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The first time she saw him alone was by the sea.

Early spring, the sky gray as feathers, daylight waning slow into evening.

Alastair stood at the shoreline, his trousers rolled up, waves lapping his bare feet.

He was in profile, half-turned toward the water, and he watched the ocean with an expression that seemed almost… hungry.

The whole scene was like one of Lark’s favorite paintings, a landscape by Ottavio Caedmon, all resonant hues and textured brushstrokes. Alastair with his loosened collar and his tangled hair was a selkie kept too long ashore, cursed to languish when out of sight of the sea.

Alastair started laughing as well. “Observant as ever, I see.”

The sound of his laugh was the same as she remembered, and that encouraged her a little.

Still, Lark stood frozen in place as Alastair came toward her.

The sea was at his back. A streak of sunlight cut through the clouds, lining the edge of the water in gold.

His eyes were the same storm gray as the evening sky.

They’d never been together like this before, despite the fact their houses were close enough that Lark could see the Felimath estate from her bedroom window.

When Lark, Alastair, and his older sister, Camille, met in the village school, they became friends out of circumstance.

The class was small, so they shared a desk.

They were neighbors and it made sense that they walk home together.

Lark knew the Felimath siblings were different from her.

That they lived in a big house that had a name—Saltswan—and that their father owned all the land except for the small acreage where she and her brothers lived.

Lark was never invited to visit them at Saltswan, and she never asked them to her cottage.

But none of that really mattered when they were passing notes beneath their desk, or racing one another to the border of the Arriscane woods on the way home. They were a trio, woven together like a triplicate knot, even if their friendship existed in a small, contained space.

It wasn’t until Lark’s eleventh birthday that she realized the difference couldn’t be eclipsed by penciled notes and after-school games.

Alastair and Camille gave her a present, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a pink velvet ribbon.

Inside the parcel was a leather-bound notebook, with pages the color of milky tea.

It was gleamingly new, with a gold stamp on the back cover marking the name of the stationery company.

Lark had visited that store once, when her brothers took her into the city. It had gilded lettering on the windows and the inside was as elegant as a museum, with pens inside locked cases and notebooks lining the polished wooden shelves.

“Camille and I have one as well,” Alastair said, taking a twin notebook from his pocket to show her.

“I don’t carry mine around everywhere, though,” Camille teased. She picked up the ribbon from the parcel and started to braid it into Lark’s hair. Musingly, she went on, “Do you know your hair is the exact color of honey?”

Lark hugged the notebook to her chest. She felt a strange, bright joy, sitting between Alastair and Camille as the courtyard tree spilled dappled shadows over them. It was like the syrupy, sugar-rich taste of the strawberry cake her brothers had served at breakfast: a birthday tradition.

Impulsively, she held the book against her heart like a talisman. “We should write in them when we’re apart, and then we can swap once the pages are full.”

Alastair cast her a sidelong glance. Her stomach dipped, and she wondered if she had crossed a line.

If trying to make their friendship exist outside the school yard and their clifftop walks would somehow tarnish it, if she was asking too much.

Alastair laughed, which softened some of her worry, but he looked nervous.

“I wouldn’t know what to write,” he said, and then, a flush creeping over his cheeks, he went on hurriedly, “but I do like to draw.”

That afternoon, once they’d parted at the gate to the Arriscane woods, Lark went home and showed her brothers the gift. Oberon was quiet and solemn, and Henry turned the pages of the notebook, frowning at it, as though there were some unpleasant message invisibly written on the blank paper.

Finally, exasperated, Lark set her hands on her hips. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t want you taking anything from the Felimaths,” Henry said.

“I didn’t take it, Henry. It was a present. For my birthday.”

Her nose started to prickle and she thought she might cry. Oberon took the notebook back from Henry and placed it in her hands. He put his arm around her shoulders.

“It’s a thoughtful gift, Lark. It’s just… very grown-up,” he sighed. He drew her against him and kissed the top of her head. “I suppose you are growing up.”

Henry offered an apologetic smile. But when she was upstairs, almost in her room, she heard him mutter to Oberon, “We already owe the Felimaths enough.”

Lark traced her fingers over the golden stamp on the back of the notebook.

She knew that grown-up was Oberon’s tactful way of saying expensive .

She knew that before they died, her parents had borrowed a lot of money from Alastair and Camille’s father.

Her brothers were still repaying Marcus Felimath; after every salt harvest, Henry wrote out a check addressed to Saltswan.

Alastair and Camille giving her a present wasn’t the same as taking money from their father. Still, an unpleasant thought tugged at her, that somehow the expensive notebook was a reminder of her family’s debt.

Time passed; she began to fill the milk-tea-colored pages.

She wrote about her weekends in the garden, helping plant new seeds.

She copied passages from her library books, and glued in photostats of her favorite paintings.

The unpleasant thought remained, but she pushed it down to the pit of her stomach.

It lay buried, worn over time like a piece of glass turned smooth by the sea.

She never finished the notebook, though. When school ended for summer break and half the pages were still blank, Alastair and Camille went away—along with their father—across the sea to Trieste. They left so quickly that Lark didn’t even get to say goodbye.

At first, she had kept up her entries in the notebook, but as the year drew out, they still didn’t return.

Marcus Felimath had telegrammed her brothers with an address to send their check at the end of the salt harvest, so when Henry mailed the payment, Lark asked him to include a letter she had written for Alastair and Camille. Neither of the siblings replied.

She had tucked away the notebook and tried not to think about how, perhaps, her friends had forgotten her. And now Alastair was back, so suddenly and unexpectedly that he almost didn’t seem real.

He was older, taller, his hair grown longer, waves brushing silkenly against his shirt collar.

Lark wanted to ask him so many things—where he had been, why he never wrote to her—but she couldn’t make herself form the words.

Instead, she looked up and down the beach, wondering if Camille was nearby. But the shore was deserted.

On the clifftop, Saltswan was closed up and shuttered, as empty as it had been all summer. Camille’s absence felt like the blank pages of the notebook that now lay buried in Lark’s dresser drawer.

Alastair caught the direction of her gaze, and his expression darkened with realization. “Camille is still in Trieste. She’s at boarding school there.”

“Oh,” Lark said. Without meaning to, she’d already begun to imagine the shape of days ahead: the three of them in class together sitting at their old desk in the back of the room, sharing lunches beneath the courtyard tree, walking home together in the spring twilight.

“Will you come back to school in the village, now that you’re home? ”

Alastair shook his head. “Father hired a tutor for me.”

Lark pressed her lips together and stared down at the ground.

She felt hot and foolish for how she’d hoped.

She’d clutched that hope like the knitted rabbit she still held when she slept, its ears worn down to tatters.

Now, thinking about the way Alastair and Camille were divided not just from her but from each other, Lark wanted to cry.

“And you…?” Alastair asked, taking an uncertain step toward her. “How have you been?”

“I’m fine. I’ve been fine.” Forcing back the lump in her throat, Lark cast around for something to offer that would make everything feel like it had before. “Henry and Oberon took me on the train to the city last month. There’s a new bookstore opening next to the canals; it made me think of you.”

Alastair’s mouth tilted into a small, hesitant smile. “Did you see the Caedmon mural at the art gallery?”

Lark shook her head. Despite everything, a small flare of warmth sparked through her at the fact that Alastair had remembered her favorite painter. “It’s still being restored. Oberon promised we can try to visit next year; they’ll be too busy with the salt harvest until then.”

They both fell silent. Lark thought again of the debt her family owed to Alastair’s father, the check Henry would deliver to Saltswan once the harvest was done. Alastair tugged a hand through his hair, as though trying to smooth down the windswept strands. “That means your birthday must be soon.”

“Next month,” she said, and the warmth in her kindled brighter. She liked that he had remembered. If Alastair hadn’t forgotten her while they’d been apart, then maybe Camille was thinking of her, too. Perhaps they would still be a trio, even divided.

Alastair was quiet for a moment. His brow creased, and he looked nervous. “I have something for you. An… early present. Will you come back to Saltswan with me, so I can give it to you?”