Booker leans in. ‘You wanna shoot me, don’t you? That’s why. You told Mary to make it look like you’d been shot. That’s been the question of my life, Rox. Bothered me for three decades. No idea why you said it. Why you said it to her.’

‘I’d never loved her more than I did in that moment,’ Roxy says quietly. ‘How she knew just what I wanted, without the words.’ Roxy smiles to herself in a way I feel we’re not supposed to see.

‘Then you told her to leave the note in your car,’ I say. ‘To make it look like you ran away. Via the radios.’

‘Mary was street-smart,’ Roxy says, ‘and from the sound of it seems like she can run a fine business, but couldn’t wield the weapon of language to save her life. That woman gave a new meaning to sweet nothings, God, just nothing nothing nothing. I didn’t think anyone would come looking for me, anyways. Turns out she writes so poorly that I might have been better off not asking her to do anything at all. People didn’t like me. They knew how I was.’ She pauses, turns to Booker. ‘But blocking off the entirety of the goddamn woods was a helpful exploit of pure cowardice that I had not been expecting.’

‘How do you survive out here?’ Ellis asks.

‘I once had a beautiful garden growing,’ she says, floaty and exaggerated, like a damsel. ‘Hunted. There’s a ravine off to the side where I could get close to the sea and fish.’

It doesn’t escape me that she’s speaking in the past tense.

‘Oh, and pemmican is beautiful stuff, you wouldn’t believe. Need to develop a bit of a taste for it, but once you do you’re golden. Anyway, I could get to the mainland in about thirty minutes in a dinghy. Stay there for a few days at a time.’

‘You mean – you leave the island?’

‘How else would I stock up on supplies? I’ve got another place on the mainland, friends who don’t know nothing about nothing.’

‘Then why stay here? It would be so easy to just go somewhere else. No one would know you. Maybe they would have when it first happened, but not any more. Why here?’

She leans in close to me, a sort of conspiratorial smirk stretching her lips, and it frightens me. ‘Are you familiar with the term schadenfreude?’

Booker rolls his head. ‘Oh, Jesus, Roxy.’

‘Lee,’ she says, ‘do you remember the fires?’

I watch his mouth start to form the words – What fires? – but he shifts into a picture of realization.

I remember something Peyton had mentioned. The weekender cabins catching fire. Objects inside mysteriously moving and disappearing.

A ghost in the woods.

‘That was you?’ he says. ‘I swear, everyone’s felt under some curse …’ Sandown’s ghost.