Abby wasn’t generally fussy about her appearance – she mostly got around in black leggings and baggy jumpers – but picking up garbage in the street on her hands and knees still seemed beneath her. The road was wet. That morning, the island had been hit with the most violent thunderstorm of the season, and it had rained nearly non-stop since. The sky had temporarily cleared, but it was only a matter of time before it started up again.

Working fast, she managed to get all but one of the bags back into the bin. She was seconds away from slamming the lid shut when she noticed something. Through the semi-transparent skin of the bag was a pair of tan-coloured workboots. She made a hole in the side of the bag with an index finger and looked inside.

The boots belonged to her husband, Ray. Aside from a little mud in the tread and a few scuff marks, they looked brand-new. It was possible Ray had bought the wrong size, but it seemed strange for him to just toss them out instead of putting them aside for the Salvos. Bunched up along with the boots were a pair of Ray’s cargo trousers and one of his grey work shirts, Island Care printed across the breast pocket. They still smelled of the lemon-scented laundry detergent that was always on special at the Buy & Bye.

A gust of frigid wind sent her hurrying up the driveway and into the garage, the clothes bundled under one arm.

She yanked the pull-string light switch in the dark, and, after a satisfying click, a bank of fluorescent lights blinked on overhead. The garage was a double and should have been big enough to fit two cars and then some, but like most garages theirs served as a miscellaneous overflow. There were tall, wavering stacks of packing boxes, plastic tubs, empty pots, resistance bands with little resistance left in them, a weightlifting station shrouded in cobwebs, a ride-on mower that Ray got cheap at a garage sale three years ago before finding – surprise, surprise – that it didn’t run.

A narrow path had been carved through the junk, along with a wide rectangular space for Ray’s work truck, a mud-splattered four-door utility. The only other space cut out of all this stuff was for Abby’s workbench, a hulking, paint-stained thing they’d picked up from an antique store on the mainland. Somewhere beyond it was the box of old clothes they’d been meaning to drop at the Salvos for months.