Dominic's POV
One year later, on the fourteenth of October, I wake before dawn and don't reach for my phone.
It's a habit I've been trying to break. For three years the first thing I did each morning was check the news, the markets, the messages from Marcus, the long grey list of everything that might have gone wrong in the night. I'd lie there in the dark with the screen on my chest, bracing for the worst.
This morning there's no screen.
There's a window.
It's the big one at the foot of our bed, in the penthouse on sixty-one, and through it the sky is going from black to pewter to the first thin gold. Below it, the river. The bridges, strung with light. The long grey waking city, laid out like a map of something I used to be afraid of.
And on the sill, in a squat white jug, is a single lily.
I look at it for a long time.
I turn my head.
The bed is empty.
For a second I'm eleven years old, again, in a dark house, and the clock is ticking, and the sheets are cold, and I think: no.
Then I smell it.
Turpentine. Linseed oil. A burnt edge of coffee.
I get up.
I find her in the corridor, in my old grey cardigan and a pair of paint-stained jeans, with her hair in a knot and a brush in her teeth, standing in front of a canvas the size of a door. She hasn't heard me. She's absolutely still, with her head on one side and one hand lifted, in the way she has when she's listening to a picture.
I lean on the doorframe.
I watch.
I could watch her all day. It's one of the great luxuries of my life. The studio on fifty-nine was hers before it was anyone's, and we've given it back to her, the whole floor, with its north light and its long white tables and its smell of a place where things are made. By day it's a school. Twelve apprentices from the union, four of them grandchildren of pensioners, learn to clean and repair and restore the broken things of the world.
By night, it's hers.
The painting is nearly finished.
She calls it Still Here.
It's going to the Whitney in the spring.
"You're staring," she says, without turning.
"I'm admiring."
"You're hovering."
"I'm admiring in a hovering sort of way."
She takes the brush out of her mouth and turns, and her face lights, as it still does, every single time, as if I'd come home from a war.
"Happy anniversary," she says.
"Which one?"
"All of them." She comes across the floor, trailing the smell of linseed and coffee, and puts her arms round my neck. "The six we had, and the three we didn't, and the one since. I'm counting every one."
"Agreed."
"Did you sleep?"
"Like the dead."
"Don't."
"Sorry."
"Don't be." She kisses my jaw. "I'm allowed to say it now. It's quite liberating."
She holds me.
Her cheek is warm against my collarbone. She's got a smear of cobalt on her chin. I think of a woman with an auburn bob and a red mouth, walking into my office with a folder under her arm and a stolen pen in her pocket.
I think: I'd have followed her anywhere.
I think: I did.
"What time's the boat?" she says.
"Ten."
"Is Abel coming?"
"He's bringing his own lunch. He says he doesn't trust yours."
"He's right. I put olives in it."
"You don't."
"I do. To see what happens."
I laugh.
It's the best thing in the world, laughing in a doorway at dawn, in a painted corridor, with my wife.
***
We take the Birdie out from Rockland at ten.
She's not a big boat. Thirty feet, white and green, with a little wheelhouse and a smell of fresh varnish. Abel found her in a yard in Stonington and spent four months making her honest. She's named for a bad drawing of a bird on a very long dock, and for a man who kept it for twenty years.
Abel stands at the wheel.
Marcus is in the stern, with a fishing rod and an expression of deep suspicion. Caleb sits beside him with a sparkling water, eleven months and twenty days sober, his arm round Tessa. She's showing, a little, in a long red coat. They're due in March. She's decided to name the baby Walter if it's a boy and Charlotte if it's a girl, which has made Caleb cry twice and Marcus once.
Hannah Cho sits on the cabin roof with her feet dangling and a flask of terrible coffee.
"I hate boats," she says cheerfully.
"Then why did you come?"
"Because it's the fourteenth," says Cho. "And I said I would."
"Thank you."
"Don't mention it."
It takes us two hours.
We don't talk much.
"Here," he says.
I look round.
It's just a cove. A scoop of grey water under a long low ridge of rock, with a lobster pot buoy bobbing in the middle, red and white. There's nothing to say what happened here. No stone. No cross. The sea has closed over it, as it does.
Serena goes to the bow.
She stands with her hand on the rail, in her old grey cardigan, with the wind in her hair. The rest of us stay where we are. Nobody speaks. Even Cho has put down her flask.
She's holding something.
It's a bunch of white lilies, tied with a piece of green string. She looks at them for a while.
"I've been trying to think," she says, in a clear low voice, "what I wanted to say."
Nobody moves.
"I thought I'd say something about the dead. About how we didn't forget. I thought I'd say sorry, to the boat, for what it carried." She smiles, a little crookedly. "And I thought I'd say thank you. To a man in a yellow oilskin, who isn't going to let me say it, so I'll say it to the wind."
Abel looks very hard at the horizon.
"But I think it's simpler than that," says Serena.
She turns.
She looks back down the length of the boat. At Abel. At Marcus, and Caleb, and Tessa. At Cho, and Torres's empty place at the rail, because she's in Washington, and sent a postcard. At me.
"I thought I'd lost everything," she says. "And I did. For a while. But the water gave it back. Every single thing, a little at a time, in a different shape. A father I could finally forgive. A sister. A husband." Her voice shakes. "A name."
She opens her hand.
The lilies fall.
They go down into the water one by one, white on grey, scattering slowly, drifting out on the slow swell in a loose pale ring. They float. They turn. A few of them catch the light, and for a moment the whole cove is full of small stars.
"Whatever the water does," says Serena.
"We're still here," says Tessa.
"We're still here," says Caleb.
"Ayuh," says Abel.
I go to her.
I put my arm round her shoulders. She leans into me, light and warm and entirely real, with her hair smelling of the sea. The lilies drift. The sun comes out from behind a cloud, and the whole bay goes to hammered silver, and a long way off, at the end of the point, the old light on Windward turns and turns and turns.
"Dom," she says.
"Mm."
"Do you know what I think?"
"What?"
"I think I was never really dead." She turns her face up. "I think I was only waiting. Somewhere in the cold, in the dark, for a man to come and find me."
I look down at her.
At the sea-glass eyes, and the cobalt on her chin, and the thin gold band on her finger with a line of tiny letters inside it that she'll never read again, because she already knows them by heart.
"I didn't find you," I say.
"No?"
"You found me."
She smiles.
It's the smile she gave me in a lobby, on a Monday, nearly a lifetime ago, with coffee soaking my shirt and a stranger's face over my wife's eyes, when she said: You're wet.
I kiss her.
The Birdie rocks, gently, in the long grey swell. The lilies drift away toward the open sea.
And somewhere under us, under the cold bright water, under the weed and the wreck and the three long years, something that had been holding its breath lets go at last, and is still.