They started to run round the edge together, looking obsessively at the surface of the water, watching for something they hardly dared imagine.

"Maya?"

Cathal's feet were being cut to ribbons. Emmy's head was shrinking.

"I'm sorry, Cathal. I'm sorry I've been so, so, unable to cope."

"It's okay. Maya?"

The rhododendrons behind them rustled.

"Yes?" said Maya, coming out of the woods. She was clothed but shivering and she had a bunch of yellow rhododendrons in her hand.

Emmy fell on her. Cathal kept his hand on Maya's back, desperate to have equal contact. He let out short bursts of relieved laughter, the remnants of a panic so intense he had thought his world might end. Emmy was repeating her daughter's name over and over again.

"Have you been in as well?" Maya asked Cathal through chattering teeth. "The weed makes it really hard, doesn't it? I did a surface dive."

"Did you?" he tried to say. "Good girl." He spat a mouthful of saliva and pond water into his hand.

"You look like a weird fish," she told him as Emmy ripped off her fleece and put it round her daughter's shoulders. "A creature from the blue lagoon."

Cathal tried to suck in his cheeks. He looked like an old man with no teeth.

"Oh," Maya said, suddenly seeing him with entirely new eyes. "Look, Mum. I can't do that, either."

Niall saw the three of them from across the pond. He stood there, his feet on his brother's clothes, rooted to the spot. Then Cathal saw Niall. Emmy saw Cathal see Niall. Maya saw them all see each other. The earth stopped spinning on its axis for a moment.

"Look at these," Maya said, thrusting the yellow flowers under Cathal's nose. "This is proof, this is."

"I'll see them later," he said, looking toward his brother. "Go inside now with your mum and get warm. I've got to talk to Niall about something."

Maya waved across the pond at Niall.

Cathal looked at Emmy. His eyes searched hers. He was still shivering, still in his boxers, weed still hanging from him.

"Is that okay with you?"

"Yes," Emmy nodded, picking a string of blanket weed from his arm and preparing to usher Maya back to the house. "That's okay with me."

18.

"Why are you taking so much stuff with you if you're coming back?" Maya persevered accusingly. She was leaning against Niall's bedroom door frame, noting every item he put into the three open cases on his bed. Books and music. An ashtray. A halogen desk light. He had already unplugged his computer in the library.

"To make room for Mog and Dean and baby Nathan."

"Baby Nathan?" she repeated. Niall was not himself. She looked at him as if to say, Do you think I'm stupid?

"They take up ten times more space than an adult, you know," he said.

"No, they don't."

"Go and take a look in Jonathan and Sita's room if you don't believe me. You can't move in there for nappies and powder, and vests and-"

"That's just them," she interrupted impatiently. "You know what they're like. They all have their own shampoos. And toothpaste. Asha's even got a different toothpaste from Jay."

"Whereas you clean your teeth with a stick and some salt."

"Yeah, and I wash my hair with my own spit."

Niall remembered the times he had taken her out with nothing more than a spare nappy and a packet of baby wipes in his coat pocket. She ate anything, slept anywhere, still did. Just thinking about her made the hole inside him even bigger.

"And my, how it shines."

Maya frowned at him. He could see that now was not an optimum time for joking, but he was doing his best to sound normal, to hide the fact that his heart had been wrenched from its casing and was hanging out on wires, like the light switch on the stairs the electrician was working on.

Twice, Emmy had tried to touch him, to see if she could ground him somehow, but twice she had got a shock. The first time was hardly surprising. It had been too soon after the whole ghastly showdown for there to be a safe connection. He had walked back into the house from the pond like a zombie, and she had leaped out at him from the shadows of the hall, mortified at her own behavior, desperate to talk, pleading with him to trust her, to speak to her. But he hadn't been able even to look at her. His worlds had collided, and the wreckage was still burning.

Niall couldn't shake off the memory of the way his brother's naked body had juddered in time with his voice.

"You need to know something," Cathal had stammered, dripping onto his clothes.

"I do, don't I? What's going on?"

"Nothing. It's not..."

"You and Emmy? I don't have a problem..."

"Not now, not for years. Just once."

"Once?" Niall had begun to laugh. "Jaysus, ye bastard, I thought you were going to tell me-"

"No, wait. Once, once is all it takes."

"You want to tell me you're in love with her?"

"No, I'm trying to tell you, I'm trying to tell you Emmy got pregnant."

"I know that."

"Not that time, another."

"What other time? How long ago?"

"Well, you know how long."

"W'd ye feck off?" Niall had laughed hopefully, but then he suddenly knew he had to accept it. "No. Not Maya." It wasn't even a question.

"I'm sorry. I would have told you years ago, except I didn't know. It's just come to a head in the last few weeks and..."

But coherent thought had stopped there for both of them.

"You must go," Niall had told him. "You must go. Just go. You can't be here. We can't do this. Go on. Go."

Cathal had put his dry clothes back on over his wet body and driven away, sodden and still trembling, because that was the only thing he could do to make it better.

It had been no easier to help Niall after Cathal had left. "I don't want you near me," he kept saying to Emmy, as if she was about to rip off her face mask and reveal an alien. "You feel like a stranger. Leave me alone. Don't touch me."

"I'm sorry," she kept saying. She wasn't crying, so he knew she meant it.

Maya hadn't become a stranger, though. She was still his girl, his lovely girl, and she wasn't prepared to take his exit lying down.

"Mog and Dean have got their own home. It's parked outside the door. Or haven't you noticed?" she persisted, coming in at last and sitting on the bed.

"But it's a bus, Maya. A knackered old bus. And this is a bedroom, in a house, with running water and electricity."

"The bus has got those things."

"Come on, stop being difficult."

"I don't want them here. I want them to go."

"How? Their bus has broken down. It was towed here, remember? Or are you going to push it for them?"

I would if it meant you would stay, she wanted to tell him.

"Well, how long are they staying, exactly?" What she meant was, How long will you be gone?

"They're going as soon as it's fixed."

"Can't you sleep in the bus till then? Stay. Please?"

The understanding was only just out of her mind's reach. Her mum seemed less stressed and yet Niall was leaving Bodinnick, Mog and Dean were taking his place and their baby both did and didn't have something to do with it. But to make sense of it, Maya needed the missing links, the other babies, the aborted baby, the baby she used to be. Only Emmy and Niall had those. Only they really knew the nature of the thin-skinned beast that stalked the house. Everyone else was left guessing at its curious footprints and unfamiliar cry.

"Well, I would, if this other problem hadn't come up."

"What other problem? Grown-ups are always saying they have to go because of something 'coming up.' I think it's just an excuse they use when they don't want to stay somewhere. They should be more truthful." She stared at him unforgivingly.

Niall didn't know how to answer. There was no point in fobbing her off, but he could hardly tell her the truth. I am going because I feel betrayed, because your mother has deceived me and my brother has defrauded me and I don't know who anyone is anymore.

He picked up a silver photo frame, a black and white picture he'd taken of her when she was two. All you could see was a chubby cheek, a strand of hair and one runny nostril.

"You're not taking that as well, are you? If you take that, I'll know you're not coming back," she said. She felt like crying. When she'd heard about his row with Kat and that Kat had gone back to London in a huff, she'd thought, Yippee, that's what we want. It hadn't occurred to her for a second that he might follow her.

"I was just looking at it," he said, changing his mind and putting it back on the tall chest of drawers.

"Are you going to live with Kat?"

"No."

"I mean, stay with Kat?"

"No, I'm not going to live with her or stay with her, not least because I wouldn't be welcome. You were right. Kat and I have split up. I'll be at my old flat."

"What about Chris? You said he could have it for at least three months, and it's only been two so far."

"I'll stay in the spare room."

"Stay in the spare room here."

"I can't, my darling."

"Why not?"

"I just can't."

His hand faltered over his Roberts Radio with the duck-egg-blue leather finish Kat had given him for his birthday. It had cost her a hundred ridiculous quid. "Do you want this in your room?"

"It's okay, thanks. Leave it here for the baby."

"Good idea. It's the right color, anyway."

He carried on packing and she carried on watching him.

Eventually, she spoke. "Niall?"

"Maya."

"Can I ask you something?"

"You can always ask me anything," he told her, feeling a shit for knowing he wouldn't always answer her honestly.

"If they wanted to name the baby after Jonathan, don't you think they should have called him Jo instead?"

Shit, he thought, winded by how much he loved her. I think I can live without Cathal and Emmy and Kat, but how the hell am I going to live without her?

Downstairs, Emmy held Nathan against her shoulder and walked rhythmically round and round the kitchen. She was singing a song, making it up as she went along, about sleeping and hope and riding life's storms. In a literary sense, it was rubbish.

But Nathan's birth had come to them all like a very small drop of extra-virgin oil on deeply troubled water, and that made no sense, either. The arrival of a new baby should wreak havoc in an already turbulent house, but somehow it had simplified it. He cried when he was hungry, and he slept when he was tired. He was showing them the secret of truly simple living. Perhaps Toby had sent him. Perhaps Toby had sent them all here, to burst her bubble, to set her free.