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Lark walked behind him and they slipped past the screen, going down a narrow dirt path to a smaller entrance, behind the closed-up garage. Alastair took out a plain metal key and unlocked the door, standing back to let Lark be the first inside. They were in an enormous kitchen. It was cool and dark, with wayward striations of light coming in between the closed shutters.

An awkward laugh escaped her. “Is this the service entrance? Your house is like something from a book.”

Alastair scowled in the same prickly way as when Camille made fun of him. He led her through the kitchen and up a narrow flight of stairs. She looked at Alastair’s bare feet as they climbed to the upper floor. Sand dusted his heels, and a piece of seaweed was tangled around one of his ankles like a bracelet. He left gritty prints on the stairs, and grains of sand crunched under the soles of Lark’s shoes.

“I didn’t mean to tease you,” she said. “It’s beautiful in here.”

“You really think so?” Alastair glanced back over his shoulder at her. In the dim light, she couldn’t make out his expression, but he sounded sad.

Lark nodded. They came to the top of the stairs, where a long hallway was decorated with flocked wallpaper the color of seafoam. Dozens of framed artworks covered the spaces between the closed doors. Saltswan was like a locked-up jewelry box, and even though she’d been invited, Lark felt giddy with transgression at being inside. Like she had stolen a bite of dessert instead of waiting until the end of dinner.

She turned a circle, her arms outstretched toward the paintings. “It’s like an art gallery.”

Alastair huffed out a laugh. “Unfortunately, all we have are portraits of dead relatives.”

Still, Lark eyed the portraits enviously. Her family had no pictures except a few snapshots of her, Henry, and Oberon. She had never seen photographs of her mother or father. Once, when she asked why there were none, Henry told her that the night they received the black-bordered telegram announcing their parents’ death, Oberon, grief-stricken, had burned all the photographs, and even the oil portrait that had hung in the upstairs hall.

Now, as she looked at all the paintings, Lark wondered how it would feel to see countless generations of your family laid out on the walls like the endless links of a chain.

Alastair opened a door and beckoned her inside. This room wasbrighter than the rest of the house because the shutter had been drawn back from the window. The curtains were open, revealing a view of the sea below; they were so high up that everything looked impossibly small. The room itself was dormitory-neat: an iron-framed bed, a desk pushed against the wall, a shelf filled with paperback books.

“Is this your bedroom?” Lark asked, peering incredulously around the space. “But it’s so tidy.”

Alastair was searching through the bookshelves. He glanced at her, one brow raised. “Camille’s room is messy enough for both of us.”

Lark tried to picture Camille’s room. She thought it would be similar to her own, which had pictures tacked on the walls and vases of dried flowers on every surface. Alastair was still looking at her. She started to imagine him in her bedroom, amid the clothes she never managed to fold or put away, her unmade bed and her cluttered dressing table. Their eyes met, and a hot blush scored her cheeks.

Suddenly, this moment—being here, alone, in his room—felt impossibly intimate. The narrow bed with its pin-striped sheet folded over the linen comforter, the glass jar of pencils on the desk, the way the air carried the scent of old paper, like her favorite part of the village library.

Alastair was blushing, too. Swiftly, he turned back to the shelves, intently scanning the books until he found a large hardcover volume tucked behind the paperbacks. “Here,” he said, holding it out to her. “Happy birthday.”

Lark accepted the book with shaking hands. On the cover was a penciled sketch cropped from a larger work. Even before she read the title, Lark knew the artist. “These are Caedmon’s works?”

She traced her fingers over the printed lettering:The Early Sketches of Ottavio Caedmon. Her knees felt suddenly weak and she took a step backward, sinking down onto Alastair’s bed before she realized what she was doing. She fumbled, about to stand back up, but he put out a placating hand as he came to sit beside her.

“They’re mostly landscapes,” Alastair explained, “but it also has some of the sketches he used to makeThe Dusk of the Gods.”

Lark turned through the pages, touching the corners of the glossy paper like they would crumble beneath her fingertips. She couldn’t speak; all her words were lost to the wonder of this. It was as though Alastair had given her a piece of a world that had been hidden from her until now, one she had never expected to see.

When she finally looked up, Alastair was watching her with a worried frown. “Is it—do you like it?”

She started to laugh. “Alastair, Iloveit. Thank you.”

He laughed, too, a choked sound, like he had been holding his breath. As she returned to the book, he relaxed slightly beside her. Some of the images were familiar; she’d seen the finished paintings in the art magazines she borrowed from the library. But so many of them were new to her. When she reached the section containing the sketches for the chthonic mural, she let out an audible gasp.

“I’m glad you like it,” Alastair said. He reached to his desk and took one of the pencils from the jar. “Here, let me inscribe it for you, otherwise it’s not a proper gift.”

Lark handed him the book. “He was Versian, you know. His studio was in the city, but he was born here.”

Alastair wrote something on the endpaper, then closed the cover and laid the book back on her knees. He cast a wistful glance toward the open window. “Sometimes I think I will always be in Verse, no matter where I am. I feel like the sea is in my blood; when I was away I couldn’t breathe properly until I came back and stood by the water.”

Lark smiled softly to herself, thinking of Alastair when she first sighted him on the shore, all windswept with the waves at his feet. She turned the pages of her book to find the sketches forThe Dusk of the Gods, the famous mural she hadn’t been able to see in the city gallery. It wasn’t until she had finished looking at them that she realizedAlastair spoke only of the ocean, and not Saltswan, when he talked about coming home.

“I missed you,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

Silence spiraled out between them. She closed the book and hugged it to her chest, staring down at her lap. The sun had almost set, now, and the dove-gray light that spilled into the room made everything feel softened, blurred. Like they were in a shared dream.

Alastair laid his hand in the space between them. “Lacrimosa… even though I’m not coming back to school, it doesn’t mean we have to stop being friends.”