Summary

The story begins with an unidentified narrator walking along a Northumbrian shoreline, looking for crabs with another unknown person. The narrator appears relaxed and happy, but distracted, until they suffer a medical emergency and the prologue closes.

Chapter 1 is told in first person from the perspective of Leo. Leo begins by introducing the readers to his wife, Emma, and their daughter, Ruby. He spends much of the chapter detailing Emma’s idiosyncrasies and how much he loves her. An anxious mother, Emma wakes up nightly to check on Ruby and make sure that she is breathing. Emma is an intertidal ecologist so infatuated with the ocean that she was late to her wedding as she spent time photographing tidal strandlines; “no one was surprised” (6). She is such a successful ecologist that she hosted a television show on BBC, although it was later...