Chapter Five

A knot of people at the sea wall who were not looking at the water the way people usually looked at the water in Kinloch, with the loose, unfocused patience of folk killing a slow morning, but with the tight, held stillness of people who had already looked at something specific and could not stop their minds from replaying it, over and over, in the particular helpless loop that follows witnessing a thing you were never meant to see.