With the city waking up around them, Lydia stretched her long, brown legs across Kate’s lap and crossed her ankles, arched her neck as she leaned back on arms as willowy as reeds on a riverbank. “Let’s go to Brighton,” she said.

“When?” asked Kate.

“Right now,” said Lydia with a mischievous grin.

So they took the bus to Brighton and found a room above a pool hall, but they were hardly ever in it. They sunbathed on the beach and sat outside the Palace Pier, Lydia drawing portraits of strangers and trying to sell them for money. At night they danced on the sand to the music playing in the clubs along the boardwalk, and later, to the rhythm of the waves. Lydia taught her flamenco floreos, twisting her wrists in the air adentro and afuera – into her body, and out to the world – holding her back straight as a pin, her eyes shadowy and dark under the pale light of the moon.

When Lydia had made enough money from her sketches, she took Kate to the fortune teller’s to have their palms read, in a booth set up beside the pier on the beach, festooned with gold bunting and closed off with thick purple velvet curtains. The fortune teller wore a cheap turban and smelled of garlic, and spoke with a thick Eastern European accent that Kate suspected was faked. She told Kate that she would live a long and happy life with a man with sandy-coloured hair, and Kate couldn’t help but think about Walter, back home in Fort William – probably engaged to Frances Halliday by now and forgetting all about her. It gave her an ache in her chest when she thought about it, but the pain was distant and muted, more like the memory of pain than pain itself. After only a few weeks away, it already felt as though her entire life in Canada had been just a dream.

When it was Lydia’s turn, the fortune teller glanced down at Lydia’s palm and then abruptly sent her away, refusing to tell her anything or to take her money. The girls laughed about it, spilling out of the booth and onto the beach in a fit of giggles, but the botched reading did cast an ominous shadow over the rest of their time in Brighton, as though they both were half waiting for something terrible to happen.

“What happened, Nana?”

Kate shakes her head, trying to bring herself back to the present. Car, road, trip, girl. “I don’t know, sweetheart,” she says.