‘No one ever goes deep into them, because it’s, like, physically impossible. I guess the trees are super dense and there’re drops and people kept getting hurt and that’s why they just closed ’em off. But there’re tons of stories about all sorts of weird stuff in them at night. Electromagnetic shit. And tons of stories from those weekender cabins on the edge, before they shut ’em all down – that the people who stayed in them kept losing their stuff, or saw it moved around, or saw people in the woods.’

‘No kidding?’

‘It’s not just the woods, either,’ she says. ‘Weird stuff happens all the time around here. There were a bunch of fires a couple of years ago, like, some local buildings just set ablaze out of nowhere. It had to have been arson because, what a coincidence, you know, but they never caught who did it.’ I think of the impression I got of Sandown my first day here: the fat red wound of it, perpetually gaping, putrefying. Peyton nudges me. ‘Anyway, we can go check out the No-Names later,’ she says, but I get the sense she’s joking.

I bite my lip, watch the waves as they lick the shore. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

Liam doesn’t like this response, clearly. ‘Nah, you should. I’ve had full supernatural experiences where –’

Peyton, unfazed, clocks something behind me. She erupts, flailing an arm above her head. ‘Ellis! Buddy!’

I turn and there’s the boy from the B and B, alone, hunched over, a few paces from the tide, face plastered with the alarm of a deer about to be flattened. There’s something in his hands that he’s carrying like an injured bird as he approaches, shuffling arduously across the stones. ‘Hey, Peyton.’

She wraps him in a hug, saying, ‘You’re so tall!’ over and over. ‘Sylvia feeding you Miracle Grow? Holy shit.’

Liam says a cool Hey, man, which is perhaps too masculine for Ellis’s comfort and he shifts, unsure how to volley it back, but then notices me and seems to relax, shoulders falling from his ears. ‘H-hi, Mona.’

‘Yeah, I heard you two met,’ Peyton says with a mad grin, jiggling both of us by the shoulders.

‘Potentially the best chef in Sandown,’ I say. I look to his hands, the contents of which I still can’t make out. There’s a bunch of the things, round and partially reflective, even in the shadows of the gathering dark.

‘What’cha got?’ Peyton asks before I can.

Ellis seems to have forgotten he is holding them because he looks down, startled, remembering. ‘Oh, they’re just, uh, sea glass. Broken b-b-bottles or whatever else winds up in the ocean and the salt w-water erodes it into these –’

Of all the colours on the shore, you’re the one she adored

Hadn’t given second thought to tangerine –