She took her own advice, locked all the dark thoughts in a room in her mind and tried not to visit it. For the most part, it got easier. But in the dead of night, when Milt Street was quiet, she could hear them growling behind the door and scratching at the walls. It reminded her that the dark things were still there and they weren’t going away.

Lori got out of Belport when she turned eighteen. She studied art history in Melbourne. She found a job on campus and moved into an apartment with three roommates. She fell in love with one of them, and when he was offered a job in Sydney that he couldn’t refuse, she moved there with him and they got married.

At the wedding, when Abby asked if it made her sad that her father wasn’t there to give her away, Lori said he gave her away a long time ago. Abby cried herself to sleep that night.

Eddie, who became Ed, stayed on the island to take over the family business. He ran it well. He spent his days haunting those big empty houses on Neef Street, retreating further and further inwards. He might have wanted to leave. He might have eaten his lunch down at Beech Tree Landing as his father had done and fantasised about a boat coming in to take him away. Abby wouldn’t know because they never talked about it.

Abby thought about leaving too, once or twice. A developer would probably give her three times what she and Ray paid for their place, knock the house down and put in three townhouses. But Belport wouldn’t let either of them go. It was David Stemple who died in the winter of ’96, but it was Abby and Eddie’s ghosts that were doomed to haunt the island.

In the winter of 2019, Abby Gilpin, then deep into her fifties, was nearing the end of her shift at the Buy & Bye. Her left foot ached with what the internet had diagnosed as either gout, a corn, or foot cancer. Bay Street was practically deserted.

There was a single customer roaming the aisles: a man somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, a dusting of salt and pepper in his hair, a shopping basket under one arm. He had been standing in the medicine section for close to three minutes, engrossed in their very limited selection.

Abby thought about asking if he needed help finding something, but then she’d have to walk all the way over there on her sore foot, and besides, she had just borrowed the new Stephen King from the library and Biller wouldn’t be in for another twenty minutes, so she might be able to knock off a chapter or two before he arrived.