Serena's POV
He tells me at eleven at night, in an empty office, over a cardboard carton of cold pad thai.
It's the strangest first date of my life.
I don't ask him to. I'd never ask. I sit on the sofa in his office with my shoes off and a stack of board minutes on my knee, and he stands at the window with his back to me and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and at some point between the second page and the third he starts speaking.
"It was our fifth anniversary," he says.
I put down my pen.
"We'd taken the Halcyon up from Camden. Twelve people. Caleb, Tessa, Edmund, some friends from the Foundation. A cook. Four crew. We were anchored in a cove off Owls Head, three miles from Rockland breakwater, a place I'd been going to since I was nine."
He stops.
I look at the line of his shoulders against the glass.
"She was angry with me."
"Why?"
"Because I'd asked her to wait." He rubs the back of his neck. "She'd found something in her father's old papers. I won't tell you what. A thing I'd already been looking at for a month and hadn't told her. She wanted to go to the police that night. I told her I needed forty-eight hours."
"And she said no."
"She said I'd never loved her father's name as much as my own. She said..." He laughs, a bad, hoarse sound. "She said she'd rather marry the sea."
My throat closes.
I remember it.
I remember the tilt of my chin and the shake in my voice and the white evening dress, and the way the wind flattened the sail against the mast. I remember saying it. I remember how much I wanted to be wrong.
"I said, If you do this, you'll destroy everything. I meant the evidence. I meant a case that would fall apart if we moved too fast." He turns his head. His eyes are unreadable. "Half the crew heard me say it. They gave it to the police as a threat."
"You didn't mean it as one."
"No."
"What did you mean?"
"That I loved her. That I wanted to do it properly. That I'd rather lose a day than lose a case." He looks away again. "I was a fool. I thought I had time."
"Where did you go?"
"An agent was waiting at Rockland. I'd been meeting her for weeks. She had the other half of what we needed." He draws in a breath. "I told her to stay in the cabin. I said I'd be back by ten, before the fireworks. I kissed her forehead."
Something goes through me like a blade.
I remember that, too.
The brush of his mouth against my hairline. The smell of sea salt on his collar. He said, Stay, I mean it. I'll explain everything.
I stayed.
"I was standing on the pier," says Dominic. "I had a phone in my hand. The woman on the other end said, Mr Hale, are you still there? And I looked back across the water, and I saw it."
His voice has gone very quiet.
"There's a white that isn't a colour. It's a sound. It went up over Owls Head, and the sky just opened. And a half a second later, the noise hit me."
"Dominic."
"I ran." He's still looking at the window. "I don't remember running. I remember a lobsterman's boat, I took it, I had no right, and a kid shouting at me. I remember the water. The fire on the surface, like oil. And a piece of the stern, still burning."
I can't speak.
"I went in."
"You what?"
"I dived. Several times. I couldn't find..." He shakes his head. "They told me afterwards it was forty-one degrees. I broke three ribs on the wreckage. A man from the Coast Guard had to hit me to make me stop."
"You went in."
"Of course I went in."
He says it as if it were obvious.
As if it weren't something I'd spent three years telling myself he hadn't done.
I'd decided, in a spare bedroom on Isle au Haut, with my face in bandages: he left, and he lived. I held it like a stone. It was the only thing that made it possible to hate him.
I'd been wrong about one thing.
I stand up. I don't know I'm doing it.
I cross the room in my stockinged feet and stop beside him at the window, close enough to feel the heat of him through his shirt.
Below us, Park Avenue is a river of red tail-lights.
"I'm sorry," I say.
"For what?"
"That you lost her."
He turns.
He looks at me for a long time.
"You say it as if you know what it's like," he says.
"I do."
"Do you?"
"I lost someone, too." Someone. Myself. My voice breaks, and I don't try to fix it. "I lost the person I was. All at once. And nobody ever told me what to do with the rest of my life."
A muscle moves in his jaw.
The city blurs.
We're standing very close.
I think: Tell him.
I think: Say it. Say Dom. Say I'm here. Say it was never you.
It would take one breath.
I can feel it gathering behind my ribs, three years of silence pressing against the door.
He didn't leave. He dived. He broke three ribs. He holds my sister when she cries.
"Dominic," I say.
"Yes."
"There's something..."
He waits.
I see his hand rise. Very slowly, as if he's afraid I'll vanish. His fingers come toward my face, and stop an inch from my cheek, and hover there.
I can hear the clock.
I can hear my own heart.
"You can tell me anything," he says, so softly I almost miss it. "Whatever it is. I promise."
My eyes sting.
Is it a trap?
Is it the voice of a man who killed me and mourned me in one breath?
Or is it the only honest thing I've heard in three years?
I don't know.
God, I don't know.
And I can't lose him by guessing wrong.
"There's something," I say, "I'd like to tell you. But not yet."
"All right."
"Not tonight."
"I'll wait."
He means it.
I see it in the line of his mouth.
"You always do," I whisper, before I can stop myself.
His fingers freeze.
A very long pause.
"Always?"
"I mean..." The blood floods my face. "The way you wait for things. I've noticed. For the board. For the bankers."
He doesn't breathe.
"Yes," he says at last. His eyes have gone dark and bright. "I'm told I'm patient."
"You must be."
"For some things."
He lowers his hand.
It's a small movement, careful, almost courtly. He folds it into a fist and tucks it behind his back.
The air in the office has turned to glass.
If I lean forward an inch I'll break it.
If I stay here a second longer I'll say his name, the old way, the one he'd know in the dark, and I'll have thrown everything away.
I reach for my shoes.
"It's late," I say. "I should go."
"Yes."
"Thank you for telling me."
"Thank you for listening."
I'm halfway to the door, and he's halfway to saying something, and I think the whole building leans toward us.
Then every light on Park Avenue goes out.