Brynn. He’d also found a dressing-gown—only he called it a bathrobe—which surely must have been his own, as it brushed the tops of my feet.

Brynn held my hand and stroked it. ‘Your mum said not to come back, didn’t she?’

‘She’s just being brave,’ I said. ‘She’ll be lost.’

‘But what about you?’ Jim said, drinking from a glass of whiskey that the steward had brought with the cocoa.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you go back, it would mean postponing the rest of your life. I think your mum was telling the truth: she’d probably rather think of you happy, starting anew.’

•