Chapter 6: The Last Ferry Leaves at Nine

I don't remember walking off the dance floor. I remember the sudden cool of the quay's edge against my ankles and the way the drum sounded, muffled and far away, as though someone had put the festival under a blanket. She had gone very quiet beside me. The man in the gray suit stood ten paces off with his hands visible, which I appreciated, and a tired, polite expression I did not.

He introduced himself as someone from the publishing house she'd left, and said it so gently that it took me a moment to understand what he was telling me. The thing she had come here to finish, the thing she'd never explained, was a manuscript. A deadline had passed. People were worried. He had followed the only lead he had, a ferry ticket, and he was sorry to interrupt such a lovely evening. He truly seemed sorry.

She didn't argue. She looked at the lanterns, then at the water, then at me, and I watched her decide something in the same slow way she'd decided things all summer. She said she would talk to him, tonight, properly, over tea, and that it wasn't an ending. She said it twice. I nodded the way you nod when your throat has stopped cooperating, and pressed the borrowed dress's loose strap back onto her shoulder, because it was something to do with my hands.

We sat on the sea wall afterward while he waited by the tea garden, giving us the courtesy of distance. She told me about the book, how it had stalled, how this town had unstuck it a page at a time, how the blue house had a desk by the window that had practically dictated chapters to her. She said I was in most of them. I said I would need to read those very carefully. She laughed, and the laugh shook a little.

Down at the end of the pier, the last ferry sounded its horn, one long note that rolled across the water and settled in my chest. Nine o'clock, as always, no matter what the town is feeling. The man in the gray suit looked at his watch, then toward us, and she stood and took my hand in front of him without any hesitation at all. She said she had an offer to make, and that I might want to sit down first. I was already sitting.

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