Serena's POV
"It's a trap," says Odile.
"Of course it's a trap."
"He's drawing you onto his own ground. On the day. At the house. In front of everyone who'll be looking at you with a handkerchief."
"I know."
"Then why go?"
I'm standing in the studio at five in the morning on the fourteenth of October with a half-packed suitcase open on the bed, and my reflection in the dark glass looks like a woman about to step off a roof.
"Because he's been waiting for me for twelve years," I say. "And I want to know why he wants it to be there."
"That's not a reason. That's a feeling."
"It's both."
"Serena..."
"I'll be careful."
"You said that about the archive."
"And I got what I wanted."
"You got chased down an alley by a man with a crowbar."
"I got a name."
She sighs. It crackles down the line.
"Take your phone. Keep it charged. Send me a signal every four hours. If I don't hear from you..."
"You'll call Abel."
"I'll call Abel."
I close the suitcase.
I think of an old man's face, weathered and kind, and a lobster boat called the Marguerite. A pair of enormous hands bandaging a girl who couldn't speak.
I haven't seen him in eleven months.
I'm not sure what I'll say.
***
Dominic drives.
It's a seven-hour road. We leave at six, in a black Range Rover with a thermos of coffee in the cup holder and a bag of Posy's homemade ginger biscuits. He doesn't talk much. Neither do I. The sun comes up over Connecticut, a long yellow blade through the trees. By Providence there's mist on the river. By Portsmouth, the woods are on fire.
October in New England is the cruellest month.
It does this to you. It takes the trees and sets them alight, crimson and amber and a blazing, ridiculous orange, as if the world were saying: look how beautiful, look what you'll lose.
I press my forehead to the window.
I know every mile.
I know the diner in Kittery with the pie. The long grey bridge at Bath. The little white church at Waldoboro, where a stranger once gave me a blanket in the rain.
"Left at the blue barn," I say.
"Sorry?"
"There's a shortcut. After Thomaston. It saves twenty minutes."
I realise what I've done a moment too late.
The car doesn't swerve. Dominic's hands don't move on the wheel.
But the silence changes.
"I've driven this road every summer of my life," he says. "I've never heard of a shortcut."
"I read it on a map."
"Ah."
"It's marked."
"I'm sure it is."
He says nothing else.
He takes the left at the blue barn.
I sit in the passenger seat with my heart in my mouth and watch the road unroll, narrow, wet, sprinkled with leaves, and I know exactly where it comes out.
At the top of the hill, it does.
The whole coast opens up like a hand.
Penobscot Bay in the morning, silver and blue, islands scattered like spilled pearls. Spruce, granite, a lighthouse. The white speck of a ferry. The long, low, indifferent shine of the sea.
I put my hand on the door handle and hold it.
I've been looking at the Atlantic for three years, from a window, from a rented room, from a rocking boat. I know it as well as I know my own pulse. I know the place where it turns from silver to green.
I've never seen it from the front.
From the road, driving back in.
"Are you all right?" says Dominic.
"I'm fine."
"You've gone white."
"It's very beautiful."
"It is." He's not looking at the bay. He's looking at me. "I've never been able to decide whether I love it or hate it."
"Both."
"Both," he agrees.
The car goes on.
Rockland slides past on the right: the breakwater, the working harbour, the Coast Guard station, the long concrete finger of the ferry pier. A fishing boat pulls out of the dock, and its wake spreads and spreads.
Twelve years ago, a Buick went off the end of that pier.
I don't look.
I've done it before. I stood on the end of it with a bunch of carnations, the day after the funeral, and I said to my father in my head: I'll find out who.
Dominic says nothing.
I feel him not saying it. I feel him decide, again and again, not to ask.
At the end of Main Street, he slows the car, and we both look out at the pier. A gull sits on the railing, white, indifferent.
"Your father," he says, "died here, didn't he?"
The air leaves the car.
"What?"
"Walter Quinn. The Ironbridge man." His voice is gentle. "I read the file. You've been reading it, too, I imagine. It was in this harbour."
"Yes."
"I'm sorry."
"It was a long time ago."
"Twelve years. It doesn't help."
"No."
"Does it help," says Dominic carefully, "to know that I don't believe he did it?"
I turn my head.
"What?"
"The theft. The suicide. Any of it." His eyes are steady on the road. "I've read the files three times. Somebody wrote that note with a very careful pen. Somebody wanted a dead man to take the blame."
My throat has closed.
"That's not what the board thinks," I manage.
"The board thinks a lot of things."
"And you?"
"I think the man at the bottom of this harbour was a better person than any of us."
I cannot speak.
I'm looking out of the window, at the green water and the grey sky, and tears are running down my face. I don't wipe them.
He doesn't look.
He drives, with one hand loosely on the wheel, past the lobster shacks and the shuttered ice-cream stand, and he lets me cry, without a word, as if it were a perfectly ordinary thing for a woman to do in a car.
It's the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.
***
Windward stands at the end of a gravel road, at the top of a bluff, with the whole Atlantic at its feet.
White clapboard. Grey slate. A wraparound porch with a hundred years of salt in the boards. A boathouse down the slope, and a long pier running out into the cold bright water. A flagpole. Three chimneys. A kitchen garden that I planted myself, with Tessa, the first spring, and which someone has kept alive.
I get out of the car.
The air smells of spruce and woodsmoke and low tide.
It smells of the best five years of my life.
Caleb is on the porch with a drink in his hand. Tessa stands behind him, wrapped in a grey shawl, and when she sees the car she lifts one hand to her mouth.
Not to wave.
To hold something in.
"You came," Caleb calls, with that wide, easy, golden smile. "I was afraid you'd stand us up. Dom, you look dreadful. Ms Lowell, welcome to the family mausoleum."
"Caleb," says Dominic.
"What? It's true."
"Don't."
"Fine. Fine." Caleb laughs, and lifts his glass. "To the dead. May they rest better than we do."
Nobody answers.
A gull cries.
"The church is at two," says Tessa, to the gravel. "Augustus has the car. If you'd like to see the grave first, it's just up the hill. We put a stone in last year."
"A stone," I say.
"Yes."
"With her name?"
"Yes."
"Then I'd like to see it."
Dominic looks at me.
"It's not required," he says.
"I know."
"You don't have to."
"I'd like to."
He's silent a moment. Then he nods, and holds out his arm, and I take it, and we walk up the path between the gorse bushes, past the old apple tree, the stone wall, the little iron gate.
The Hale family plot sits at the edge of the bluff, within sight of the water.
I see Charles Hale's grave first. Granite. Plain.
Then the grey marble beside it.
New. Pale. Smooth as skin.
I stop walking.
A small bronze plaque is set into the stone, under a carved wave, and the letters shine in the pale October light.
SERENA QUINN HALE
Beloved Wife. Beloved Daughter. Beloved Sister.
Whatever the water does.
I stand there looking at my own name.
At the date.
At the word that is going to be carved over me for as long as the sea reaches this shore.
And at the bunch of fresh white lilies, tied with string, laid at the foot of the stone, still dripping with morning dew.