Me: I promise you. No danger. I just know that you would come and get me and that really can’t happen yet. I love you! I’m sorry.

I shut my phone off. I realize I’ve been sucking on the same gutted sunflower seed for the past ten minutes, maybe, and my tongue is eroded and sore from salt. I open my car door a crack and spit the shell on to the pavement, then shut my eyes and listen to the sea.

Soon the lull of the waves is sliced by the blare of a foghorn, impossibly loud; for all I know the ferry’s teleported here, up against the sharp of the dock. It lurches to a halt. A pair of deckhands rope the thing tight and the gate falls open.

An older man emerges from the captain’s deck, says something to the deckhand, and makes his way off the boat and into the booth I’m parked next to. I roll down my window.

‘You’re raring and ready, eh?’ he says with a voice about as gravelly as I anticipate.

‘Pretty much.’

‘Car ticket?’ he asks, and up close I can see the texture of his face, rough with sun damage. He’s got a wild head of white hair poking from beneath a red cap emblazoned with a Sandown patch. Dense and unruly beard to match. Nose thick with cartilage, small eyes peeking from a hooded brow.

‘Yeah, but I’m a Seasonal, so should be free.’

‘Seasonal?’ He performs a laboured pivot towards the back of the hut, where there’s a crossed-to-date calendar hung on a nail. ‘You’re early.’

The past twelve hours flash before my eyes, of another plate-scraping dinner and packing and gone, driving away from Indiana like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Blurry highway bokehs. Seventies classic radio. I’m not even tired. ‘Just eager.’

‘Mmph.’ He drags a clipboard towards him that rattles against the counter. ‘Name?’

‘Mona Perry.’

‘You got identification, Mona Perry?’

I fish my driver’s licence out of my back pocket and slide it across.

There’s a beat while he scrutinizes, and I worry he can tell it’s a fake, but he’s not looking at my birthday, the 2002 where there should be a 2004. The picture. His small eyes shrink. ‘This ain’t you.’