Mary Anne knows our conversation is over and I swear the corners of her lips turn up with the answer. ‘She loved me.’

Hands grip me from behind and I know it’s Dad, and I want to keep looking at Mary Anne, can’t stand the thought of the moment falling apart, but Dad forces me round and into his chest into the least-wanted hug of my life. And when I turn back, Mary Anne’s gone, locked in her office.

Dad pulls me into him, not a hug so much as the preliminary hold of a kidnapping. ‘Mona,’ he says.

‘My friend’s missing.’

‘What?’

‘My friend Ellis is missing. He went into the woods.’

‘Well, they better find him.’ And I realize now that I am not my father. I don’t have to be my sister. I don’t have to be any of it.

I need to stay for Ellis. But God, I don’t want to go back into the woods.

Dad looks me up and down, seemingly registering my exhaustion. My only other blood. The only one I’ve taken everything from.

‘They’re evacuating the entire island,’ Dad says, ‘and the next boat is in an hour. I’ll take you back to the dorm to pack – quickly – and then we’re out of here. I booked a hotel for the night; I think we can probably make it to Erie –’

‘I think I have to stay.’

Dad raises his eyebrows. ‘What?’

‘I have to stay.’

‘What does that mean?’

I don’t speak. Where is my voice?

‘I’ll pack for you, then. Give me your keys.’

I think of what Lenore had said about Roxy, that even though she’d wanted nothing more than to leave, she was plagued, always, by the feeling of being inexorably bound to her circumstances, to her blood. How in public she was a spitfire but behind closed doors, at the will of her mother, only a girl.

And this I think is why, despite knowing what is right with every fibre of my being, even after everything, I drop the keys, gently, into my dad’s outstretched hand. Good daughter.

There’s a frenzy at the dorms, everyone with the same idea.

I almost hope Peyton is in the room but she’s not. Dad and I don’t speak. I don’t like him being here. For the obvious reasons – I don’t appreciate what he’s here to do – but I don’t like his shape in a space I’d resolved to make my own. He looks completely out of place, made of different stuff from what I thought I’d accomplished here.

Outside, the sky grows increasingly alien and volatile, ready to burst.

So much has changed. My podcast equipment is gone. Packing takes all of two seconds, the most laborious task involving balling up the first bag into the other. There’s barely anything left.