The black wool dress came out of the suitcase first. Margot held it up against the grey light of her grandmother's bedroom window, smoothing the creases with her thumb, checking the hem for the water damage she had already repaired. The sea wind off the harbor had pushed salt through the gap in the sash and left a fine white crust on the windowsill. Below, the gulls were already quarrelling over something in the breakwater.
She laid the dress flat across the quilted coverlet her grandmother Edith had stitched by hand forty years ago. The fabric smelled faintly of cedar and, beneath it, the lavender sachets Edith tucked between the linen. Margot pressed her palm flat against the wool and felt the cold of the window glass through the material, a chill that had nothing to do with the weather.
She had not worn the dress in twelve years. She had brought it home anyway, folded beneath the shoes she no longer wore, because the solicitor's letter had been specific about dress code for the formal reading of an estate. Black. Conservative. No jewellery except wedding bands or family heirlooms. The letter had been typed in the same font Edith had favoured for her own correspondence, the kind with the slightly off centre ampersand, and Margot had stared at it long enough to memorize the wording.
The cottage ticked around her as she dressed. Every board in the floorboards of the old place had its own small vocabulary. The third one from the bedroom door groaned when she stepped on it, the way it always had when she was nine and creeping down to the kitchen for a glass of milk. The seventh one had a hollow note. The one by the wardrobe had been replaced, and the new timber sounded flatter, younger, like a word in a different accent.
She buttoned the dress slowly, working from the hem upward, the way her grandmother had shown her. No mirror yet. She wanted the dress on the body first, before she looked at herself in any glass.
The boots came next. Black, low-heeled, leather worn soft at the ankle from years of walking along the harbour wall. She laced them tighter than usual, then loosened them again, then tightened them once more. Her hands were not quite steady.
Downstairs, she found a cup of tea on the kitchen table, still warm, and a note in a hand she did not recognize. She carried it to the window where the grey light was strongest and read it twice. Jude Ashford, the boatman. His father had been harbour master before his retirement. He had left the tea there because he had seen her light on the hill the night before and understood what it meant. Underneath the kettle, he had placed a small stone with a chip of quartz running through it, a thing that meant something in this village that Margot had forgotten, or had never been told.
She set the note down and drank the tea standing. It tasted of strong leaves and a little of the iron from the kettle.
Then she went to the hallway mirror and looked at herself for the first time.
The dress fitted the way a borrowed thing fits, a little too closely across the shoulders, the hem brushing a finger's width above the knee. Her hair she had pinned up at the crown in the style she remembered Edith wearing for funerals and for the occasional Sunday service. A single thin gold chain circled her throat, the only piece of jewellery that could be considered an heirloom. It had belonged to her mother. She had not worn it in a long time either.
The woman in the mirror looked older than Margot felt. Or rather, she looked the way Margot had always feared she might look if she ever came back to this place and stayed long enough for it to recognize her. The sea light was not kind to faces. It stripped the colour from under the eyes and put it back in the lips, sharpening the bones.
Margot turned away from the glass and gathered her bag from the hook by the door.
The walk down to the harbour took her past the post office with its faded red awning, past the slate-fronted pub where her grandmother had once thrown a saltshaker at a fisherman who would not lower his voice, past the alley where the baker's cat sat on a stack of crates and considered her with grave yellow eyes. She greeted a few of the early faces, those who were up and about despite the weather, and received in return the careful nods of people who knew what today was and who had been waiting, longer than she had, for her return.
Vera Hollis's offices occupied the second floor of the old customs house, a grey granite building set at the very lip of the harbour wall. From the windows of the waiting room, one could see both the working quay and the open stretch of coast where the Atlantic came barreling in under low cloud. The lighthouse stood at the end of the causeway, half its lantern long since decommissioned, the other half still serving the smaller fishing boats that needed a guiding light in the worst of the weather.
Margot had assumed, until the letter had come, that Edith still owned the whole of the structure and the keeper's cottage beside it. That was what the family had always believed, even though her grandmother had been strangely quiet about the subject for as long as Margot could remember. There had been some arrangement made, decades ago, that split the tower into two working halves and the responsibilities that went with them. Margot had never been told the details. Edith had always answered her questions about the lighthouse in monosyllables and then changed the subject to something edible.
She climbed the stone steps of the customs house. Inside, the stairwell smelled of beeswax and old pipe tobacco and, faintly, of the dried kelp the harbour master used to scatter on the floors in winter. A brass plate on the door read holman and hollis, solicitors, in letters that had been polished so often they were almost worn through.
The door was ajar. Margot pushed it open.
The reception room was small and high-ceilinged, the kind of room designed to make visiting clients feel the appropriate weight of their own concerns. A framed chart of the bay hung on one wall, annotated in Edith's handwriting, the route of every commercial vessel that had come in and out of the harbour for sixty years. Margot's throat tightened at the sight of it. She did not look at it again.
Vera Hollis came through the inner door before the girl at the desk could finish offering her a seat. The widow was a tall woman, even diminished by age, with a head of white hair pulled back in a netted knot and a face that had once been handsome in the way of old Cornish faces, all strong bones and watchful eyes. She wore black, as Margot did, and her hands were clasped in front of her as if she were about to deliver a sermon.
"Margot."
"Missus Hollis."
"You came in good time. The others are not here yet." Vera's voice was thin and reedy but carried without effort. She had the slight burr on her r's that Margot remembered from childhood, the soft rolling sound that turned every word into something that came up from the throat. "Come through. We'll have it done before the rain starts."
Margot followed her into the inner office, a long room with panelled walls and a single tall window that looked straight down the harbour mouth and out to the open Atlantic. The lighthouse was there, framed perfectly in the glass, its painted tower half cream and half the red it had always been, the two halves meeting in a visible seam where the original stonework showed through.
On the desk in front of the window lay a folded document in a buff envelope, sealed, the wax stamped with a mark Margot did not at first recognize. She had expected the will. She had expected the trust accounts. She had expected, in her private and orderly heart, a tidy instrument she could sign and walk away from, the way one signs for a parcel at a post office counter.
Vera sat down behind the desk and gestured for Margot to take the chair on the other side. The chair had a worn leather seat and arms polished to a pale honey by decades of similar elbows.
"Your grandmother drew this up seven years ago," Vera said, "and revised it twice since. The last revision was made the morning of the day she passed. She was quite clear in her mind."
"About what?"
"About the terms."
Margot kept her hands folded in her lap. The morning light off the harbour shifted as a cloud passed, and the painted tower in the window-frame dimmed and then brightened. She could hear, faintly, the bell-buoy out in the channel complaining to itself in a low regular pulse, the way it had complained since she was a girl.
Vera broke the seal on the envelope with a small bone paperknife and drew out two sheets of heavy cream paper. She did not read from them. She set them down flat on the blotter and looked across at Margot with the kind of attention that meant she was measuring something.
"Your grandmother left you the keeper's cottage, the contents, and her half of the lighthouse tower, the eastern half, which had been in our family since 1923. She left no debt. She left, in addition, a small bequest to the village archive fund and a larger one to a young man she had been quietly assisting through his trade examinations. The residue of the estate goes to you, with one condition attached."
Margot waited. The light in the room was so pale her own face must have looked like a sketch in pencil.
"The condition is that you must hold the eastern half of the tower and the keeper's cottage jointly with the western half, which my husband left to his brother's line, now represented by his grandson, and that you must agree in writing, before a witness, to fulfil the terms of the original arrangement made between the two families in the year 1923, a copy of which is annexed to this document and which I have not, in all honesty, finished reading because the language is older than my reading spectacles can comfortably manage."
Vera paused. She let out a small breath that was not quite a sigh.
"The relevant clause, however, appears clear enough. The keeper of the eastern light and the keeper of the western light must, between them, ensure that one full revolution of the great lens is made on the night of the winter solstice each year, and that the keeper of the eastern light must be present in the lantern room at the moment the western keeper extinguishes his lamp, and that the western keeper must be present in the lantern room at the moment the eastern keeper extinguishes hers. This is to be witnessed, under the terms of the original covenant, by a third party of standing in the village."
The room was very quiet after she finished speaking. Margot could hear the harbour bell-buoy, and underneath it, the small papery sound of Vera's fingers pressing the edge of the document flat.
"I don't understand," Margot said. Her voice, even to her own ears, sounded strange. As if the wind had got into her throat.
Vera regarded her with those watchful eyes.
"No," the old woman said.
"No," the old woman said.
Margot waited. The harbour bell-buoy sounded twice across the water, its tone flattening like a coin pressed into soft wood.
Vera lifted her reading spectacles from where they lay folded beside the teacup, settled them on the bridge of her nose with the slow precision of a woman performing a small rite, and turned back to the document. The lenses caught the grey morning light and held it.
"There is more," she said.
Margot's fingers curled against her palms. The chair beneath her was horsehair, old, and she could feel each strand through the thin cotton of her dress.
"The original arrangement," Vera continued, "contains a clause which the solicitor, in his letter, has termed a cohabitation covenant. I had not seen the like until this morning. The wording is, I should warn you, somewhat formal."
She drew the page closer and began to read.
"'Be it known to all parties present and to come that the trustees of the Penhallam Lighthouse and the lands adjacent thereto, in consideration of the deep and enduring bond between the families of the Eastern Light and the Western Light, do hereby require and enjoin that the heirs of either branch, being of full age and sound mind, shall for a term of six consecutive calendar months take up their residence together in the keeper's cottage adjoining the eastern tower, such residence to be continuous and unbroken save for absences necessitated by illness, by the call of the sea, or by duties owed to a parent or grandparent in extremis, and that failure to fulfil this requirement in its entirety shall render the said inheritance forfeit and the said lighthouse and its lands shall revert in perpetuity to the historical society of the county, to be held by them in trust for the people of Cornwall. Both inheritances, eastern and western, are bound by this covenant in equal measure, and the failure of either heir shall work a forfeiture against both.'"
Vera stopped. She lifted her spectacles and let them fall against her chest on their thin chain.
"You understand," she said, not quite a question, "what that means."
Margot did not answer at once. She was looking at the vase of thrift on the table, the pink of it almost lost against the white of the cloth, and at the dust that had gathered in the folds where the cloth draped to the floor. Her grandmother's cottage. Her grandmother's dust.
"Six months," she said.
"Six months," Vera repeated. "Consecutive. Unbroken. In this cottage."
"In this cottage," Margot echoed. The words felt strange in her mouth, as if she were learning a new language.
"With whom," she said, and the question came out harder than she had intended, "is it that I am to take up residence?"
Vera folded her hands on the table. Her fingers were long and thin, the knuckles swollen, the skin spotted with the brown of old age. She did not look away.
"With the grandson of my husband's brother," she said. "The heir to the western light. A young man you have not seen since you were a child, if I recall. A young man who has, until this morning, had no reason to set foot in this cottage, and who has, until this morning, no notion that his name is bound to yours in a document older than either of you."
"The name," Margot said. Her mouth was dry.
"Ashford," said Vera. "Jude Ashford. The fisherman's son. The harbour master's grandson. You will remember him, perhaps, as a boy with a face full of freckles and a hand always in his pocket, looking for something he had lost."
Margot's hand went to her throat. She remembered. She remembered a boy, ten or eleven, standing on the slip below the cottage with a coil of rope over his shoulder, his hair the colour of wet rope too, and his eyes a pale washed grey, and his mouth set in a line that was older than his face. She had been eight. She had been nine. She had been leaving.
"That boy," she said.
"That man's grandson," said Vera. "And the man himself is dead these seven years, and his son, the harbour master, is retired and lives with his sister in Truro, and the grandson fishes out of Padstow in the summer and does odd jobs in the winter, and has, by all accounts, never been east of Bodmin in his life."
"But he must come here," Margot said.
"He must come here," Vera said. "Or you must go to him, if the cottage is not to your liking, though the terms require this cottage specifically, by name, in the document. And you must remain here, both of you, for six months, with the door unlocked between you and the sea, and the window open to the salt, and the record of your residence kept by me, for I am named in the document as the witness of standing, the keeper of the book, as my husband was before me."
The clock on the mantel ticked. It had ticked in this cottage for sixty years and more. Margot had listened to it as a child, lying in the box bed in the room upstairs, with the sound of the tide coming in beneath it like a second pulse.
"And if I refuse," she said.
"Then the inheritance is forfeit," Vera said, "and the lighthouse passes to the historical society, and the restoration funds, which are considerable, are lost, and the tower stands as it stands until the salt has eaten the last of it, which will not be in my lifetime, and may not be in yours, but will come."
"And Jude," Margot said. "If he refuses."
"Then the same," said Vera. "And you will have lost your grandmother's cottage as well as the lighthouse, for the terms apply to the whole of the estate, and the whole of the estate is bound by the covenant, and the cottage is not excluded. If either of you leaves before the six months are complete, both inheritances pass to the historical society. There is no partial fulfilment. The document is absolute on this point."
Margot let out a breath. It came out of her in a way she had not expected, shaking slightly at the end, and she pressed her hand against her mouth for a moment to still it.
"He does not know," she said.
"He will know by supper," said Vera. "I have sent young Ellis from the post office with a letter, and there will be a letter also to the solicitor in Wadebridge to confirm the date of commencement, which the document permits to be any day within the calendar month following the reading of the will."
"So soon," Margot said.
"The terms," said Vera, "do not permit delay. The winter solstice is twenty-three days from today. The six months will run from the day you both take up residence, but the lighthouse ceremony, which is the other requirement, must be performed on the solstice itself, in the lantern room, with both keepers present at the extinguishing of the other's lamp. If the ceremony is missed, the covenant is broken. If the residency is broken, the covenant is broken. The two requirements stand together, and neither is sufficient alone."
Margot closed her eyes. She could feel the floor of the cottage beneath her feet, the boards worn smooth by her grandmother's steps, by her grandfather's before her, by generations of feet that had known this floor in the dark and in the light. The salt air came in through the window, faint but persistent, carrying the iodine smell of the wrack that lay along the shoreline below.
"Six months," she said again.
"Six months," said Vera.
Margot opened her eyes. The old woman was watching her with those steady eyes, and there was something in them that was not quite sympathy and was not quite curiosity, but was something older than either, something that had to do with the keeping of records and the holding of names.
"You will want to think," Vera said.
"I will want to think," Margot agreed.
"You will want to walk," Vera said. "Down to the cove, and along the wall, and back up the lane. You always did, when you were small. When there was a thing to be thought."
"Yes," Margot said.
"Then walk," said Vera. "And when you have walked, come back, and we will speak of what is to be done. I will put the kettle on again, and there will be a pasty in the oven by the time you return, for you have not eaten since you came off the train, I can see it in your face."
Margot stood. Her legs were stiffer than she had expected, the long train and the morning having stiffened them. She moved to the door, and then she stopped, with her hand on the frame.
"Vera," she said.
"My dear," said Vera.
"Why did she not tell me."
Vera was silent for a long moment. The clock ticked. The harbour bell tolled once, far out, the sound coming in through the window like the memory of a sound.
"Because," Vera said, at last, "she was afraid you would not come. And she was afraid you would. And she did not know which she feared more. And in the end, I think, she could not bear to ask. So she left it to the paper, and to me, and to the wind."
Margot nodded. She did not trust herself to speak. She went out into the passage, and out through the front door, which her grandmother had painted blue the summer Margot was seven, and which the salt had weathered to a pale powdery colour, like the inside of a mussel shell.
The wind took her at once. It came off the sea with a sharpness that was almost sweet, carrying the cold brine and the faint darker smell of weed. She pulled her coat tighter and turned down the lane toward the cove.
Behind her, in the kitchen, she heard the small papery sound of Vera turning the page of the will, and then the quieter sound of a match being struck, and the older smell of tobacco drifting out to meet the salt.
The lane ran downhill between low stone walls, the stones set without mortar in the old way, the lichens on them pale grey and sulphur yellow in the winter light. At the bottom of the lane, the cove opened out, a shallow scoop in the cliff, the sand dark and ribbed with the tracks of gulls. The sea lay beyond, grey-green, heaving slowly, the white of the breaking water drawing back and forth across the rocks at the harbour mouth.
Margot sat down on the wall. She did not mean to sit. Her legs simply folded under her, the way they had used to fold when she was small and the world was too much for her, and she found herself looking out at the horizon, where the sky and the sea met in a line that was not quite a line but a kind of slow mingling.
Six months. With a man she had not seen in twelve years, in a cottage that smelled of her grandmother's lavender and her grandfather's pipe tobacco, under the eye of a woman who kept the book of the village the way other women kept recipe books or hymnals.
She pressed her hands between her knees. They were cold, and the cold moved up into her wrists, and she did not pull her coat tighter. She let the cold come.
Somewhere out beyond the headland, she knew, a man was mending nets. She did not know which man. She did not know yet that the letter was on its way, or that by suppertime the lane would carry the sound of a different kind of footsteps, slower, heavier, the footsteps of a man who walked as if the ground were something he was testing with each step.
She sat on the wall, and the wind moved over her, and the sea moved under the wind, and the light moved on the water, and she did not move at all.
Margot sat on the wall until the cold finished crawling up her arms and settled somewhere behind her ribs. Then she stood, brushed the grit from her palms, and turned her face toward the headland path.
She had not meant to go up there. Not yet. Not with her head still full of Vera Hollis and the lawyer and the smell of her grandmother's lavender, not with the taste of salt and something like grief on the back of her tongue. But her feet knew the path, and she let them take it.
The track climbed through bracken gone bronze with the late season, then through a stand of blackthorn where the wind moved and made a dry whispering like the turning of many small pages. Her boots found the stones she had climbed on as a girl, and the stones were the same, and she was not.
The cottage appeared first as a chimney against the sky, then as a roof, then as the whole small shape of it, low and whitewashed, the lichen on the north wall green as verdigris. Smoke came from the chimney. There was a light in the kitchen window, and a man on a stepladder at the side of the house, his back to her, working on a window frame.
She stopped at the gate. She could hear the scrape of sandpaper on wood, the slow steady rhythm of it, and beneath that the sea, always the sea, the long breath of it drawing in and out behind the headland.
"You can come through," the man said, without turning. "Gate's not locked."
"You knew I was here."
"Smell of the lavender soap your gran kept under the sink. And your boots on the stones. I know those stones."
She pushed the gate open and walked up the path. The man went on sanding. She stood at the bottom of the ladder and looked up at him.
Jude Ashford had not changed in the way she had expected. He had changed only in the way people do when you have not seen them for a long time, the way a wall you remember as clean shows its lichen only when you come back. He was broader across the shoulders than she remembered, and the sunburn had set into his skin so that he looked like someone carved from the red sandstone you could see at low tide down at the cove. His hands were thick with calluses, the knuckles scarred, and he held the sanding block with a patience that reminded her of something she could not name.
"Jude," she said.
He stopped sanding then. He turned on the ladder and looked down at her, and she saw his face, and it was the same face, older, weathered, the same.
"Hello, Margot," he said.
He climbed down. He set the sanding block on the ledge. He wiped his hands on a rag and looked at her the way he had always looked at her, as if he had all the time in the world and was willing to give it to her.
"I've had a letter," she said.
"Aye."
"From the solicitor. About the cottage."
"Aye."
"About the six months."
He nodded. He did not speak for a long moment. The wind moved over the garden and the bracken whispered.
"Then you know," she said.
"I know."
"And you're here."
"I'm here."
"You shouldn't be here, Jude."
"Maybe not."
She waited. He went on waiting, too, and for a moment they stood in the garden as if they had both forgotten what came next. The sea drew in and drew out behind the headland. A gull cried somewhere far off.
"The will," she said. "Did Vera tell you what was in it?"
"Vera told me."
"All of it?"
"Vera does nothing by halves."
"You cannot stay here."
"I can."
"It is my grandmother's cottage."
"It is the cottage in the will."
"It is not yours."
"No," he said. "It is not mine. But I am here under the terms, and the terms are the terms."
She felt the heat climb up her throat. She had forgotten this about him, the way he could be immovable, the way he could stand in a place and simply be in it, the way a boulder is in a field, not because it is being difficult but because that is where it has always been.
"The terms are absurd," she said.
"They may be."
"They cannot be legal."
"Vera had them drawn up proper. A solicitor in Truro, a solicitor in London. The will was read twice."
"You have known about this for how long?"
"Since the spring."
"Since the spring," she repeated. "You have known since the spring that I would come home, and you did not write."
He looked at her then, and there was something in his look she had not seen in him before, or had not allowed herself to see, something that was not patience but a kind of worn-out tenderness.
"I did not write," he said, "because there was nothing to write that the letter would not say better."
"You could have warned me."
"You would have come anyway."
"How do you know that?"
He did not answer. He looked at her the way he always looked at her, as if he knew her better than she knew herself, and she hated him a little for it, and she hated herself more for letting him.
She walked past him and tried the door. It was unlocked, as she had known it would be. The smell of the cottage came out to meet her, lavender and pipe tobacco and the salt that lived in the walls, and she stood on the threshold for a moment with her hand on the frame.
He had been tidying. She could see that. The kitchen was swept. The kettle was on the hob. There was a vase on the table with a single stem of late fuchsia in it, the colour of a wound.
"You've been living here," she said.
"Since June."
"In my grandmother's house."
"In the house in the will."
"Jude."
"Margot."
"You have to leave."
"I cannot."
"You cannot stay."
"I can, and I am."
She turned on him then, and her voice rose, and she let it rise, because she had been quiet for too long and because the quiet had been a kind of lying.
"This is not your home," she said. "You have your own place down at the harbour. You have your boat. You have your nets. This is mine. This is the only thing she left me that was not a question, and you cannot take it from me."
"I am not taking it."
"Then what are you doing?"
"Honouring her."
The word landed strangely in the room. Margot closed her mouth. She stood there with her hand still on the door frame and felt the wood under her palm, the same wood her grandfather had planed, the same wood her grandmother had polished every Saturday morning, and she could not speak.
"Your gran asked me," he said. "Last winter. Before she went into the home. She asked me to look after the cottage for six months if anything happened to her. She said you would come home, and you would need somewhere to land. She said you would fight it, and you would need someone there to stay put."
"She had no right."
"She had every right. It was her house."
"It is mine now."
"For six months, it is both."
She walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table, because her legs had made the decision for her. The fuchsia trembled in the vase. The kettle began to tick as the water inside it warmed.
He came in after her. He set the kettle properly on the heat. He took two cups from the shelf and put tea into the pot without asking, the way he had done when they were young and she had come down to the harbour after school with her books under her arm and her hair full of wind.
They did not speak while the tea steeped. The light moved on the table. The sea sounded through the window, and the sound was the same sound it had always been, the long patient breath of a thing that does not care what humans do.
"You could not have told me," she said at last, and her voice was smaller now.
"Maybe I should have."
"You should have."
"Aye. Maybe."
She drank her tea. He drank his. Outside, the light began to thicken and lean toward evening, the way light does on the headland in autumn, going amber and then copper and then a kind of bruised rose.
The argument went on, and on, and on. It went on past the time the light left the garden, past the time the gulls stopped their crying and the curlews began, past the time the stars came out over the headland, faint at first and then bright, the way stars are when there is no other light to compete with. She accused him of presumption. He said he had only done what he was asked. She said her grandmother had no right. He said perhaps not, but she had, and she had gone, and the will was the will. She said he had taken twelve years to speak to her. He said he had written twice and both letters had come back unopened. She said that was not the same. He said perhaps not, but it was what he had.
They did not raise their voices. Neither of them had ever been a person who raised their voice. They fought the way people fight when they have known each other too long and too well, in low tones, in sentences that began one place and ended another, in pauses that meant as much as words.
The kettle was filled and emptied and filled again. The candles on the mantel were lit, and the room smelled of wax and lavender and the woodsmoke from the fire he had laid, because of course there was a fire, because Jude Ashford had always known how to make a house warm.
At last, when the clock on the mantel had struck eleven and the dark outside was complete, she set her cup down.
"Fine," she said.
"Fine?"
"I will stay the night."
"Margot."
"One night. To prove how absurd this is. Tomorrow I will go back to the solicitor, and we will find a way."
"The upstairs room is aired."
"Good."
"There's clean sheets on the bed."
"Good."
"There's a jug of water on the chest."
"Good night, Jude."
He stood. He picked up her cup. He looked at her across the table, and in the candlelight his face was all shadow and weather and something she was not ready to look at.
"Good night, Margot," he said.
She climbed the stairs. The boards creaked under her feet, the same creaks, in the same places. The upstairs room was at the end of the landing, the door ajar, the moonlight coming through the small window and laying a square of silver on the floor.
She undressed. She washed her face and her hands in the jug. She got into the bed, and the sheets were cold at first, and then warm, and then the kind of warm that is only warmth when you have been away from a place for a long time.
She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling, and the ceiling was the same ceiling, with the same hairline crack she had traced with her finger as a child when she could not sleep.
Downstairs, she heard him bank the fire. She heard him set the latch on the back door. She heard his footsteps cross the kitchen floor and stop, and for a long moment she thought he might come up the stairs.
He did not.
The sea breathed outside the window. The cottage settled around her, the old timbers speaking to each other in the dark, and she lay in the bed her grandmother had slept in, in the house her grandfather had built, with the smell of lavender and the taste of salt on her lips, and she did not sleep for a long time.
But she did not leave.
Not yet.