She told herself she had a reason.

The harbormaster's office had always handled the Hale family's two boats — maintenance schedules, slip fees, seasonal storage — and with the change of ownership it was perfectly reasonable, perfectly ordinary, for someone from the family to go down and establish the new arrangement in person. It was the kind of thing her father would have done himself except that her father had not offered and Nora had not waited to be asked.

She told herself this was why she was walking down Clement Street at nine in the morning with her coat buttoned and her folder under her arm and her face arranged into its most useful expression — the one that said errand, that said routine, that said absolutely nothing about the fact that she had been awake since four.

The harbor looked different in daylight. Larger somehow, or perhaps just more real — the boats in their slips, the smell of salt and diesel, the particular grey light that came off the water on an October morning like this one, flat and cold and without apology. She had been coming to this harbor her whole life and it had never felt like someone else's territory before.

It did now.

She kept walking.

There was a man she didn't recognize checking lines on the nearest dock — young, efficient, not from Holloway or at least not from the part of Holloway she knew, which amounted to the same thing. He looked up when she approached and she gave him her name and said she was there about the Hale account and he nodded and pointed her toward the harbormaster's office at the far end of the main dock without a word.

She walked the length of the dock.

It took a long time. Or it felt like a long time, which was not the same thing but produced the same effect — too much space for her mind to move around in, too much grey water on either side, too much awareness of her own footsteps on the old timber boards. She had counted these boards as a child. She could not remember how many there were and was grateful for that, because counting them now would have been unbearable in a way she couldn't entirely explain.

The harbormaster's office was a low building at the end of the dock, weathered shingle, a single window facing the water. The door was open. Through it came the sound of someone moving inside — deliberate, unhurried.

Nora stopped outside.

She had one moment, just the one, standing in the cold salt air with her folder under her arm and the marker bell tolling somewhere out past the breakwater — one moment to be whatever she was going to be before she walked through that door. She used it. Then she walked through the door.

He was standing at the far end of the room with his back to her, looking at something on the wall — charts, she registered, nautical charts pinned in a long careful row, the coastline of this part of New England rendered in contour lines and depth soundings and the small precise symbols that meant danger. He was exactly as tall as she remembered. She had not expected that to mean anything. It meant something.

He turned around.

Calvin Voss at thirty-three looked like a man who had decided, some years ago, what he was going to be and had become it completely. The boy she had known was somewhere inside the architecture of his face if you knew where to look, and Nora knew where to look, and she did not look. She kept her eyes at a level professional height and her folder in front of her like it was a document and not something to hold onto.

He looked at her.

His expression did not change. Not a flicker, not a hesitation — nothing that acknowledged the fifteen years or the history or the fact that the last time they had been in a room together she had been seventeen years old and the world had been a completely different shape. He looked at her the way you looked at someone you had just met. Politely. Briefly.

"Can I help you," he said.

Not a question. Two words with a period at the end of them, delivered in a voice that was exactly what she had heard it described as over the past two days — quiet, precise, the kind of voice that made rooms pay attention without raising itself. She had not heard that voice in fifteen years. She had not known she remembered it.

She remembered it.

"Nora Hale," she said, and was proud of how that came out — clean, level, her own voice doing exactly what she asked of it. "My family has two boats in your slips. The Eleanor and the Grey Lady. I'm here to discuss the continued maintenance arrangement."

Calvin looked at her for a moment that lasted approximately one year.

"I'll have someone pull the account," he said. "If you want to leave a number."

If you want to leave a number. Like she had walked in off the street. Like she was anyone. Like she was no one.

Nora held his gaze and kept her face exactly where she had put it and said, "Of course," and wrote her number on the back of one of her cards with the pen she kept in her coat pocket and set it on the desk between them without crossing the distance to hand it to him directly.

He didn't look at the card.

"Someone will be in touch," he said.

She nodded. She picked up her folder. She turned toward the door with the measured unhurried pace of a woman who had come to conduct a routine errand and had conducted it and was now leaving, and she was almost there — she was three steps from the door, two steps, the cold air coming in off the dock and the grey light and the smell of the water — when something happened to her throat.

It was nothing. A tightening. Half a second at most, the composure bending without breaking the way green wood bends before it holds — and she breathed through it, one controlled breath, and she was through the door and onto the dock and walking back the way she came before it could happen again.

She did not look back.

Behind her the office was silent. Calvin Voss said nothing further. He had said everything he intended to say and it had landed exactly where he aimed it and she had walked away from it without giving him the satisfaction of knowing that, and that was the only thing she had to hold onto as she walked the full length of that dock — the old timber, the grey water, the boats in their slips — counting her steps instead of the boards because the boards were his now and the steps were still hers.

She made it to Clement Street before she stopped.

She stood with her back to the harbor and her face to the town and she waited for the tightening in her throat to pass, which it did, because she had trained it to. Then she straightened her coat and tucked her folder more firmly under her arm and walked back up the hill toward Aldrich Road and the rest of the day, which still existed and still required things from her regardless of what had just happened on that dock.

Nothing had happened on that dock.

She repeated this to herself with the same precision she applied to everything else, and by the time she reached the top of Clement Street she almost believed it.

Almost.