Cora liked to walk the beach in winter. She usually waited for the flag to be changed over to red and she could hear it being slapped by the wind; if it was flapping out its warning then it kept most people away. Most of the newcomers anyway. The tide was going out, waves rising, breaking and leaving behind swirling, foaming eddies as the water receded. She always felt like the sea was breathing and the change to low tide was her favourite, those deep inhalations as water pulled away from the shore. If she closed her eyes she could feel her own breath align with the tide.

They’d arranged to meet in their usual place. It was half a mile down from the town but worth the walk to miss anyone not already put off by the weather. It was still dry but the clouds over the Firth were dark and she’d lived here long enough to know that they probably had an hour before the rain came in. She quickened her step and picked her way across the low dunes, grasses snaking around her ankles, down to the harder sand near the tideline. Her phone vibrated in her back pocket. It was Rob. Two words: they’re here. Cora broke into a run.

He was standing close to the water looking through binoculars across towards the Black Isles. He turned back to look at her as she approached, grinning, and gesturing towards the sea.

“I thought you were going to miss them.” He handed her the binoculars and pointed her in the right direction, guiding her gaze by holding her from behind and leaning his head in close to hers. “Have you got them?”

Cora took a moment to adjust to the focus, the sea magnified in the lenses, the small undulations of the waves exaggerated to vast, heaving swells. The sky was becoming progressively overcast and it was difficult to pick out much detail between the blue-grey of the sea and the encroaching clouds.

“I don’t see anything,” she said, almost lowering the binoculars but she felt his grip on her arm tighten slightly, a silent encouragement to give it a little longer. And then, in a line, breaking surface, three dolphins stencilled on the horizon. She held her breath, steadied her hands, and tracked them as they leapt, skimming the waves with an ease and grace that made her want to laugh or shout or scream. “I see them,” she said. “I see them.”

When the dolphins disappeared Cora twisted round, letting Rob pull her into an embrace, resting her head on his chest. Neither of them spoke and all she could hear was an asynchronous call and response between the ebbing tide in one ear and his heartbeat in her other. Gradually his pulse quietened, slowed, and she pulled her head up and kissed him.

“Your heart beats faster for the dolphins than it does for me,” she said.

“Does not,” he said. He bent to kiss her back but she wriggled free of his arms, laughing.

“Prove it!” she shouted. “Prove it or it’s just dolphins you’ll be kissing for the rest of the winter.”

Rob made a half hearted attempt to catch her but she was too quick. He watched her bouncing on the spot on the sand, ready to spring away from him: he’d spent the last two years chasing her and didn’t think he would ever tire of it. Chasing is good but being caught is better. That was what she’d said that night at McKendrick’s party just before she’d kissed him the first time. He could still remember the taste of her that first time, cherry brandy that she’d regretted the next day. No other regrets, though. He still had that text in his phone.

He found a stick back in the dunes and broke off the end; it was sharp enough to serve as a makeshift pencil in the sand. Cora watched, bemused, as he attempted to draw the shape of a large dolphin, bending over to make incisions in the beach.

“It looks like a shark,” she called.

“Does not,” he said. Pointedly he drew a large cross over his drawing and next to it etched out CORA FOREVER in large capitals, surrounding it with a roughly sketched love heart.

“It’s a bit cheesy,” she said.

“I give up,” he said, standing up and breaking into a sudden fit of coughing. Cora ran back to him, concerned, and rubbed his back until the coughs passed. “It’s nothing,” he said, noting the worry on her face.

“You sure? I heard one of the new families that came up from London had a case, the daughter maybe. She’s isolated now. It’s not right. We had nothing here until they started to come to get away from the towns.” She looked out across the water, the wind had picked up now and was whipping the waves, white-capped, spray rising into the air.

“It’s nothing,” he said again. “I was tested last week. Next one’s in a few days.”

“Just be careful, alright?” she said. She grabbed his hand and pulled him back towards the road at the top of the beach. “Come on, weather’s coming in.” They retreated up the beach as the rain started to fall, leaving behind CORA FOREVER as the only marker that they’d been there that day. The tide turned, inexorably, inevitably, in the night, the sea bit higher up the beach and washed it away.