WE WALK TO the shore for the last time. There’s a fast, fresh wind off the sea, and the water far out is a flat, bright sheet of silver.
“Sylvie—look—we could go to Barry’s, get you that ice cream I promised you.”
But to my surprise she shakes her head.
“I want a boat trip, Grace,” she tells me.
“A boat trip? Sweetheart, are you sure?”
She nods.
I can’t believe this.
She grabs my hand. “I really want to,” she says.
I glance at Adam. He gives me a knowing smile, as though he’s pleased with himself. In fact, he’s looked rather pleased all day, like a man who’s discovered something. Not an answer or anything certain, but perhaps a thread of comfort or a bit more hope than he had.
“Is there time?” I ask him.
“Absolutely,” he tells me. “We’re all packed up and everything.” Sylvie leads us along the jetty, through the smells of salt and fish, past the boats called Ave Maria and Endurance, and the lobster pots and the nylon nets and the coils of sodden green rope. By the sign that says CURRAN CRUISES there’s a small blue dinghy, the Venturer, tied up. It has an engine at the stern, and room for perhaps twelve people.
The skipper has a face as wrinkled and brown as a walnut, and his eyes are acute as a bird’s. Yes, he can take us around the bay. He will do it just for the three of us, and we can leave now if we want. The trip will take us half an hour.
Adam pays. The dinghy tips as I step in; my heels, as usual, are far too high. The skipper helps me to a seat. Sylvie climbs down deftly and goes to sit in the prow. Adam sits beside me.
The skipper starts the engine, and the boat moves gently forward, breaking up the water into scattered fragments of light. As we edge out beyond the shelter of the jetty, the wind slams into our faces.
I look briefly behind us. Coldharbour is receding from us, so tiny already it looks like something remembered or imagined. I can see the whiteness of the beach and the shops along the seafront and the soft spring apricots and purples of all the budding trees. The burned upper floors of Kinvara House are stark against the blurry pastels, the black roof rafters sticking up like bones.
Sylvie is leaning forward at the prow of the Venturer. She holds her hand over the side, so the white spray dampens her skin. The wind blows color into her face and pushes her hair straight back. She’s laughing.
“Look,” I say to Adam.
What if we just don’t get it? What if our dying isn’t at all as we’ve always believed it to be?
Adam smiles.
“How did this happen?” I say.
“Maybe she can let go of it now,” he tells me. “She made a choice back there. The only one she could make, but perhaps it still had to be made.”
“I’m so grateful,” I tell him.
He gives a slight self-deprecating shrug.
“It may not be easy,” he tells me. “When you’re home again. It may not be over yet, with Sylvie. It may not be all straightforward. But I think it will be better.”
“Yes. I know that,” I tell him.
There’s silence between us for a moment, full of the yearning cries of gulls.
“Grace.” There’s a hesitancy about him, and he isn’t looking at me. “When we get back to London, I’d like to fix—you know, a time that we could meet . . .” He looks up at me then. We’re sitting close together; I can see the bright flecks in his eyes. “I mean, if you’d like that . . .”
“For your research?” I ask him. “So you can finish your article about Sylvie?”
For a moment he doesn’t say anything.
“For that too,” he says then.
His hand is resting on the bench between us. I put my hand on his. I love it when he looks startled like that. For now this is enough, this tentative shining moment.
Then, just a few yards to the side of us, the sea takes form and leaps. A dolphin. It’s radiant, pristine, dazzling: we watch the immaculate arc of its leaping, and then again and again.
“Will you look at that?” says the skipper. He lets the engine idle. He has an expression of pride, as though the dolphin is his. “Well, looks like it’s your lucky day. She doesn’t show herself that often. And what a beauty she is.”
We wait for a while, but the dolphin has gone. But my eyes are still full of its vividness, so when I close my eyelids its dazzle is there in my mind.
“Yes,” I say. “She was beautiful.”
The skipper starts up the engine again.
We’re a long way out from the shore now. Quite suddenly the sea gets choppy; we’re moving beyond the sheltering arms of the bay. The little boat lurches alarmingly. Sylvie is leaning over the side, and I panic that she could fall in. I reach out and grab the hem of her fleece.
The skipper, so at ease on the sea, is amused by my protectiveness.
“She’ll be okay, ma’am,” he tells me. “You mustn’t worry yourself.”
Sylvie feels my tug and looks over her shoulder toward me. Her face is luminous. Then she turns to look forward again, to face the way we’re sailing, with the depth of unknowable darkness below her, and before her the blue far horizon where your mind stops, and all around, the acres of shining sea.