Peyton’s nosy when I leave; I tell her I’m going for a run.

The sky’s weird tonight, almost green, thick clouds rolling in from the mainland, angry and seemingly ready to burst. I catch intermittent flashes of lightning.

I use one of the dorm bikes to ride there. It takes maybe fifteen minutes – for Ellis, I think, it’s just a walk down the street. This isn’t the wood behind their house – further down the road they live on, there’s a cul-de-sac circled by temporary-stay cabins. Past an unthreatening wooden barrier, there’s an empty parking lot, presumably there for when the woods were open. Now it’s encircled by that same barbed-wire fence and the same signs as the stretch of wood behind Ellis’s house. The greenery, though, isn’t as dense here as it is in the Willowwood’s backyard; with no defined treeline, the barbed fence seems not to have known quite where to go and meanders unconvincingly between wide gaps in the trunks.

Ellis is already there when I arrive, sitting cross-legged on a long stretch of grass next to the fence. I make my presence known at once so as not to spook him, let the soft rubber of the tyres scratch against the asphalt as I brake. ‘Hey, bud,’ I say. Above him, there’s a flickering lamp post that casts shadows straight down. Even baby-faced Ellis looks creepy in the harsh half-light.

‘Hey.’

‘Sylvia give you any trouble?’

‘No, surprisingly.’

‘What do you have for me, then?’

He exhales, quick and hard. ‘OK. So.’ He unzips his backpack and rummages inside until he emerges with a container the size and shape of a shoebox, but made of sturdy dark wood, with a metal clasp. ‘As far as I’m aware,’ Ellis says, in such a low and serious register that it gives me chills, ‘this all belonged to Roxy.’

I suppress the urge to grab the box straight from his hands, instead asking quietly, ‘Can I see?’

‘Well, yeah.’ He undoes the clasp and the lid pops open with a wonderful creak, revealing nothing at all at first, until I shine the flashlight from my phone on it. ‘This is almost everything, all I could take for now.’

There’s a photo on top. I recognize the spot – by the pier, facing the park opposite the main strip. It’s Roxy. And she’s young, maybe my age – she’s wearing forest-green flares and a grey sweater, her long blonde hair blanketing her shoulders, arms crossed over her chest. She’s leaning against a boxy red car.

‘Wow. Is that hers?’

‘Yeah. It’s a seventy-five Camaro.’

‘You know stuff about cars?’