He stood up and gathered his shopping, pausing when he was ready and turning toward me, as if there were something else he wanted to say. My phone rang again. Go away, Dad!

“So, are you an artist?” I said stupidly. One of us had to fill the silence as we began walking down the prom. The shopping bags kept twisting on their handles and banging into his legs, so our pace was necessarily slow.

“Oh, no,” he protested. “Well, not really. I tried to be, once, but it went wrong and I gave up. It was just a pipe dream; one of those childish things . . .”

The beach had almost emptied by now, and the few people left on the prom—apart from us—were walking quickly to avoid the imminent rain. I wanted to look at him—after all, he had studied me for five solid minutes and gained an intimate knowledge of the back of my head—but it was difficult when we were rambling side by side like this. I tried to build a picture from the fragments in my head—world-weary shoulders, a frown of concentration, an uncertain smile. Messy hair and brown eyes—or were the eyes grey? It wasn’t much to go on. He was taller than me but slighter than Tom.

“I write poems in my spare time,” I confided. “In another life, I’d be a real, full-time poet.”

I don’t know what made me say that: for one thing, even Dad didn’t know about my poems; for another, I hadn’t written properly in years. The man tilted his head, as if assessing my chances of success.

“What’s to stop you being a real, full-time poet in this life?”

I shrugged. The softest murmur of thunder came rolling over the sea, and the air seemed to catch its breath. “Life. Work. Being a real, full-time grown-up.”

“Oh yes.” He glanced at me with feeling. “I know.”

My phone pinged again.

“It’s my dad,” I explained. “We were very close.”

It was the weirdest slip of the tongue. I meant are, not were, but before I could correct myself the man said, “I was very close to my mother too.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I meant are. We are close. My dad’s still alive. Obviously. Given that he’s just texted me.”

We stared at one another in confusion and I noted, once and for all, that the man’s eyes were grey. My phone rang—Dad again—and the man said, “Go ahead and answer; don’t mind me.”

I sighed. Trust Dad to start worrying because I hadn’t messaged him the second I stepped off the train. On the other hand, what if he was phoning for a reason? What if he’d hurt himself? Or if something had happened to Tom . . . ?

“Dad?”

“Oh, thank goodness, there you are. I was getting worried.”

“You didn’t need to. Is everything all right?”

The man said, “Do you think I might sketch you again some time?” but bashfully, almost soundlessly. I didn’t get it at first—not with Dad gabbling away in my ear about fish pie—“So it says on the box to cook it from frozen, but I’ve gone and defrosted it”—and by the time I’d registered his question, and the need to answer, he’d turned away with a smile and a self-deprecating, bag-laden wave. I didn’t call after him, because my attention had snagged on the uneven white crisscross of scars along his soft inner arm.