hit the kitchen table with a flat slap, and a thin skein of dust rose from its leather cover. Mr. Penniman smoothed his cuffs and did not sit.
"Miss Fairfax." His voice carried the same papery precision as always, each word measured and rationed. "I trust you received my letter."
Rosalind Fairfax set down the kettle she had been holding and studied the solicitor without moving from the stove. Behind her, the old boiler ticked and groaned, a sound she had learned to translate into the slow language of money she did not have. A week ago it had started shuddering at odd hours, and twice last night she had been woken by a hiss from the cellar that tasted of rust and brine.
"I received it, Mr. Penniman. I was not aware the matters it concerned required a personal visit."
"On the contrary. On the contrary, they require exactly that."
He opened the ledger, then another, then a third, spreading them across the worn oak like a man dealing cards at a table he intended to win. The pages rustled, ink-smudged and watermarked, the columns of figures marching in their tight, prim lines. Rosalind counted three ledgers, then four. Then a slim folder tied with red tape.
"Forgive my bluntness," he said, though his tone suggested he would not forgive it at all. "Your father, the late Captain Fairfax, was a man of considerable vision. Perhaps too considerable. The estate, the boats, the wharf improvements, all of it was undertaken on the assumption of returns that, regrettably, did not arrive."
"I am aware of my father's ambitions, Mr. Penniman."
"Are you?" He tilted his head. The spectacles caught the grey morning light from the kitchen window. "Then you will also be aware that ambition, unchecked, becomes debt. I have prepared a summary."
He placed one finger on the first ledger. "The property is mortgaged to its fullest extension. The original note, taken out in eighteen seventy-two, has been renewed twice. The current balance, inclusive of accumulated interest, stands at four thousand eight hundred and twelve pounds, six shillings, and four pence."
The kettle ticked on the hob behind her. Rosalind did not turn.
"The boilers in the cellar, two of them, were replaced in seventy-nine. They are, by any honest reckoning, past the end of their serviceable life. The newer of the two has begun to leak at the seam. I had my clerk obtain an estimate." He drew a paper from the folder and laid it beside the ledger. "One hundred and forty-six pounds to refit. Possibly more, if the connecting pipes have corroded, which I am given to understand they have."
"My steward has managed the repairs in smaller sums," Rosalind said. "We have not required an outside estimate."
"Until now, perhaps. The sum in question is rather beyond smaller sums." He turned a page. "And then there is the matter of the property taxes."
She had known, of course. She had known in the way one knows a storm is coming by the colour of the sky and the silence of the gulls. Three months past due. A hundred and sixty pounds, accumulated, with penalties. A figure she had not allowed herself to write down because writing it would have made it real, and she was not yet ready to grant it that dignity.
"Three months," she said.
"Three months," he agreed. "There is, I regret to inform you, no money in the household account to address any of these matters. The takings from the inn this past quarter have been, while creditable, insufficient to cover the running costs, let alone the arrears. Your sister's school fees, paid quarterly in advance, have consumed a further portion of the reserves."
Rosalind's hands found the handle of the kettle again, more from habit than intent. The metal was warm and grounding. "My sister is completing her studies, Mr. Penniman. That was my father's wish."
"Your father's wishes are precisely the issue, Miss Fairfax. They were vast, and they were not, in the end, funded." He removed his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I do not say this to wound you. I say it because something must be done, and it falls to me, as executor, to ensure that what must be done is done with the appropriate form."
"Appropriate form."
"The estate cannot sustain another year of this trajectory. The inn alone is not sufficient. The shipping interests, what remains of them, yield nothing. The wharf leases have lapsed." He gestured to the folder. "There are options. I have drawn them up."
"Options."
"Several." He folded his hands. "There is the question of sale. A buyer for the property as a going concern would discharge the mortgage, settle the taxes, and leave you and your sister in comfortable independence, if not in the style to which you have been accustomed."
"The style to which I have been accustomed is not the point, Mr. Penniman."
"No. The point is the four thousand eight hundred and twelve pounds, six shillings, and four pence. Which sum, I might add, is held by this firm." His gaze did not waver. "I hold the note. I have held it for these thirty years. I held your father's hand when he signed the first one, and I held your mother's when he passed, and I shall, God willing, hold yours when this matter is resolved, one way or another."
The boiler in the cellar gave a long, shuddering sigh. Rosalind heard it in her teeth.
"And if I refuse to sell?" she asked.
He smiled, thinly. "Then we shall have to discuss the other options. They are, I fear, less agreeable."
He began to gather the ledgers, then paused, his thin fingers resting on the corner of the second book. "There is, I should mention, a further complication. A gentleman arrived in the village three days ago, inquiring about the wreck of the Mary Deare. He presented himself at my offices yesterday with a letter from a London underwriter. He believes your father insured the cargo of that vessel, and he believes there is salvage to be recovered from her hold."
"Who is he?"
"A Mr. Wilder Hayes. He owns a small salvage vessel out of Shelburne. He is, by his own account, a former officer of the Royal Navy, discharged under some irregularity he declined to name. He is not, in short, a man of the first respectability. He is, however, a man of the first persistence." Mr. Penniman straightened his cuffs. "He wishes to make you an offer, Miss Fairfax. I have not yet heard the terms, but I suspect they will involve the ledgers you see before you, in one fashion or another."
The kettle began to whistle, a thin bright sound that filled the kitchen. Rosalind did not move to lift it from the hob. The steam curled upward and vanished into the dark rafters, and the sound went on and on, as if the small metal thing had found, at last, something worth saying.
The kettle's whistle climbed higher, a bright insistent needle stitching through the dark of the kitchen, and Rosalind crossed the slate flags and lifted it from the hob. The handle was too hot; she felt the brass bite into her palm even through the folded cloth. Steam scalded her wrist. She poured the water into the brown teapot without looking at it, set the kettle down on its iron stand, and stood quite still for a moment, watching the steam curl upward from the pot's spout and disperse against the soot-blackened beams.
Mr. Penniman had taken his leave some ten minutes before. She had heard his hat brim catch on the doorframe as he bowed out, and the particular way the front stairs complained under a careful man's measured tread. Now the house had settled back into its quieter breathing, the kind of quiet that was not empty but listening, the timbers of Fairfield remembering themselves into old shapes. Rain had started again against the west windows, a fine persistent hiss that sounded, if one stood very near the glass, almost like the sea.
She had not made the tea. She would not make it. The leaves in the pot would steep into something bitter, and bitter tea was the sort of small defeat a woman in her position could not afford.
Rosalind took the pad and pencil from the shelf beside the kitchen door, where she had left them that morning, and went upstairs.
The guest rooms lay along the upper corridor of the east wing, four of them in a row, each behind a door whose paint had gone to the color of old bone. She had not opened all of them in some months. There had been no guests since the summer the Coltons came, and before that, only the occasional travelling clergyman or the surveyor from Halifax who had measured the roof and written a letter Rosalind had not answered. She had kept the doors shut not from grief, exactly, but from the particular inertia of a household with too few hands. A closed door was a question she did not have to answer. An open one was a survey.
She opened the first.
It smelled of cedar and dust and the faintly sweet rot of old window curtains gone soft at the hems. The bed was stripped to the ticking. A pair of candle sconces shaped like dolphin heads hung on either side of the empty mantel, and the gilt had worn off their flippers, leaving the metal bare and almost pink. Rosalind wrote, on the pad: Dolphin sconces, east room, gilding failed. Needs polish or removal. She paused, considered, added: Sell?
The word looked wrong on the page, too mercantile, too much like a verdict. She crossed it out with a single hard stroke of the pencil and moved on.
The second room had been her mother's sewing room in the last years, before she had stopped sewing altogether. Rosalind remembered the floor scattered with pale green clippings and the particular rhythm of her mother's breath, slow and concentrated, the needle going in and out of the linen with the regularity of a tide. The room held none of that now. The chair by the window stood empty. The workbasket was gone. Only a single steel thimble had rolled beneath the fender and lay there still, tarnished almost to black, like a seed that had been waiting through a long winter for someone to come and pick it up.
She wrote: Steel thimble, mother's. Keep.
The third room was the largest of the four, the one her parents had kept for any family of consequence who might come to stay. The air in it was colder than the others. Rosalind could feel it against her face when she stepped over the threshold, a draft sliding in from somewhere behind the wainscot. She crossed to the bureau and ran her hand along its surface, feeling for the grit that would tell her the wood was drying out. There was none. She was about to move on when she noticed, on the right-hand corner, a small glass bottle with a dauber stopper, half hidden behind a porcelain tray.
Her mother's perfume.
The glass was cut into shallow flutes, and through them the liquid still showed a faint amber, the color of weak tea or of the last light of an October afternoon. Ros had not known the name of it when she was small. She had only known it as the smell that lived in her mother's hair when she bent over the bed to kiss her goodnight, a smell of something both foreign and entirely hers, warm and faintly resinous, with a green undertone that Rosalind had only ever found again in the wild rosehips that grew along the upper pasture fence.
She lifted the bottle. It was heavier than she had expected. She did not unstopper it. She set it down again, carefully, in the center of the bureau, and stood for a moment with her hand still near it, as if the glass were a sleeping thing she did not wish to wake.
Her mother had worn this scent the summer Rosalind was seven, the summer the Mary Deare came in. She had worn it at the dinner the night before the wreck, when Captain Hamm had stood in the front hall with his boots still muddy from the lane and complimented the stew. She had worn it, Ros thought, on the morning she had not come down to breakfast, when her father had stood at the foot of the stairs and listened to the silence above him as if the silence were a kind of weather he could read.
Rosalind wrote, on the pad: Perfume, mother's, master suite bureau. Keep.
She underlined the word twice.
The windowsill was next. The casement had swollen in its frame, the latch failing to catch properly, and a thin line of rain had been working its way in along the joint. Rosalind crouched to look at it and saw, caught in the small drift of dead moths and dust that gathered in the corner where the sill met the wall, a single pearl earring.
It lay there like a dropped tooth. The pearl itself was small, no larger than a sweet pea, and the gold wire that held it was bent slightly inward, as if it had been tugged rather than simply fallen. Rosalind did not touch it at once. She studied it, the way she had been taught to study things washed up on the shore, with patience, with attention, with the willingness to wait for the object to tell her what it was.
She picked it up at last. The gold was warm from the sun that had lain along the sill sometime that morning, before the weather closed in again, and the pearl was smooth and faintly cool against her fingertip. She turned it over. There was no mate. The wire was whole. The pearl, when she brought it close, showed the faintest blush of pink at its heart, the way the inside of a shell showed pink.
She remembered, then, that her mother had owned a pair.
It was not a thing she had thought of in years. There had been so many things to think of, and the pearls had not been among them. They had been small, ordinary pearls, not the great pendants of story, and they had belonged to her mother before her marriage, brought back from somewhere, Rosalind had been told, by a great-uncle who had been a long-voyage man. She had been told also that her mother had loved them best of all her jewelry, because they had been given to her when she was still only herself, before she had become anyone else's.
Rosalind held the earring in her closed fist and felt the small cool weight of it against her palm. She stood very still. The rain hissed against the window. The house breathed around her.
She opened her hand. She looked at the pearl.
She wrote: Pearl earring, single, sill of master suite east window. Wire bent. Keep. She paused, and added, in smaller letters, almost as an afterthought: Find mate, if exists.
She had not been sure, until she wrote it, that she meant to keep it. She had thought, for a moment, that she would put it back on the sill, where it had lain undisturbed for however long it had lain there, and leave it to the quiet work of the seasons. But the pearl had been waiting for her to come and find it. Rosalind had been raised to believe that such things were not coincidences, only patterns too large for the eye to take in.
She set the earring in the pocket of her apron, where it lay against her thigh with the gentle, insistent weight of a small truth.
The fourth room was at the end of the corridor. It had been her mother's room, in the years when she had slept alone, and then, toward the end, when she had not slept at all but had lain in the four-poster with the curtains drawn and a cup of something tepid on the bedside table that no one had ever remembered to take away. Rosalind had not been inside it since the morning after.
She opened the door.
The bed was still made, the coverlet drawn up to the pillow in the careful way her mother had taught the maids, with no wrinkles and no tucks. The curtains were drawn, though the light that came through them was the dull grey of a November afternoon. The room smelled of lavender and of something else, something Rosalind could not name, something that might have been only the smell of a room long closed.
On the bed, propped against the pillow as if it had been set there in expectation of an arrival, was a small square pillow, hand-embroidered, the linen gone the colour of cream that has stood too long. The stitches were her mother's, Rosalind recognized them at once, the small even cross-stitch that her mother had learned from her own mother, the way stitches are passed down, like names, like the habit of grief.
The pillow read, in letters of faded blue thread: Welcome, Wanderer.
Rosalind stood in the doorway and looked at it. The rain had stopped, or seemed to have. There was a stillness in the room that was different from the stillness of the other rooms, a stillness that felt deliberate, as if her mother had arranged it and then stepped out for a moment and would be back at any time.
Rosalind did not step inside.
She wrote, on the pad, in letters that did not waver: Pillow, mother's embroidery, "Welcome, Wanderer." Keep. She pressed the pencil so hard into the paper that the point broke, and she had to stop and sharpen it against the wall, a small violence that left a grey smudge on the pale plaster.
She closed the door. She stood for a moment with her hand on the knob. Then she turned and went back down the corridor, past the rooms she had already done, past the door of her own room, past the little linen closet where the moths lived, down the stairs that complained under her weight as they had complained under Mr. Penniman's.
In the kitchen, the tea in the pot had gone cold. Rosalind poured it out into the sink, watching the brown stream run down the white enamel and vanish. She set the pot on the side. She smoothed the pad flat on the table and looked at what she had written.
The perfume. The pearl. The pillow. The thimble.
She crossed out the line about the dolphin sconces, and wrote it again, more carefully, beneath: Keep, for now.
She folded the pad closed and set the pencil across it, and stood for a long time in the kitchen, with one hand in the pocket of her apron, feeling the pearl there against her thigh, small and cool and patient, waiting for whatever was to come.
The door of Pettibone's General Store stuck, as it had stuck since Rosalind was a girl. She put her shoulder into it, and the bell above the frame gave its one small, good-morning peal, and the smell of the shop came out to meet her: kerosene and paraffin, peppermint and sawdust, the particular dusty sweetness of things kept too long on their shelves.
She liked this place. She had always liked this place. Mr. Pettibone was long dead, and his daughter ran it now, and after her, no one knew, but the shop still carried the inventory of forty years, and you could still find, on the third shelf from the top, against the back wall, beside the tins of anchovies and the boxes of rusk, the jars of beach plum jam that old Mr. Pettibone had put up himself in the autumn of 1923 and had been selling, one by one, ever since.
Rosalind had been buying that jam since she was nine years old. Her father had liked it on his toast on Sunday mornings. After he died, she had kept buying it, and eating it herself on the days she felt she could, and putting it by, unopened, on the days she could not.
She walked down the second aisle, between the sacks of flour and the folded bolts of gingham, and she did not look at the brass register, because Mrs. Pettibone was at it, and Mrs. Pettibone, though a kind woman, had the unfortunate habit of asking after one's health in a way that required one to say something true, and Rosalind did not, this morning, have anything true to say that she was willing to put into words.
She reached for the jar.
The glass was cool against her palm. She knew, without looking at the label, that this was the right one. She could feel the particular weight of it, the way the jam inside shifted when she tilted the jar a fraction, the faint tackiness of the old adhesive on the lid. She had held this jar, or one exactly like it, perhaps a hundred times in her life.
Behind her, a voice said, low and unhurried, "Hello, Ros."
She did not turn around.
Her hand remained on the jar. Her fingers did not tighten. They did not loosen. They simply stayed where they were, and the rest of her stayed where it was, and for a long moment the only moving thing in the shop was the dust turning in a slat of sun from the front window, and the slow blink of the striped awning sign outside, and the breath she was not quite letting out of her chest.
The voice had struck her strangely. She had felt it arrive before the word Ros had finished sounding in the air. Not wrong in pitch. Not wrong in timbre. Out of place, the way a hand is out of place on a door that has been painted shut, the way a key is out of place in a lock it has not turned in years.
She knew whose voice it was. She had not heard it in seven years, and she had not expected to hear it again in this village, and she had certainly not expected to hear it in Pettibone's, on a Tuesday morning, with her hand on a jar of beach plum jam.
She set the jar back on the shelf. She did it slowly. She did it with the same care she had used to pick it up, as if the jar were a thing that had asked something of her and she was answering it honestly. She aligned it with the others. She let her fingers leave the glass one at a time.
Then she turned, but only far enough to see, in the corner of her eye, the shape of him at the end of the aisle. Tall. A cap in his hand. The collar of a coat that had seen salt. She did not look at his face. She had not yet decided whether she was going to look at his face.
She walked to the front of the shop. Her shoes on the wooden floor made no sound at all, because the floor was old and the boards had cupped themselves into shallow cradles, and her steps were light, and her hands were at her sides, and the pearl in her pocket shifted against her thigh with each step as if it were keeping time.
She passed the penny-candy counter.
The glass jars were lined up there as they had always been, in their alphabetical order, which was also their chromatic order, because Mr. Pettibone had believed, with the gentle obstinacy of a man who had been running the same shop for forty years, that things ought to be arranged according to some principle, and he had chosen colour. The lemon drops gave way to the green apple, the green apple to the cinnamon, the cinnamon to the clove, the clove to the licorice. At the end, a single jar of something dark and unfamiliar that no one had ever bought, with a label in Mr. Pettibone's own hand that read, simply, Sea.
She did not stop. She did not look at the counter long enough to see what was inside it. She had been seven years old the last time she had stood at that counter with a penny in her hand, and she had been eight, and nine, and ten, and eleven, and twelve, and she had made her choices then with great seriousness, and she was not going to stand here now and make any choice at all.
She pushed the door open. The bell rang its second small peal, more tentative this time, as if it were not sure she ought to be leaving. The morning air came in off the harbor, cool and a little briny, and it struck her face and her wrists and the exposed skin at the back of her neck, and she stood for a moment on the step, blinking, before she set her foot on the boardwalk.
Behind her, she heard the door open again. She did not turn. She knew, by the weight of the footfall on the boards, that it was him. She knew it the way she knew the weight of the jam jar in her hand, by a sense that lived deeper than sight.
"Ros," he said, from a little closer now.
She kept walking. She did not run. She would not run. She had decided, on the long walk from the house to the village, that she was not going to run from anything today. She had decided this before she had known there would be anything to run from, and she was going to keep her decision.
She walked past the riggers' loft. She walked past the chandler's shop with its smell of tallow. She walked past the slip where her father's old boat had once been moored, and which was now occupied by a stranger's vessel, a small black-hulled thing with a salt-bleached deck and a name she could not, from this angle, read.
She slowed, without meaning to, when she came level with the slip. The vessel was low in the water. There was a coil of new rope on the cleat, and a pair of sea boots drying in the breeze, and a canvas tarp folded over something on the foredeck. There was, on the wheelhouse, in letters that had been repainted at some point in the last year, and repainted carefully, the word RESOLVE.
She stood, with her hand on a piling, and looked at the boat.
She had not yet looked at him. She was aware, without turning, that he had stopped walking when she had stopped walking, and that he was now standing some paces behind her, also looking, she supposed,
also looking at the boat, or perhaps at her.
The breeze came off the harbor, and it carried brine, and tar, and a faint sweetness from the kelp beds to the east. She breathed it in. She had grown up breathing air like this. It had been in her lungs when she was three years old and her father had carried her on his shoulders down to the water to see the ships. It had been in her lungs when she was twelve and had learned, from the old sailor who lived at the cove, how to read the color of the water for the weather. She knew this air the way she knew her own name. And yet, today, with this man standing behind her, the air felt different. It tasted of something she had no word for. It tasted of the question she had not yet asked him, and of the question she suspected he was waiting, with West Country patience, for her to ask.
She heard him shift his weight. A boot scuffed against the dock. A gull cried overhead, high and reedy, the way gulls cried when there was wind coming.
"You've been walking past this slip every morning for two weeks," he said. His voice was low, and it carried the slight rasp that came from too much salt air and too little sleep. "I was beginning to think you didn't see it."
"I see it," she said. She did not turn around. "I see it very well."
"Then you see I've painted the name back."
"Yes."
"It was scraped off when I bought her. I had it put back."
She did know that. She had known it before he had told her. She had watched, from a careful distance, when the painter had climbed up on the wheelhouse with his pot of black and his careful brush, and she had known, in some part of herself, that he was doing it for her. Not for her, perhaps. Not for any reason she could name. But for the story she had told him, that long-ago afternoon when he had come to the house with his questions about her father's wreck, and she had told him about the Resolve that had gone down in the gale of '09 with all hands, and had watched something move behind his eyes, a recognition, as if he had heard the name before.
"Your boat has a name that means something to me," she said. "I should think you knew that when you had it painted."
"I knew it might."
"You knew."
"I suspected."
She let out a breath. It came out more shakily than she had meant it to. She straightened her shoulders. She put her hand flat against the piling, and felt the rough, salt-encrusted wood under her palm, and the slow pulse of the water below.
"Why did you come here, Mr. Hayes?"
She heard him move a half step closer. She did not turn. She could smell, now, the wool of his coat, and the faint kerosene that always clung to him, and underneath it, something clean, like soap and cold water, the smell of a man who kept himself scrubbed whether or not there was anyone to see him.
"You know why I came here," he said.
"I know why you said you came here."
"And what is the difference?"
She turned, then. She turned, because she could not bear any longer not to look at him, and because she had decided, on the long walk from the house, that she was not going to run from anything today, and because his voice, low and steady as it was, had a small tremor in it that she had not heard before, and she needed to see his face when he spoke.
He was standing four paces away, in his gray wool coat, with his cap in his hand. His hair was dark, and it had been cut recently, and there was a small scar at his temple that she had never noticed, or that was new, she could not tell. His eyes were the color of the harbor in winter, and they were looking at her with an expression she could not read, or could read only too well.
"The difference," she said, and her voice came out lower than she had meant it, and steadier than she had expected, "is that you said you came to look into the wreck of the Margaret Catherine. And I am asking why you really came."
He was quiet for a moment. The gull cried again. A halyard tapped against a mast somewhere on the next boat over, a hollow, rhythmic sound, like a slow heartbeat.
"I came because a man in Bristol told me the Fairfax family had papers I needed," he said. "Insurance papers. The wreck was insured. He said the executor would have them."
"And Mr. Penniman does."
"And Mr. Penniman does."
"But you didn't need to come all the way up here to get them. A solicitor could have copied them and posted them."
"Yes."
"So why did you come?"
He put his cap back on. He did it slowly, with both hands, the way a man did when he was buying himself a moment. When his hands came down, he said, "Because I wanted to see the place where the Resolve had gone down. Because there are some things a man needs to stand on the shore of before he can let them go."
She felt the words move through her, the way a wave moves through a boat, a deep, slow lift. She did not know what to say. She had not, in her life, been a woman who did not know what to say. She had managed her father's affairs. She had managed the estate. She had managed Mr. Penniman's small, punctilious cruelties. She had managed her sister, and her grief, and her secret hours with her books and her specimens. She had always known what to say. And now she did not.
"You didn't have to come back," she said, at last. "After that first visit. You could have taken the copies and gone."
"I could have."
"Why didn't you?"
He looked at her then, fully, with the cap shadowing his brow, and the harbor wind moving a lock of his hair against his temple, and his mouth set in the line she had come to know, the line that meant he was going to say something true and was bracing himself against the saying of it.
"Because," he said, "the woman who gave me tea in that cold parlor asked me what I was looking for. And I told her the truth, which was that I was looking for the wreck of a boat my father had been on when he died. And she said, 'Then sit down, and have another biscuit, and tell me about it.' And no one, Miss Fairfax, in the whole of my life, has ever said anything kind to me like that."
She felt her breath catch. She felt the wind on her face. She felt, somewhere behind her, the piling against her palm, and the boat against the piling, and the whole of the harbor holding them all up.
"His name was in the crew list," she said, softly. "I found it. After you'd gone. I went through the papers myself."
"I know you did."
"I didn't tell you."
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"Because Penniman told me. Yesterday. He said you'd been through the office. He said you'd been crying."
She felt the blood rise to her face. She felt her jaw set against it.
"I was not crying," she said. "I had the dust of the archive in my eyes."
"Yes," he said, and there was, in the word, the smallest warmth, like a coal uncovered in ash. "That's what I told him."
She looked at him. He looked at her. The breeze blew between them, and the gull cried, and somewhere in the village a bell began to ring, low and steady, for the noon hour.
"Mr. Hayes," she said.
"Miss Fairfax," he said.
"I am going to walk on now," she said. "I have an appointment. With Mr. Penniman."
"I know."
"And I am not going to invite you."
"I know that too."
"But," she said, and she heard, to her own surprise, the steel in it, the thing she had not known she had until this moment, "I would like to. I would very much like to. And I think you know that."
He did not move. He stood, with his cap on, and his hands in his pockets, and he let her say it.
"Good day, Mr. Hayes," she said.
"Good day, Miss Fairfax," he said.
She turned. She walked on, toward the village, toward the narrow door of Mr. Penniman's office, toward the thing she had come to do. She did not look back. She did not need to look back. She could feel, between her shoulder blades, the weight of his gaze, steady and patient as a tide, and she carried it with her, all the way up the cobbled street, and into the shadow of the solicitor's door.