Serena's POV
I wake in a bed that smells of cedar, with a hand holding mine.
For a long moment I don't know where I am.
Grey light. A high white ceiling. The soft, patient hiss of a humidifier. My chest feels as if it has been scrubbed with wire wool, and my throat is dry as a stone, and every muscle in my body hurts.
Dominic is asleep in an armchair beside the bed, with his boots off and his jacket over his knees. His face is grey with exhaustion. There's a smear of soot along his jaw. One of his hands is bandaged, wound round with white gauze from the wrist to the fingertips, and the other is curled round mine as if he'd forgotten how to let go.
I look at it for a long time. At the fingers. At the scar on the knuckle from a boat cleat, the summer we met.
I don't move. If I do, he'll wake, and the day will begin, and I'll have to be someone.
He doesn't start. He doesn't speak. He looks at me, as if he's been looking at me for a very long time, and has only just allowed himself to blink.
"Hello," he says.
"Hello."
"How do you feel?"
"Like I've been on fire."
His mouth twists. "That's about right."
"Odile?"
"Asleep in the guest room. A little singed. She wouldn't go to hospital. Marcus says she punched a paramedic."
I laugh. It hurts. It turns into a cough, and he's up at once with a glass of water, his hand steadying the back of my head.
"Your hand," I say, looking at the bandage.
"A burn. It'll heal."
"Dom."
I hear it hang in the air between us, short and soft and dangerous.
"I'm not going to take it back," I say.
"Okay."
"I tried. I tried for three weeks."
"I know."
"It's no good. I can't be her any more. I can't be a stranger with a scarf who counts steps, when somebody's carried me out of a fire." My voice shakes. "I'm tired of it. I'm tired of lying to you."
"You don't have to."
"I want to tell you."
"Serena."
"No. Let me." I put down the glass. I sit up against the pillows, with my hands knotted in the sheet. "Because you know the end. But you don't know the middle. And I think you should."
***
I tell him about the sea. How the deck lifted under my feet, white, and the sound came afterwards. How the water was black and burning, and the cold hit me like a wall.
I tell him about the hatch cover, a piece of the cabin roof, a raft the size of a door. I found it by touch in the dark. I lay on it with my left side on fire and my arm over my face and my teeth chattering. I remember watching a single star through the smoke.
I remember thinking, he'll come.
"I thought you'd find me," I say.
"I lay there for hours. I heard a boat, a long way off. I heard a man shouting. I couldn't make a sound." I stare at the sheet. "Then there was the fog. And then there was nothing."
"Abel found you."
"At dawn. A mile and a half south of the wreck, in a patch of fog." My voice trembles. "He thought I was dead. Then I moved my hand."
"He never told me."
"I made him swear."
"I woke up nine days later in a spare bedroom on Isle au Haut. Ruth Pelletier was sitting beside me. She used to be a trauma surgeon at Mass General. She'd retired to the island to grow tomatoes. She had a radio on the nightstand. And the first thing I heard..."
"Don't."
"The first thing I heard," I say, "was my own memorial service. And your voice."
"They played a clip. You on the pier at Rockland. The reporter asked how you were, and you said, I don't know. That was all. I don't know."
"I remember."
"I thought: he's lying. I thought: he's relieved. I thought it for two years." I laugh unsteadily. "I was so angry. I'd lie in that bed with my face in bandages and plan it. What I'd say. How I'd come back. I'd walk into your office in a red wig and say, Hello, Dom. Surprise."
"I'd have deserved it."
"You'd have deserved nothing. You were a man on a pier." I press my hand to my mouth. "I didn't know. Abel never told me you dived. I didn't know until Maine."
"Serena."
"I didn't know."
"I know."
"I hated you for something you didn't do."
"You hated me for something I did do." He says it so quietly. "I left."
"For eight minutes."
"For eight minutes. And a day before that, I told the wrong man the right thing."
"What?"
He's looking at the window, at the grey light on the glass. His profile is very pale, and very stern, and I realise I've seen that face before, on a boat, in the second hour of the storm, when he thought I couldn't see.
"I told someone about the pages," he says.
"The pages?"
"Your father's. The ones I found in a locked drawer of my father's desk. The ones I took to Cho." His voice is flat. "Two days before the yacht. I knew what they meant. They proved the transfers had been made by someone else, with a different signature, three weeks after your father's death."
"You said you hadn't told me what they were."
"I hadn't told you."
"You told someone else."
"I'd gone to him in a panic. I didn't know what to do. My father was dead, and there was a ledger in my hand that said Ironbridge on every page." He swallows. "I sat in his library. I had a glass of port. And I said, I think my father was covering for someone, and I think you'll know who. And I handed it to him."
"Who?"
"Augustus," says Dominic.
"He said, Give me a day, Dom." His voice is a thread. "He said he'd look into it. He put his hand on my shoulder. And I gave him the day. I gave him the day. I took the copy to Cho the next evening, because I wanted a second pair of eyes, and I left the original in his safe."
"Dom..."
"Forty-eight hours later, the sky went white."
I'm looking at a man I've known for nine years, a man who has told me he'd put out his own eyes before he'd hurt me, and I see it. The thing he's been carrying under his ribs, in the dark, every night of three years.
I told him.
I told the man who did it.
And she paid.
"You didn't know," I whisper.
"I should have."
"You couldn't."
"I was a fool."
"You were a son." I take his bandaged hand in both of mine. "You went to your father's oldest friend. The man who stood at your christening. Who'd held you when you broke your arm. Who read the eulogy. You trusted him."
"And you died."
"I didn't."
"You could have."
"Dominic."
"I couldn't tell you. I couldn't say it to your face. I thought you'd look at me and see the man who killed you."
"I'm looking at you now."
"What do you see?"
At the grey in his hair. The scar on his knuckle. The soot still on his jaw. The ring on a chain, half out of his shirt, a thin silver glint in the grey light.
"A man," I say, "who told the truth to someone who didn't deserve it. And has spent every day since trying to fix it."
I lay my free hand on the back of his head. I don't say anything. There isn't anything to say. I just hold him, in a large, quiet room in the grey morning, while three years of silence come out of him, soundlessly, in long, helpless breaths.
When it's over, I say: "No more."
"No more rooms," I say. "No more walls. No more waiting for the other one to be ready. If one of us knows something, the other knows it by nightfall."
"By nightfall."
"And if you lie to me again..."
"I won't."
"If you do, Dominic Hale, I'll go to Rockland and drive your Range Rover off the pier."
It's wet and broken and astonished. It's the best sound I've ever heard.
"It's a deal," he says.
"I'm not forgiving you."
"I know."
"Not yet."
"Not yet."
"I'm just..." I swallow. "I'm just not going."
"That'll do," says Dominic.
He presses his mouth to my knuckles.
And somewhere in the penthouse, in a drawer, in a jacket, a phone begins to ring.