ELIZABETH RETURNED TO THE HOUSE with Francine, cold without a lit fire and everywhere dark. Through the dim light she could see a letter on the dining room table, her name written on the front in a classic elegant scrawl. There was something ominous about the way it had been left there, ascetic against a vase of decaying flowers, foreshadowing the irrecoverable truths written inside.
“What’s that?” Francine asked as she closed the door behind them. The sea quieted as they stood still for a moment, then Francine’s footsteps echoed as she walked forward, picking it up. “It’s your father’s handwriting.”
Elizabeth took the envelope and slid her finger into the small opening to pull out the paper inside. The letters were elegant and calligraphic, the way her father wrote when he thought about it, when he took his time, when he wanted to create an impression. In that case, a lasting impression.
“Well?” said Francine, eager when it appeared that Elizabeth had read the letter. “What does it say?”
“Nothing,” Elizabeth said. Her voice broke, her throat sore from trying not to cry. “I’m all right now, Francine. You’d better get back. James probably needs you.”
Francine left under protest, bound by a promise to return. Elizabeth found herself hoping that she stuck to her word, because she was going to need familiar faces around her now if the contents of the letter spoke the truth. In the still house she read it again, her father’s words describing how sorry he was that he didn’t have the strength to tell her in person that he was leaving. He confessed that he had indeed taken her mother out on that boat, just as Tom’s father accounted, and just as her mother had wished in the face of her mounting confusion. Unable to accept her fate, he had at her request provided her with enough medication so that it was painless as she let herself drop half-conscious into the water somewhere between Longships and Wolf Rock. As he signed off, he apologized again for leaving Elizabeth when she still needed him, and she realized with her father’s confession that he never intended to be found.
The letter also detailed James’s knowledge of events after he had raised concerns over missing morphine. Knowing only two people had access to the opiates and that he himself hadn’t taken it, James’s suspicions were raised. When he discussed it with Elizabeth’s father, Dr. Davenport had begged for James’s compassion, and promised to make his silence as easy as possible with a swift and complete departure. On one condition. It was a condition that James was more than willing to fulfill.
* * *
For his part in it all, James really did wish that he could undo the letter he had written in Tom’s name after seeing him leave for Truro Hospital, never having expected Elizabeth’s father to have left on the same day. Guilt gripped him as he watched her read the words he himself had written, claiming as Tom that he no longer loved her, and that he would never be returning to Porthsennen, for her or their child. And James knew that he wouldn’t, not now that he had told Tom that he and Elizabeth were already married.
For two days afterward she didn’t eat or dress, and he nearly caved more than once. But on the third day, when he returned to the house, he found a different picture awaiting him. Finding her dressed in a fine skirt and blouse, something quite beautiful that clung to her hips and skipped out just below the knee, he knew something was changed. Her blouse was tight around the bust, and it stirred a sense of desire in him that he had tried to pacify for a long time. They were her mother’s clothes, he realized as she stood in the hallway to greet him. Taking his coat, she led him through to the dining room, where there was a dinner table set with two plates and two wineglasses.
“We need to talk,” she said. “My father always said that alcohol was a lubricant for the larynx.” After handing him a glass that contained a healthy measure of brandy, she picked up a second for herself. With one swift movement she drank it back, and he did the same. “I don’t suppose he meant it favorably, but seeing as he’s not here we don’t need to concern ourselves with what he might think. And besides, I don’t believe anything we have to say to each other is going to be all that easy.”
“No?”
“No. I know you know what my father did. You understand the implications of that knowledge without the need for my explanation.”
“I do.”
“The police will no doubt question his departure, but we will tell them he is traveling. I have burned the letter, and we will speak of its contents no more after this night. His actions might have been an act of mercy, but they are no less criminal for it.”
“You have my word,” James promised, and took her hand in his. “I’m so sorry for what he did.”
“It was what she wanted,” she said through gritted teeth. “If a person doesn’t want to be around anymore, there is nothing you or I can do about it, is there?”
He knew there was more than one meaning hidden within her words, and it was a struggle not to confess to everything he himself had done that had forced Tom from her life.
“I’ll be here for you,” he promised instead, hoping that was enough. “And the child.”
Her fingers stiffened in his. “How do you . . .”
“I’m a doctor, Elizabeth. It’s my job to know. But I promise that I’ll raise this child as my own if you stay with me. It’ll never want for anything, and it’ll never doubt my love.” He took the ring that had never once left his pocket since the day of their picnic and held it out for her. Tom was gone and she was having a child; what other choice did she have? This time she placed it on her finger.
* * *
They were married within the month. James wanted to order her a dress from France, and when she refused he insisted on a trip to London at the very least, but Elizabeth said she didn’t want to waste time waiting, which helped settle any lingering concerns. Mrs. Clements stitched a fine example of an elegant tea dress and underneath fashioned net curtains to give the skirt volume to cover up the burgeoning bump. Elizabeth had insisted on no invitations or reception, but word had gotten out and still a fair number of people turned up from the village. Elizabeth suspected that it had all been planned.
That night, when they found themselves alone, they retired to their separate bedrooms. But once James was asleep, Elizabeth left the house and walked to the lookout, cut down to the rocks, carrying her simple posy of white roses and cream ribbons in a tightly clenched fist. Spray brushed her face as she stood on the edge of the rock from which she had fallen only three months before, listening to the power of the sea. It had claimed her mother, in many ways her father, and now Tom. She wouldn’t let it claim her too. The posy broke apart as she tossed it into the water, sent it crashing against the rocks. It was the only way she could tell Tom, and herself, that it was done.
* * *
James knew that she had married him out of a sense of duty, to both her father and her unborn child. But he told himself he didn’t care and tried his best to maintain the visage of a contented newlywed. As for Elizabeth, she had found the juxtaposition of her feelings and her outward persona a difficult beast to tame. The idea of consummating the marriage loomed over her, because as kind and generous as James was with his patience, that, just like her time with Tom, would eventually expire. And so, one night in the second month of marriage, she ventured to his room and slipped under the sheets. He started to speak, but she placed a cold finger against his lips, followed by a kiss. She knew roughly what to expect, and James was a gentleman, but that was also half the problem. Making love to Tom had felt natural, with no hesitations or shaky, diffident touches. He hadn’t questioned himself or what Elizabeth had wanted. Poor James knew her mind was elsewhere, and he spent most of the time trying not to make the experience any more unpleasant than he felt it must have been for her, especially what with her growing bump. Afterward they slept beside each other, but that was the extent of their connection, tangled roots but still not part of the same tree.
Things would have perhaps remained that way if she hadn’t found him alone one night, crying in her father’s study. Surprised he didn’t try to conceal his tears, she took a seat on the desk alongside him. It was an unexpected comfort to witness his unabashed emotion, because it meant he was nothing like her father, whom since the day he’d left she never allowed to enter her thoughts.
“What’s the matter?” she asked as she handed James a handkerchief. He blew his nose then wiped his eyes, reddened from tears and dark with grief.
“I am wondering if it’s going to be like this forever,” James asked. Nervous fingers busied at a pot of pens. “If this is all we will ever have, or if you will ever find it in your heart to give me a chance to be your husband.”
His efforts had been admirable: always a kind word; a gentle touch; home on time, and often with gifts. She spurned them at first, didn’t want to betray Tom, crediting James with little to offer other than materialistic tokens. Paints, brushes, baby clothes from trips to Truro. But in that dark office, which smelled faintly of cigars she didn’t know he smoked, she realized that she had given him little chance to offer her anything else. At least he was trying. Was she?
“It hasn’t been easy, has it?” she said.
His tears had pooled in the fine lines around his eyes, which she had never noticed before. Their union had aged him, made both of them tired. “You could say that.”
“I haven’t been fair,” she said. “You deserve a lot better than this.”
Tears struck the desk as he closed his eyes. “I’m not sure I do.”
Turning his head with the flat of her hand, she pressed gently against the side of his face. Did she make him feel as Tom made her feel? Doubtful, she thought, but perhaps she could try. Would that be so bad, to give him a taste of what she had felt, once? After all, he was her husband, and he had promised to raise her baby as his own. Perhaps she would find something for herself too, a form of companionship and unity in their secrecy, or if she was lucky, some form of love. But if she never tried, she would surely never know.
“You have stood by me as you said you would. You are the only person left who cares.” A deep breath shook her insides, hot as acid as she reneged on a promise they had made together. “And you’ve kept the worst secret I have ever known, that my father helped my mother die. I know we said that we would never talk of it again, but I think perhaps we must, if we are to stand a chance of making this work.”
“I did it for you, Elizabeth. For us, and this little one,” he said, his hand warm against her stomach. “Sometimes people do terrible things for the person they love. Things of which they are not proud, that cause them great pain about who they are as a person.”
It was a confession of sorts, but she would never have known it. She kissed him then, and for the first time in the months since Tom and her father left, she had wanted to. She didn’t want to live in a time that no longer existed, sucked into a vortex underneath the waves. If she stayed there for too long, she too would drown.
Kate arrived six months later, a beautiful, perfect little baby. Nobody knew the secret of her parentage at first, but when Kate’s dark hair and pale skin began to mark her apart from her parents, the likeness to Tom became hard to ignore. He hadn’t been gone long enough to be forgotten. Nobody ever said anything, of course, not wishing to rake over old ground digging for secrets. But all Porthsennen knew the lie, nobody more so than Elizabeth as she watched her beautiful daughter grow throughout the years, into the ghost of a man whom she had never been able to forget.
* * *
Elizabeth never stopped painting during the earliest years of their marriage, but it wasn’t until the seventh year came that she felt ready to exhibit her work.
“What do you think of the space?” James asked as they stood in the middle of the room, the ceilings high and walls wide and white. It was overwhelming, the whole experience of being in London and finally having her own exhibition, which would open that same evening.
The exhibition was possible only because of James—aged since the day they married, flecks of white peppering his temples, his trousers growing ever tighter. She could still see that handsome chap that she had once agreed to marry, but the years of marriage and parenthood had worn harder on him than on Elizabeth.
“I think it’s wonderful,” she said, taking his hand. “Thank you. The whole day has been wonderful.”
Lunch had taken place in Sloane Square, consisting of the sweetest cupcakes, tea from bone china cups. They had walked hand in hand by the river, and she found joy in noticing how he watched her, glancing every few steps. Their love had grown, had been nurtured by the shared responsibility of parenthood, and through watching him raise Kate as his own.
“What are you looking at?” she had asked him that afternoon as they walked past Buckingham Palace.
“Just you,” he had said, causing her to blush. “Sometimes I still can’t believe you’re mine.”
“Well, I am,” she had said, yet just as always, a little thought came to her, like a single candle flame in an empty church. Part of her wasn’t his. When she watched Kate see through a difficult task, she always thought of Tom. He came to mind when she observed the dwindling number of fishermen, and when Kate marveled at the stars. He was there in everything they did, never more so than on the anniversary of their love, when the little flowers and wishes started to arrive.
The first year had taken her by surprise. Kate, only two months old, had been crying at the time, Elizabeth walking circles around the living room before first light, trying to bounce her to comfort. Through the window she saw the flash of a coat, the profile of his face unmistakable. Pausing to find a blanket, wrapping it around Kate as she ran, she rushed outside, calling his name.
“Tom, wait,” she shouted, searching left and right. “Tom, I know you’re there.” Yet he didn’t show himself. And it was only as she returned home, defeated, that she found the little flower pot and the attached wish on the step. Scooping it up, she hurried inside, settled Kate to sleep, and then sat with the flower, reading the wish over and over. Why would he come and not say anything, creeping around in the dark? Angered, she threw both away, but before the rubbish was collected a few days later she retrieved that slip of paper, beginning a collection that would take another forty-nine years to complete.
For several years she tried to forget, but on the same day each year those gifts would always arrive, dragging her back to their life unlived. Try as she might, she couldn’t erase him, imprinted as he was on her past and herself. Every year she thought about waking early, opening the door to ask why he hadn’t stayed, why he kept coming back. Yet she never found the courage to open the door again, unable to face the possibility that perhaps, deep down, she and Kate simply hadn’t been enough to make him stay.
* * *
After getting ready at the hotel, James and Elizabeth stepped into the gallery a little after seven. The room was filled with people she didn’t know, in clothes she had often dreamed of owning. Her black knee-length dress felt frumpy in comparison to the full skirts and neat jackets worn by the other women, sunglasses covering their eyes, even though it was the evening and they were inside. Frank, James’s friend and host of the exhibition, rushed toward her as she entered, taking her by the arm.
“I’m going to have to steal your lovely lady wife for a while. So many people are just dying to meet her. The artist,” he said, waving one hand like a rainbow through the air. His mannerisms and affected voice would have been so out of place in Porthsennen, and she had never met anybody like him before. Outside, the light was fading, the ground wet from a late-afternoon shower, but Frank assured her that it suited the mood of her collection, entitled Enough for a Lifetime.
“Feel free,” James said, nudging her on the chin with his fingers. “Go meet your public.”
She kissed him on the cheek and waved as Frank whisked her away.
“I have to tell you that people have responded most exceptionally,” Frank began as they headed toward the crowd. “I have sold five of the ten pieces already, and there has been an inquiry regarding a future commission.” Stunned, she said nothing. “When you work for a buyer, to their brief,” he continued, as if she hadn’t understood. To comprehend such an idea, that somebody wanted to pay her for a piece she hadn’t yet painted, was a dream come true; where some failed unexpectedly, others flourished with unparalleled surprise. “The interested party is a young socialite who has broken her daddy’s heart by falling in love with an unsuitable young cad, and made my night by falling in love with your work in the same irrecoverable way.” The glint in his eye and devil’s smirk on his lips unnerved her a little. “She’s quite dreadful, if the truth be known, but she’ll pay handsomely. Come and meet her, and at least try to appear as if you like her. She’s a sensitive little thing, prone to spontaneous bouts of what some might call self-doubt, and what other, crueler types might label as outright madness.”
Shelby Summerton, the daughter of a property developer in the business of building flats in the East End, was more extravagant than anything Elizabeth had ever seen before. Her wide-leg trousers were so baggy that Elizabeth had at first taken them for a skirt, and her blue satin blouse was cut so low you could see a tiny promise of what was beneath. Her hair was long and inexplicably voluminous at the crown, with half of it swept back away from her face.
“You see, it’s about community living,” Shelby was telling Elizabeth regarding the flats her father was building, her cigarette wafting back and forth, creating little trails of smoke. The patterns reminded her of the Milky Way. “Not a community like this village you have painted here, but one that makes a splendid profit.” The snort rose from her gut as she laughed at what Elizabeth hadn’t taken for a joke. “I will be buying this one,” she said, pointing to the painting of the Porthsennen harbor, the boats with nets draped over the side. In the center of the composition stood a sole figure of a man on the end of the breakwater, staring out to sea. “And this one. It’s my favorite.”
Shelby’s favorite was of Wolf Rock itself. It was painted in a storm, the waves crashing against the sides, swallowing the structure into the tempestuous mass. Although it was almost undetectable when you viewed the work from a distance, if you got up close your eye was unquestionably drawn to a small yellow brushstroke depicting a flashlight at an open front door. If you looked harder still you could just see a man, supine and injured on the surface of the rocks below. Elizabeth’s collection told a story she kept close to her heart, one she had told not a soul about but that was, if you looked hard enough, there for all to see.
“And about the commission?” probed Frank.
Shelby threw her cigarette to the floor, stamped it out with a platformed heel. “You worry too much, Frankie, and work as if you need the money. Don’t be so crass.” She looked to Elizabeth, winked. “We have all the time in the world for the details, don’t we . . .” She paused. “What’s your name?”
“Elizabeth Warbeck.” It didn’t matter how many times she said it. Even seven years after her marriage it still sounded wrong.
* * *
“So, tonight was a success,” James said as he met her at the door. Most people had left by then, just a few lingering in a corner talking with Frank.
Elizabeth gazed about the room, noticing the little tickets tucked alongside each painting. “It was. I sold everything.”
“That’s great.” He nudged at the rubbish on the floor with the toe of his shoe. “What did that awful woman want?”
“To pay me an equally awful sum of money to produce a painting of Porthsennen so that she might have it printed and hung in her father’s apartment blocks.” He nodded approvingly. “I will be paid for each print. And there will be one in each flat. All two hundred and fifty-six of them.”
“A fine and charming lady,” James joked.
“I’m sorry if you were bored,” she said. “You seemed it at one point.”
He shook his head, reached in his pocket for his cigarettes. Cravings for the habit he’d picked up during his tour in Malaya had returned not long after their wedding, and he hadn’t been able to shake it since. “I wasn’t bored. I was proud of you.” He looked down to the floor. “Very proud of you, in fact.”
“Shall we go back to the hotel? Maybe have a drink in the bar, make the most of a night away from being parents?”
Any other time he would have taken her up on the idea. He loved her as much as he loved Kate, which was to say without limits. But after seeing her paintings all there together, proof of her thought processes for the last seven years, he had realized that she wasn’t really his, never had been, in fact. In some way he had achieved what he wanted; she did love him, he knew that. But she didn’t love him in the right way. The lies inside him had swollen, were taking over like cancer. They required excision if he was to survive, find himself again.
“I’m afraid we can’t do that, Elizabeth.”
“Why not?”
Her heart quickened as he took a step forward toward the closest paintings. He stopped at the first, the old Mayon Lookout, Porthsennen just a dot in the background.
“I used to follow you sometimes when you were younger, did you know that?” She shook her head. “I suspected as much. It amused me a great deal to be there without your knowledge, watching where you went. Remember, I was fresh back from this god-awful city and I thought a lot of myself back then. I felt quite untouchable because you were my fiancée. Quite entitled.
“Then one day I saw you leaving the old Mayon Lookout with Tom. I couldn’t bring myself to follow you after that. I figured whatever it was that you had with him was a childish fancy. I doubted anything serious could occur to stand in my way. You see, when I first met you, you made me feel a thousand feet tall. I realize now it was this bloody city you were taken in by”— he raised his arms to the city of London—“but at the time I thought you were enamored by me.” He lit another cigarette, the first already finished. “These last two days you’ve had the same foolish look in your eye as you did back then.”
“What does all that matter now? We’ve been married for seven years. We’ve built a life together.”
“But not a lifetime, Elizabeth. And we never can, because you still love another man.” He swept his hand through the thick air, motioning to the paintings. “I have tried to be everything you need, but I am not. Do I appear in even one of these?” He gave her a moment to answer, hopeful that she could defend herself, prove he was wrong. But her silence spoke volumes. “I thought as much, yet he appears in every one, doesn’t he? All this time we have been together, and not once did you ever stop thinking about him.”
“James . . .” she stammered, but he held up his hand, didn’t want her to finish.
“Please don’t apologize, for God’s sake. You see, it’s all my own fault.”
“No,” she protested, rushing to take his hands in hers. “It’s not your fault. Tom is the past, a memory.” It wasn’t entirely true, but it was what she wanted to believe. “I love you, James. And so does Kate.”
“And I love you both. I will always be her father, Elizabeth. Even considering what I’m about to say, nothing can change these last seven years. But you don’t love me in the way you love him. He is a shadow over everything we have done together. A curse of my own creation.” He threw his cigarette down and stamped it out. “I want to make this easier for you, Elizabeth, which is why I must tell you the truth.”
“What truth?”
“The truth about us.” It was necessary to turn away, because he couldn’t bear to see the disappointment on her face. “Also, about Tom and the letter you believe he wrote to you on the day he left.” He looked to the ceiling, and Elizabeth was sure she saw a tear streak down his cheek. “And the letter you wrote to him, telling him about Kate, that I never sent.”
* * *
Minutes became hours, hours without end spent alone in the Ritz suite that James had splashed out on in celebration of her show. Up and out by seven the next morning and hours before her train, she sipped a tasteless cup of tea in the café in Hyde Park and sat quietly by the water. Boys fished from the pavement, others dived from the high board. The sound of traffic was as inescapable as it was alien. Why was everything in this city so overwhelming? Nothing familiar, everything different from what she recognized as life, and yet everything she thought she knew was a lie. James had confessed to writing the letter she’d received on the day Tom left for Truro Hospital, and to telling Tom that he and Elizabeth were already married when they weren’t. To destroying the letters to and from the lighthouse, which was the worst thing of all, as far as she could tell, because it was the birth of his deception. Kate plagued her thoughts, all the lies she had told her, a tight painful knot in her stomach. All she wanted to do was get home, but when she went to the train station later that day, she found James on the platform waiting for her.
“I need to explain,” he said, taking her bag from her.
He looked dreadful, as if he hadn’t slept. “I think you’ve said enough, don’t you?” But the soft pink eyes that spoke of shame and guilt forced her to listen as they shared the return journey. All the while he spoke, she thought about Tom’s little wishes left on her doorstep for years, wishes she had on occasion almost discarded.
“Please let us try again,” he said as the train pulled into Penzance station. “If not for me, then for Kate.”
All along she’d thought Tom had abandoned her, yet he had no idea about the baby and had left because of James’s lies. And the previous year’s wish had been for them to raise a family together. A horrible, painful coincidence. “I think you’d better move out when we get home,” she replied. “This charade has gone on quite long enough.”
* * *
Mrs. Clements danced around the subject of James’s departure for well over a week, hoping to ascertain what had happened. Elizabeth decided the best way forward was to focus her attentions on something that she could control, so she set about painting the commissioned piece for Shelby Summerton, and was rewarded with a handsome royalty a little over two months later. The sale earned her enough capital that she could leave the family home and move into one of her own. Mr. Bolitho was reluctant at first, but she convinced him to let her buy the still vacant cottage that had once been home to Tom and his family. James helped her with the move, said it was the least he could do, and Elizabeth let him, on account that she wanted Kate to see the only parents she had ever known working things through.
But she also knew that the truth had to come out before Kate got any older. In his continuing pains to make amends, James drove her to Tremayne’s farm in the hope she might find Tom. They pulled up in a muddy patch of land, straw and rain ripe with the smell of manure. James stayed in the car, but Elizabeth rang the bell with the swell of hope tight in her chest. It was short-lived; the Hales had gone missing along with a stash of smuggled whiskey and tobacco not a month after they arrived.
“Never saw Tom in my life,” the farmer’s wife said, hoisting up a skirt unsuitable for the manual labor her hands suggested she did. “But I heard he took up a driving job in London.” Elizabeth returned to Porthsennen with the address of a forklift firm and renewed resolve that she was on the right track.
It took another year of joining loose ends before she found herself in an architect’s office, the walls covered with wood paneling, the ceiling grimy and smoke-yellow. It was almost a dead end, Tom long gone, but they gave her his home address and wished her luck. From there she rode the sweaty Tube from Richmond to Hampstead, exiting into brilliant sunshine. Although she wasn’t certain about the route, she did her best to follow the map she picked up in the train station, and eventually she found herself standing outside the house she had been told was his.
Her first thought was that it was a pretty place, flowers creeping up the front, a square patch of lawn that she could imagine Tom mowing. Life, lived. The nausea of nerves rumbled in her stomach, so she took a seat on a bench on the opposite side of the road. It was facing away from the house, overlooking the overgrown perimeter of Hampstead Heath. Just a moment, that was all she needed, to think about what it might be that she was going to say. After all, it wasn’t every day you were reunited with the only man you had ever truly loved after almost a decade of absence. Should she start with hello? An apology? A big toothy smile? No, she thought, not that one; her tea habit ensured that her teeth weren’t that white anymore, a conclusion that at least helped to narrow down the options.
Just as she was getting up, dusting off her legs, she heard a woman’s voice calling Tom’s name. And the strange thing was the familiarity it aroused, the trill of it stirring a certainty that she had heard the voice before. Gazing over her shoulder, turning just enough to see, she saw Shelby Summerton standing at the front gate. “Tom,” she said again, calling into the open front door. “My parents won’t wait forever. Please would you get a move on.”
Moments later Elizabeth watched as he emerged from the building. His clothes were smart, his hair longer than it used to be, flopping into his eyes. Different, but undoubtedly Tom. And there, cradled in his arms with all the tenderness of a new father that she recognized from James, was a small baby, perhaps no older than a few months. Unable to move, she watched as he placed the baby in the car, then slipped in himself, before driving away without even realizing that she was there.
In none of the possibilities of what would transpire had she ever considered he might have built a new life without her, yet now she understood the wish from the previous year. Perhaps he had hoped they would raise a family, but he was instead doing it with somebody else. As the sound of the engine faded, she watched the car disappear around a corner. And that was it; once again, he was gone, too late for second chances.
* * *
Not a week later, her breath tight, she pushed her way up the steps to the old Mayon Lookout, then cut back down to the rocks as dusk fell across their village. Taking a seat in the spot where she had once lain with Tom, she unfurled the quilt, the one his family had been sewing for generations. Flickering in the breeze, the delicate white trim with colorful embroidery stared back at her. Her intention had been to save it for Kate, but now there was no point. Tom could never be her father. The rock was hard under her head, the quilt warm across her body as she gazed up at the glistening edge of their galaxy. Everything had changed in that silvery stain, but to look at it now it was as if nothing had changed at all. She could have been lying there on the same night almost ten years before, when she and Tom believed they had a whole life ahead of them.
After a while she sat up and folded the quilt as neatly as she could, found a nook that she thought was protected, and poked it inside. She pulled the copy of Pride and Prejudice that Tom had given her from her bag and tucked that in too. She had to say goodbye, return Tom to her past so that she might be able to live her life without him in the future. Some secrets, she thought, were supposed to be kept. She stepped close to the edge, where she could hear the roar of the water, and gazed across the indigo sea to where three more men were working in Wolf Rock Lighthouse. The light danced rhythmically across the waves, the heartbeat of her memories. Nothing had changed, and yet everything was different. It was, just as it was before, the closest she could get to him now.