The strangest thing about waking up was how good it felt.

Ila lay for a long moment with her eyes half closed, drifting in the warm gold haze between sleep and waking, and tried to understand why her chest felt so light. There was a weight against her cheek, warm and solid, rising and falling with a slow steady rhythm. There was wool beneath her face, rough and clean and faintly smelling of salt. There was the sound of a stove ticking, and gulls crying somewhere beyond the walls, and underneath it all, deep in her bones, a sense of safety so profound and so unfamiliar that she had no name for it.

She thought: I'm home.

Then she opened her eyes, and Tamsin's face was inches from hers, and the thought dissolved into a hot rush of mortification.

"Ila," Tamsin said.

It came out low and rough and thick with sleep. It was not the cold, careful Ila of the past weeks, the clipped syllable of a captain addressing a subordinate. It was the other one. The one from a kitchen at midnight, from a quay at dusk, from a hundred whispered mornings in a narrow bed. The one she had not heard in seven years, and had never expected to hear again.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Ila was sharply aware of everything. The shape of Tamsin's collarbone under her cheek. The slow drum of her pulse. The way her own hand, in the night, had crept up to lie flat against the front of that faded oilskin, as though it had a right to be there. She saw the faint flush rising along Tamsin's cheekbones, and the startled darkening of her gray-green eyes, and knew that she was seeing, at that instant, a woman who had just said something she had not intended to say.

"Good morning," Ila said.

It was absurdly formal. It sounded ridiculous in the quiet.

"Morning," said Tamsin.

"I fell asleep."

"So did I."

"I didn't mean to."

"No."

"I'm sorry. I'll just."

"Don't," Tamsin said, quickly, then cleared her throat. "That is. It's fine. You were cold."

"Was I?"

"You were shivering."

"Oh," said Ila.

She sat up. She did it slowly, carefully, as though the air might shatter. The sailcloth rustled. The chart, which had been lying across Tamsin's knees, rolled itself up with a soft whisper of paper and slipped into its tube, as neatly as a cat going into a basket. A cold draft stirred through the crack of the door, and Ila felt the absence of that warm shoulder like a missing tooth.

It was the loneliest she had felt in years.

* * * The Marrow Lark was waiting for them off the northern point, riding high on a calm bright sea. Beyond her, the fog had rolled back to a distant gray rim on the horizon, and the island of Hushwater, now only a long low smear of black rock, lay sleeping in the morning sun.

Odo had spotted them from a mile out. He brought the tug alongside the beach with a skill that made Ila's heart ache with envy, and Juno leaped down onto the shingle with a rope in one hand and a thermos in the other and the expression of a boy who had not slept in thirty hours.

"You're alive!" he cried. "You're both alive! We saw the flare and then it went dark and we thought, we thought."

"We're fine," Tamsin said.

"We tried to come ashore. We couldn't. The fog just closed up like a wall, and Odo said it would be suicide, and I said we couldn't leave you, and he said."

"Juno."

"I made tea. I've been making tea since midnight."

"Juno," said Tamsin, and put her hand on his shoulder. "It's all right."

He subsided. He looked at her, and then at Ila, and then back, with an expression of such helpless hope that Ila had to look away. She saw Odo, behind him, leaning on the rail with his cap pushed back and his arms folded. He had taken in everything at a glance. The rumpled clothes. The ashen faces. The way they were standing a careful yard apart, like two people who had just finished a very long argument, or the beginning of an even longer one.

"Well," said Odo, mildly. "That was quick."

"Don't," said Tamsin.

"I didn't say a word."

"You were about to."

"I was about to say we'd better make way. Tide's turning. I've no wish to sit here and watch the Shoal rise and swallow us up." He lifted his chin toward the boat. "In you come. There's hot food."

They went aboard.

Ila took her place at the wheel in silence, with her hands steady on the spokes and her heart hammering. She did not look at the stern, where Tamsin stood with her back to the wheelhouse and her face to the sea. She did not look at the chart tube, slung across the captain's shoulder like a rifle. She looked at the horizon. At the water. At the long pale line of the coast, drawing slowly nearer.

She was aware, deep in her chest, of a decision.

It had been forming since the night. It had come to her in the dark, as she lay with her head against a stranger's collarbone, listening to the slow sure beat of a heart she would have died for. It was a small decision, in the end. A narrow, simple, impossible one.

I'm not going to hide any more.

Not the whole truth. She could not give that. The clause was waiting, cold and patient, and she had no wish to choke on a boat deck in front of a boy of twenty. But she could stop pretending. She could stop the elaborate pantomime of smooth indifference. She could let Tamsin see, if only a little, the real shape of what she had broken.

It would not be enough.

But it might be a beginning.

* * * "Tamsin."

She said it at the dock, an hour later, while the others were coiling lines and stowing gear and arguing, cheerfully, about whose turn it was to scrub the galley. She had waited until Juno was out of earshot. She had picked her moment, and her words, and the angle of her shoulders. She had rehearsed it the whole way home.

Tamsin looked round.

She stood at the head of the gangway with the leather tube in her arms, windblown and sun-bright, and her face went through a series of small rapid changes, too quick to follow. Surprise. Wariness. Something very like fear.

"Can we talk?" Ila said. "Privately. Just for a few minutes."

"We have a debrief at ten."

"I know. It's not about the run."

"Then it'll have to wait."

"It's been seven years," said Ila.

The words fell between them like a dropped plate.

Tamsin did not answer. She stood with her jaw clenched and her knuckles pale on the tube, and her gaze did not leave Ila's face. The gulls cried. A winch clattered somewhere on the dock. Behind them, in the stern, Odo's rich baritone began a slow, tuneless hymn.

"Not on my deck," Tamsin said at last.

"Then where?"

"Not here."

"Anywhere. I don't care. I'll go anywhere."

Another long silence.

"Come," said Tamsin.

* * * She led her along the south breakwater.

It was a place Ila had not walked in seven years. A long, low, rambling arm of granite blocks stretching out from the shore, grown over with weed and thrift and the pale bloom of sea lavender, and at the end of it, a small flat platform of rock where the surf boiled up on a rising tide. It was a favorite spot for fishermen and lovers. It was cold and windy and utterly exposed. In the old days, it had been theirs.

Tamsin did not speak as they walked.

She went ahead with her long loping stride, her yellow oilskin snapping in the wind, the leather tube clutched against her ribs like a child. Ila followed a few paces behind, picking her way over the weed-slick stones. She watched the line of her back. She watched the way she carried her left foot, a barely perceptible hitch, a slight shortening of the stride, as though some small thing there did not quite bear her weight.

She had not noticed it before. It tightened something in her chest.

They reached the end.

The sea was a deep bright blue, ruffled with white, and the wind blew spray in their faces. The sun was high and thin and pale. Far out, the horizon was clear and sharp as a knife edge, and a single sail crawled across it. Tamsin stopped at the very lip of the rock and stood looking out over the water, and the wind took her braid and flung it sideways like a flag.

"I stood here," she said.

Ila's throat closed.

"Every night. After." Her voice was flat. "The first winter. I'd come out at dusk, when the lamps came on. I'd stand right here, on this rock, and I'd watch the horizon. I told myself I was waiting for the weather to clear." She laughed, short and soft. "I was twenty-three. I was extremely good at lying to myself."

"Tam."

"Let me say it."

Ila closed her mouth.

"I've never said it." Tamsin sat down on the rock. She did it stiffly, like an old woman, and drew her knees up, and with a small grimace began to unlace her left boot. "Not to Odo, or my father, or anyone. I don't know why I'm saying it now. I think it's because you asked me to wait, and I've been waiting for seven years, and I'm too tired to do it any more."

She pulled off the boot.

Then the sock. Her fingers moved with a slow deliberateness, as though performing a rite. And then she held out her foot, bare and pale in the wind, and Ila saw it.

The two smallest toes were gone.

Not all at once. Not in some dramatic horror. They were simply absent, and in their place, a smooth, shiny, puckered scar, ridged and white against the faint tan of the skin. The next toe was misshapen, stiff, bent inward. A thin ghostly line ran up the outer edge of the foot, where the flesh had been cut away and healed in a different shape.

"Frostbite," said Tamsin, matter-of-factly. "And exposure. I was on the shingle for nine hours before they found me. I'd lost the feeling in my feet by the time the sun came up. I don't remember the walk. Somebody told me later I'd crawled the last quarter mile to the causeway. They had to carry me to the clinic."

Ila said nothing. She could not have said anything. Her mouth had gone entirely dry.

"I lost two toes in the first week," Tamsin said. "The third was supposed to go, but the surgeon thought he could save it. It still aches in the cold. I limp when it rains." She turned the foot slowly in the light. "People ask. I tell them it was a fishing accident. It's not a lie. It's just not the whole truth."

"Tamsin."

"I'm not telling you for sympathy."

"I know."

"I'm telling you because you ought to know what it cost."

"I do know."

"You don't," said Tamsin. "You don't, Ila. You left. You weren't there. You don't know what it was like to wake up on a beach at dawn with nobody coming. You don't know what it was like to lie in a hospital bed for three weeks, with my father sitting beside me, saying, 'Where's Ila? Has anyone seen Ila?' And me saying, 'She's gone.'"

"I'm sorry."

"That's not what I'm asking for."

"I know."

"I'm not asking for anything."

She sat with her foot in her hand, looking out to sea. The wind lashed her hair across her face, and she did not push it back. The sun struck sparks off the water. She looked very small, and very straight, and very, very tired.

"You said something to me," she said. "On that beach."

Ila's heart stopped.

"Before I went under. Before the memory went black. I remember it. I remember every syllable. It's the last clear thing I have." Her voice dropped. It was soft, almost gentle, like a person reading aloud from a book she knows by heart. "You said, 'I never loved you. Don't follow me.'"

The wind seemed to stop.

Ila heard the words. She heard them as she had heard them for seven years, in the silence of every night, in the hollow between one thought and the next. She heard them in her own voice, cold and clear and cruel, rolling out across a dark beach, and she felt them land on Tamsin's face like a physical blow.

She had meant them to.

That was the horror of it. That was the thing she had never been able to forgive. She had chosen them. She had searched her mind for the cruelest sentence she could find, the one that would cut the cleanest, and she had said it with a steady voice and a straight back, and then she had turned and walked away.

"It wasn't true," Ila whispered.

"I know."

"It wasn't, Tam. It was the opposite. It was the exact."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I've known for a long time." Tamsin looked at her at last. Her eyes were very bright, and very steady, and there was something terribly gentle in them. "I'm not stupid. You've never been able to lie to me for more than a minute. I knew the second you said it. I thought, that's not her. That's someone else, speaking with her voice. But I couldn't work out who. And I couldn't work out why. And in the end, it didn't matter, because it hurt just the same."

"I'm so sorry."

"I know."

"I would take it back. I would take back every."

"Ila." She said it quietly. "Tell me why."

* * * It was the simplest request in the world.

It was what she had wanted for seven years. It was what she had prayed for, and dreaded, and rehearsed, on a thousand sleepless nights. She had imagined this moment so often that it had worn a groove in her mind. The wind, the sea, the pale gold light. The question, spoken softly. The answer, rising like a bubble.

She knelt on the rock, on the cold wet granite, in front of the woman she had wronged, and she took a breath.

"I did it," she said, "because."

The thumb came down on her windpipe.

It was gentle at first. A hint, a warning, like a hand laid on a shoulder. She felt it settle, cool and precise, and the next word died in her mouth. She pushed. She forced it. She fixed her eyes on Tamsin's face, and thought of nothing but the shape of the sentence, the sound of it, the first clear syllable, and the pressure grew, and grew.

"Because I."

Black spots swam. The sea tilted. She heard a thin high singing in her ears. She felt her fingers dig into the rock, and her heart stagger, and her own voice crack and wither into a thin dry rattle.

"Ila. Stop."

"I have to."

"Stop. You'll hurt yourself."

"I have to tell you."

"Ila," said Tamsin, and reached out and laid a hand, light as a leaf, against her cheek.

It was the touch that did it. A single warm callused palm cupping her jaw. The thumb brushed the corner of her mouth. And the cold fingers loosened, and let go, and Ila fell forward onto her hands and gasped, great ragged gulps of air, and the sky came wheeling back.

"I'm sorry," she said.

It was all she could say.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"That's not an answer."

"I know."

"It's not."

"I know." She was weeping. She had not noticed. The tears ran down her face in hot salt streaks and dripped onto the stone, and she wiped them clumsily with the back of her wrist. "I know it's not. I'd give anything. If I could. If I could just. It's the only thing I have, and it isn't enough."

Tamsin did not speak.

She sat motionless, with one hand still half raised, the fingertips glistening where they had touched Ila's cheek. Her eyes were fixed on Ila's face. They traveled slowly over it, taking in the tears, the gray lips, the hands knotted white on the rock. Her expression was grave and tender and terribly sad.

She did not look angry. That was the worst of it. She looked like a woman who has been holding a door shut against a flood and has just felt, for the first time, the water seeping under the sill.

"Then give me one," she said.

"What?"

"An answer. Not now. I can see you can't." Her voice was low, and quite calm. "But sometime. Before the season's over. I'll give you until the equinox. I'm not going to ask again. I'm not going to push. But before that day, I want to hear it from your mouth. The whole truth. Whatever it is."

"The equinox."

"The twenty-first. When the Open Tide ends." She drew her foot up and began, with great care, to pull on her sock. "That's all I'm asking. Time enough. And if you can't, if you truly can't, then I'll understand, and we'll never speak of it again. But I want you to try."

Ila stared at her.

She was shaking. A bubble of something wild and terrible and impossible was rising in her chest, something very like laughter, and it burst out of her before she could stop it, a short harsh bark that echoed across the water.

"What?" said Tamsin, startled. "What is it?"

"The twenty-first."

"What about it?"

"Nothing."

"Ila."

"That's the day," Ila gasped, "that's the very day, it's the equinox, it's the exact. Oh, God." She pressed her fist against her mouth, and it shook with helpless, desolate, hysterical mirth. "It's the day I made it. It's the deadline. It's seven years to the hour."

"What deadline?"

"I can't tell you."

"Ila."

"I can't. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's just that. It's just that you've picked the exact day." She was laughing and crying at once, and could not seem to stop. "Of all the days in the year. You've picked the only one. You've no idea."

Tamsin looked at her with eyes full of a dawning, wary comprehension.

"I think," she said slowly, "that I'm beginning to."

She did not say anything else. She finished with her boot, and laced it, and stood up, and brushed the grit from her knees. She slung the tube across her back. She looked down at Ila, who was still kneeling on the rock with tears running down her face, and for a moment she hesitated, as though weighing something.

Then she held out a hand.

Ila stared at it.

It was a broad, square, capable hand, scarred across the knuckles, with short nails and a ridge of callus along each finger. It hung steady in the air between them. There was no softness in it, no promise. Only an offer.

She took it.

It pulled her to her feet, firmly, without effort. They stood a moment, close together on the end of the breakwater, with the wind whipping their hair and the sea thundering below, and neither of them let go.

"Come on," said Tamsin, at last. "We'll be late for the debrief."

"Tam."

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet," said Tamsin Rooke. "You haven't told me anything."

She said it lightly, almost kindly. She even smiled, a small, tired, crooked smile that did not reach her eyes. And then she turned and walked back along the long gray arm of the breakwater with her uneven stride and her head held high, and Ila followed.

Above them, a gull wheeled. The sun climbed higher.

Sixty-eight days, Ila thought, and for the first time in a year, the number did not feel like a noose. It felt like a road. A short one, and a steep one, and dark at the end. But a road all the same, and a hand to hold on the way.

It would have to do.