They’re not yet characterized by calm reflection, but by manic ticking; my adrenaline, which somehow hasn’t depleted totally over the past two feverish weeks, is still kicking its back legs at my chest. I think of Ellis, how his fears about Roxy were not just founded, but obscenely correct; of Roxy and the sheer improbability of her existence, of any of this; of my analysis at the beginning of my time on Sandown, a mystery that simply needed to be coaxed from the island; of Celeste, and what I’ve done.

I’m also thinking of that night Ellis and I had suspended in the black water, vulnerable little knots of life, wanting and ready to make anything ours.

Is that really what a life could be, after this? Could it always feel like cool black water?

No one speaks. Perhaps we are all too exhausted. Even the man driving the boat politely asks no questions.

On our eventual approach to the small crowd of people gathered beside the slipway, I feel an overwhelming sense of shrinking, as though they’re not becoming human but we, too, are becoming ants.

Alongside the people there are official-looking vehicles, two ambulances, a van that reads ELEVEN EYEWITNESS NEWS. I don’t understand why, at first, after we’ve been helped off the boat, they are so interested in Ellis and me, why they tug us away from one another with such speed. Someone drapes a blanket around my shoulders. Booker says something to a uniformed man I don’t recognize, who then glances at me.

The succession of people that follows is unreal, somehow, and I don’t know where to look. Mercifully Peyton shows up and just says, ‘You got him, you got him,’ over and over, and I let her, the moment perhaps more for her than me, and at first I’m not sure if this is the right time to tell her – but the face she makes when I finally say into her ear, low and urgent, ‘We found her, alive,’ confirms it was the right time. I don’t think I’ll ever see as complicated and wonderful an expression again, disbelief and horror and absolute exhilaration. I was right, you idiot, I want to tell her, but that can come later.

Dad, after delivering a panicked reprimand for my jumping off the ferry (which I’ve, up until now, entirely forgotten about) and an awkward acknowledgement of my myriad injuries that I think he intends to be paternal, says, ominously, that my friend and I are going to be busy. I ask why. ‘Well, I think they found your show.’

Dad lets me borrow his phone.

ok, hear me out that Mona girl has to be CAP!!!

They said she was there working for the summer and that the kid is grandson of a musician who went missing … all lines up