‘In my home!’ Roxy shouts, and the sentence is almost laughable – the cabin has no roof – but nobody is laughing. A robin perches on the sharp of the wood, chirping. ‘That’s what! He’s in my home and is a child who can’t possibly understand, whose feelings I’m not interested in sparing.’

‘Is this all because of Mary Anne?’ I ask. ‘Because she wouldn’t come with you?’

She leans forward and, in a theatrical stage whisper, says, ‘I was going to be famous,’ the famous dripping with derision. ‘Didn’t you know? My agent was endlessly optimistic. He had heard about some charming girl off the mainland with a set of pipes and moxie and had travelled over just to hear me sing. He was charismatic enough, with all these highfalutin ideas about how he planned to change me and make me a star. He said I was going to sell a million records. He said I was going to be on TV.’ She scoffs, a dark weight to it.

‘And what happened?’

‘I discovered my own lack of autonomy,’ she says in a moment of off-putting, bleaching clarity. ‘Which so happened, unfortunately, to coincide with Sylvia’s existence.’

Ellis shifts beside me.

Roxy leans forward. ‘There is not one scrap of good on this rock,’ she says. ‘None of it. None of it! No one cares about you, and everyone wants to use you, and everyone treats hurt like a thing that happens to other people instead of what will inevitably and invariably happen to you you you you you.’ And with each you another sunbeam seems to sink in the space behind my eyes. I wince.

The sun beats down into the cabin.

Roxy takes another sip of her drink. ‘I grew up understanding that Sandown Bay was hell on Earth. An ignorant bubble cut off from the rest of the world, full of regressive people who hide behind tradition. And Mary Anne wanted to leave too. She said she did, anyway. And when she went back on her word to stay with Archie, that was when I realized that you can’t trust a goddamn person in this entire goddamn bullshit world. Even the ones you think you love. The ones you think love you.

‘And once I’d come out here for good, the more and more I considered it, all these wonderful things I’d been promised, I realized that people are horrible everywhere. The entire world is full of Sandown Bays. I decided I didn’t want any part of it.’

‘Why not just disappear, then? Why the theatrics when Archie and Booker and Mary Anne followed you?’

‘Indeed, extraordinary measures must be taken when one cannot keep to one’s own fucking business,’ she says. ‘They’d seen me go in. I needed to give them a reason to think I wasn’t going any further in but I sure as hell wasn’t going back out, neither.’