For Cillian, Seapoint beach at seven in the morning was not a place, but a physiological necessity. The biting air of the Irish Sea, heavy with salt and a cold that penetrated to the bone, was the only effective antidote against the dregs accumulated during weeks of filming.

He walked at a slow pace, the collar of his dark wool coat turned up and his hands shoved deep into his pockets, relishing the silence broken only by the dull roar of the surf. A few meters away, his terrier was inspecting seaweed and driftwood brought in by the tide.

Then, the corner of Cillian's eye caught a visual dissonance.

A hundred meters away, a figure was cutting through the salt fog, running along the shoreline. The cadence was military, the stride perfect. Even from a distance, the black technical gear and the flame of red hair pulled back into an impeccable ponytail were unmistakable.

But it was the color of the hair, a bright, perfect red, gathered in a tail that defied the humidity and the crosswind, that made his jaw clench imperceptibly.

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He had pegged her immediately. She was the anomaly that had landed in the driveway opposite his house. The woman his wife Yvonne observed with the amused curiosity of someone studying an exotic insect, and whom his sons revered as an emissary from a glossy world made of obscene engine displacements and perfect bodywork.

Cillian stared at her with the cold, unfathomable gaze he reserved for everything he deemed artificial. Even there, amidst the raw fury of Irish nature, she seemed to refuse to bend to the environment, carrying with her that sterile bubble of corporate finance and flaunted perfection. She was exhausting just to look at.

He looked away, intending to ignore her with the same glacial indifference with which he avoided photographers outside pubs. He would keep walking, letting their parallel trajectories never intersect.

He went to whistle for the dog, but fate, or more simply the unpredictable instinct of an Irish terrier, had other plans.

The dog, suddenly attracted by the rhythmic cadence of the woman's steps or perhaps by some reflection on her immaculate clothing, pricked up its ears.

With its ears flat and tail spinning like a propeller, the dog made a beeline for the woman's legs, a bullet of rough fur and wet sand on a collision course with the quintessence of Swedish perfection.

Cillian cursed under his breath, forced to shake off his stoic immobility and lengthen his stride to remedy the impending disaster.