Ellis and I stay for only a little longer, until the night is too dark and the water too chilly to bear. Swimming back to shore inspires a fit of nerves, my muscles too sharp and locked to bring any grace or confidence to the task, but I’m safe under Ellis’s watchful eye. Nothing we talk about on the way back approaches the heaviness we had breached. He recites childhood swimming anecdotes. We both point out the constellations we know well enough to name (Big and Little Dippers, Orion’s Belt; Ellis impresses with a sighting of Scorpio). Where our paths diverge at the nape of the neck, our clothes still damp, I feel like something has changed, as though some new and delicate intimacy has grown between us that wasn’t there before. I want to touch him, somehow, a hug, or a hand on his shoulder, but every way I can think to initiate feels odd and contrived. ‘Get some rest,’ I say finally, and that feels like enough.

‘See you tomorrow!’ Ellis says, already starting up the lamplit drive, a boyish tug of a smile across one side of his face.

There’s a spring in my step as I walk back to the dorm.

A dimmish streetlight flickers above me as the pitchy buzz of a mosquito brushes against my ear and I realize that I’ve only been in Sandown for five days. Can that be right? Not only has this felt like a lifetime in and of itself, but I feel my other life, whatever the thing I’d arrived with was, fading from reality as easily as a dream.

Maybe it’s because I’m now so untethered that I’m seeking things to tether myself to. Peyton already feels like a safety line. So does Ellis. I’m surprised by how soft I feel towards them, these people I’ve only just begun to know, who would have never appeared in the story of my life if I hadn’t come here to find them. There’s a power in how I’ve catalysed my own profound experiences. Would this have happened anywhere, no matter where I’d gone, no matter whose bones I went looking for? Is the world full of Peytons and Ellises? Or is there something about Sandown, something about the two-dimensional main street, the clean boardwalk, the omni-embracing sea, reflective from all sides, that forces one to confront the truth of oneself no matter which way one looks? Something about Peyton and Ellis themselves? I can’t say. I’m hypnotized.

I think of Roxy. I wonder if she felt this same thing too, and who she felt it for, and why.