Dominic's POV
She lifts her chin.
It's all I need. In three weeks I've learned to read the small signals: the lift of the chin means she's about to tell a truth she's rehearsed, the tilt of the head means a lie. This one is a truth, and it costs her.
"You're right," says Vera. "I wasn't."
Abel Thorne has gone very quiet on his crate. He picks up the half-mended trap and begins to work, slowly, as if there were nobody on his boat.
"Wasn't what?"
"Here for the job."
"Then why?"
"Lowell Ridge Capital."
The harbour holds its breath.
I'd rehearsed this, at midnight, in a hotel bathroom in Portland with the tap running. I'd practised a surprised face. A shocked one. A wounded one.
I discover I don't need to.
Something rises in my throat. It isn't surprise, and it isn't rage. It's the stupid, enormous, helpless pride of a man watching someone he loves walk out onto a high wire.
"You're the principal," I say.
"Yes."
"The notes. The short. The leak."
"All of it."
"My statement," I say.
She winces. "I'm sorry."
"You wrote my statement."
"Yes."
"In the middle of destroying me."
"I didn't mean..." She stops. Her eyes are bright and wild. "I don't know what I meant. I know that I've spent two years building a way to hurt the people who killed Walter Quinn, and I didn't plan on you."
"Walter Quinn."
"My mother's friend. Her oldest friend." The lie is smooth and sad, a pretty thing, polished like a shell. "She said he'd never take a cent. She said the whole thing stank. She died in March, and the last thing she gave me was his name on a piece of paper."
"And you came for Hale Meridian."
"I came for the people who sit on it."
"Augustus."
"Maybe."
"Edmund."
"Maybe."
"Me."
She looks at me.
She says, very low: "Not any more."
I feel it go through me, like a knife through cloth.
I don't think she meant to say it.
"I could fire you," I say.
"Yes."
"I could call the police."
"Yes."
"I could tell the board that my chief of staff is the woman who's trying to take the company."
"You could."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because you'd have stopped me."
"No."
"Dominic..."
"I'd have given you a seat at the table." I hear my own voice break. "I'd have given you the whole damned table. If you'd asked."
She goes white.
It's a long moment.
Then, from the deck, without looking up, Abel says, "I'll be getting along."
He steps onto the quay. He doesn't look at me. He doesn't look at her. He taps the side of his nose, once, a lobsterman's salute, and walks away between the lobster pots with the biscuit tin tucked under his coat.
I watch him go.
"He's a friend," says Vera, quickly.
"I know."
"He's no part of this."
"I know that, too."
"He's just an old man. He had some information about the wreck."
"Vera."
"Yes?"
"I'm not going to ask about the tin."
She stares at me.
I give her a very small, tired smile.
"I trust you," I say. "You've no idea what that costs me."
***
The rain starts at four.
It comes off the Atlantic in a grey wall, hissing on the pier, drumming on the roof of the Range Rover, bending the spruce trees double. We drive back to Windward with the wipers on full and the heater rattling, and neither of us speaks. By the time we pull up at the house, the garden is a lake.
"Caleb's got the guests in the drawing room," I say. "We could join them."
"Must we?"
"No."
"I'd like to see the water."
"It's a hurricane."
"I'd like to see it."
I stop the engine.
The windshield blurs. I turn to look at her, and she's staring at the bay with a look I haven't seen before. It's not fear. It's a sort of enormous, aching tenderness, like a woman greeting an old, hard friend.
"There's the boathouse," I say.
"All right."
We run.
It's forty yards down the slope in a squall, and by the time I slam the side door behind us we're soaked to the skin, laughing like children, gasping for breath.
It's a long low building with a shingled roof and a slip that opens onto the water. Dim, quiet, smelling of cedar and tar and old rope. A sailing dinghy called Wren hangs from the rafters. A kerosene lantern sits on a shelf. A bench along the wall, a coil of line, an oar with a name painted on the blade.
S. Q. H.
I see her see it.
She stands there, hair plastered to her face, her scarf slipping, her eyes on the oar.
"It was my wife's," I say, hoarsely.
"I thought so."
"She liked to row at dawn. She said the sea was like a cat that hadn't decided yet."
"Did she?"
"She said a lot of things like that."
I'm talking to cover my heart.
I light the lantern. A soft yellow glow fills the shed, shivering on the wet planks. The rain is a roar on the roof, a hundred thousand tiny drums.
Vera stands beside the slip, looking down into the black, restless water.
"It's very deep here," she says.
"Forty feet at the end of the pier."
"Do you ever swim?"
"Never."
"Not since?"
"Not since."
She nods, slowly. She's trembling.
"I'm cold," she says.
I take off my jacket. I put it round her shoulders. For a moment, my hands rest there, on the wet wool, on the delicate bones beneath, and neither of us moves.
Don't, I tell myself.
She doesn't know you know.
She'll hate you for it.
"Dominic," she says.
"Yes."
"I don't know what I'm doing."
"No."
"I came here for revenge."
"I know."
"And I keep forgetting."
Her face is turned up to mine. There's a drop of rain on her eyelash. Her lips are parted and very pale, and her eyes are the colour of the sea in October, and she's looking at me as if I were the last thing in a vanishing world.
"Tell me to stop," she whispers.
"No."
"Dominic."
"I can't."
She laughs, a small, wet, broken laugh, and lifts one hand and puts it flat against my chest.
Right over the ring.
I feel her fingers find the chain, the little hard shape beneath my shirt.
She goes still.
"What's this?"
"Nothing."
"It's a ring."
"It was hers."
"Yours?"
"I mean it was given to me by her." I swallow. "I've never taken it off."
She doesn't speak.
She slides her palm up, over my collarbone, to the side of my neck. Her thumb rests lightly on my pulse.
I can hear the rain.
I can hear my heart.
She stands on her toes, and I bend my head.
Her mouth is cold, and tastes of salt.
It isn't a kiss. It's a question. It's the lightest touch in the world, a breath, a brush, the sort of thing you do to see if a flame is real.
I feel the whole world turn over.
I make a sound.
I don't know what it is. It's three years of silence coming up through the floor of my chest. My hand finds her back, her hair, the cold wet silk of her scarf, and I pull her against me, and she comes, like water, like falling, her fingers locked in my collar, and I kiss her the way I kissed her on a pier eight years ago, the way a man kisses a woman he has never stopped missing.
She makes a small, startled, helpless noise against my mouth.
Then she kisses me back.
I don't know how long it lasts.
It could be a minute. It could be the rest of my life. The lantern gutters. The rain roars. And somewhere very far away, as if in another country, I hear a sound like a latch.
A cold draught runs along the floor.
The lamp flickers.
I lift my head.
Vera is breathing hard, her eyes shut, her hand at my throat.
I look past her shoulder, across the boathouse, to the open door, where grey light is pouring in through the rain.
Augustus Brandt stands on the threshold in a black oilskin, dripping, holding a black umbrella.
He is smiling.
"Dear boy," he says gently. "I do hope I'm not intruding."