Chapter 12: The Wrong Ribbon

Lucan woke at dawn in the harbor office on a bare chart table with a coat over him that was not his own.

It was hers, the brown wool, left behind.

He lay and looked at the ceiling.

Her fingers had tied the knot.

He kept going back to it.

A double bowline, over and under, finished with a half hitch he had never seen anyone make but the man who taught him.

He had told himself in the dark that it was nothing.

A quay girl's habit. A sailmaker's daughter's trick.

She was a sailmaker's daughter.

The loft was her father's.

That was all it was.

He sat up and looked at his wrist.

The twine was still there, the blue gone grey with salt and age.

The knot on it was exactly the one she had made in the air with her own hand on the terrace the day of the tea.

He pressed his thumb on the knot, hard, until it hurt.

He had worn it for six years because of a night.

The cutter had gone over in the gale off the breakwater, and the black water had closed over him.

There had been nothing, no sky, no sound, no weight to his own arms.

And then a rope.

A hand on his collar, small, rough, hauling.

And a voice.

"Kick, you stupid man. Kick, damn you. Kick!"

A flat, hard, furious voice, in the roaring dark.

He had kicked.

Afterward there had been lamplight and a blanket.

A girl with white-blond hair plastered to her face had sobbed that he was safe, he was safe.

He had been so far gone he'd taken her sobbing for the rescue.

It had never occurred to him to compare the voices.

You don't, in the water.

"She was sixteen," he said aloud, to the empty office. "It was fear. It changes how a person sounds."

The lamp had burnt out.

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