When he asks Miss Pris what it’s like, she tells him it’s strange. Like someone’s pulled the back of her head off and is messing about with her wiring, trying to fix a computer that was never broken in the first place. An itch turned a discomfort turned a sharp, relentless pain. A cable grabbed, yanked, and finally pulled loose – its casing peeled off to leave the tender thing inside exposed. ‘Gnarly,’ Matt replies, because it is. He dumps a bundle of weeds – nutgrass and lamb’s tongue – into one of the tubs Kevin had put out, and Miss Pris laughs. It makes the crow’s feet by her eyes stark, like corvid talons kneading in the softer flesh of her.

‘Okay,’ he says, knocking a sand-covered knee against hers. ‘You have to tell me why.’

And she gives him that look. The one she knows will burrow under his skin, feasting on any wriggling uncertainty, an emerita in the beach of him.

‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’

He laughs like he gets it, which he doesn’t, because if he did, he wouldn’t have asked in the first place …