I don’t sleep again. I leave for work at six without waking Peyton (for the second time this fractured morning – she sleeps like a damn rock), fifteen minutes earlier than before, and the sensation is that of walking through water, exhaustion the friction that makes every movement sticky and awkward. There’s no wind down here but the clouds are practically skipping across the sky, still outlined with the pink vignette of early morning, like scabs.

The morning light, no longer sinister, clears my head and makes it possible to act instead of short-circuit. I text Ellis.

Me: Do you know anything about Frank? The ferry captain?

I think about everything Frank said. Guitar made for skewering. A walking confrontation. Always fighting over something.

I feel pieces of Roxy form in my head and lock – pieces, maybe, that were already there, but now with names. I can almost see her in the room. Those bright green eyes, long blonde hair. I’m trying to decide what she means to me, what she is, what most accurately conveys the inimitable gush of her life – a knife of a woman who pushed until there was no body left to pierce. An alien. A feeling. A roll of thunder trapped inside a woman’s body. I desperately wish to know her. I almost feel like I do. When I play any of her songs there’s something intimate there, something almost too near – like she understands the badness. Like she was there to see it. I want to get back in bed and imagine her there with me. I can’t explain why she feels so close to me.

At the diner, I say morning to Mary Anne and get started on the opening tasks, which she’s now, on the second day, evidently decided I can already be left to do on my own (I can) – wiping down the tables and bar, refilling the receipt paper, turning on the radio. Mary Anne requests the sixties hits channel – presently playing ‘Daydream Believer’ by The Monkees. It’s only my second day and, no, I haven’t worked a busy tourist weekend yet but everything seems to be going fine so far. Generally Mary Anne is happy to leave me to my own devices, and I’m happy to leave her to hers – sometimes helping in the back of house with Charlie and Archie but otherwise mainly in her office, doing God knows what.

We open at seven, the sun warming the first thin strip of the island, and I flip over the paper OPEN sign that hangs in the window. Not long after this a familiar face sends the doors chiming: Booker.

My stomach churns. I think for certain that he must know, that he saw Ellis and me in the station on Saturday night, that he’s come to confront me.

‘Table for one, please,’ he says, already a watery glisten on his brow.

‘Sure. Nice to see you again.’