Then, ahead of me, slinking through the oaks lining the road, I swear there’s someone watching.

Suddenly, someone, watching me. Long hair spilling around them.

Celeste? My breath catches in my throat.

This is when I fall.

My legs are going too fast, fighting for ground one after the other and they tangle and lock and I fall, propelled forward, and I know my chin bashes against the ground based on the pressure but not yet the pain. But when I get back up and keep going, I know the wetness on my face isn’t sweat, and this realization makes my legs buckle again.

It’s so hot. It’s so hot. And the last thing I see before I melt completely is the sharp drop of the pier and a man I recognize at the dock, the massive ferry, his confusion becoming alarm when the infiltrating grey becomes too obscene to endure and I fall again for the final time.

The water-smoothed pebbles press into my back and hold me there, suspended in the black. Like little hands. Little round eyes, watching, spread so wide that I’m compelled to open my own, flooded by the sizzling white-hot. Little clicking tongues. Or more than clicking. Voices. Say it isn’t right for a girl to be so angry, to claw merrily at her own flesh, for the pain to remind her of coming home. No, it isn’t right. But there’s nothing else.

Blinking conjures a face. I recognize it. Handlebar moustache, small rodent eyes.

He says something that echoes and hurts my ears and I don’t hear it because his shadowed face is swimming laps in the dark. Yes, all of him is swimming, but then he’s offering a hand to me and I take it. The roughness of his palm, like a hand pressed to bark, is enough to shake me out of my daze. ‘Hey. Girl. You all right?’

Frank. The ferryman. I let him haul me up and say I’m fine but in a trembling not-fine way.

‘Ain’t you that girl who looked nothing like her picture? Gave me lip on the dock?’

Salty sea air wafts past and I breathe it. In the distance, the lighthouse hangs from the sky as an omen, light like an explosion against the pinprick stars. ‘Yes,’ I say pathetically. ‘I’m sorry.’ I don’t really mean to apologize.

‘Well, s’all right,’ he says. ‘You gonna be OK?’

To my ringing ears the question seems incredibly profound and it makes me woozy again. I might not be OK, sir. Help. I brush my chin with my fingertips, which reemerge with enough blood to make my knees buckle. ‘Uh,’ is all I can say.

He looks behind like someone’s expecting him and turns back, hurried. ‘Come on, then. There’s a first-aid kit in the dock station.’

‘Thank you. I’m sorry – this is really nice of you.’