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When I wake it’s to see his face and I am returned to the first time, to when my body was on fire. I am returned to the sea.

We are alone—the kids have gone to get supplies, he tells me, even Raff, who can’t lie still despite a possibly broken wrist. I meet his eyes, this man who nearly lost his son, nearly watched his son die. I’m so sorry, I say, and he reaches to give me a hug, but it’s awkward and we find ourselves moving so that we are in the same bed, facing each other, and I think how did we get here. I can feel his breath on my lips. I haven’t seen his eyes this close before, today they are more gray than green, they are a storm.

“You’ve been sleeping again,” he tells me. “And dreaming.”

A prison of dreams.

I’ve never spoken of it. Not even to Hank. How telling that seems now. To share a life with someone but to never share the truth of that life, to never express how that life is damaged. Surely it was his right to know this wound in me, since it was bound, at some point, to become a wound in us? I’d simply worked so hard to leave it behind that I couldn’t bear to bring it forward again, not even to speak it aloud.

But it is here now, and I am awake, and I don’t feel so frightened of it. Shearwater is a place of ghosts, but mine does not haunt me, not anymore. I can name him, I can do that.

I tell Dominic, this stranger I do not know, this man who is lying in my bed and lying to my face, I tell him that there was a boat, once. That my mother and father had four children and raised us, for a time, on a houseboat. Three girls and one boy; I was the oldest, River the littlest. That we were all very good on the boat. When Mum and Dad went ashore to work, I looked after my sisters and brother. I cooked and bathed them, I brushed their tangled hair, read them stories, got them to sleep. We were wild, every one of us, often unclothed because it was easier to dive into the water and swim like fish, then swing on ropes to get back aboard. I held him in my arms most of the time, I swam with his face by my shoulder, his little hands curled against me. I made sure he didn’t fall, but it was wild, I said it was wild, didn’t I?

I loved him, and he drowned while I was meant to be watching him.

That’s what I dream of.

His tiny bare feet on the deck, pitter-pattering toward me, and his laugh as I catch him.

Dominic is holding me and our lips touch. What a strange thing that grief can become need in moments, in breaths, in the strength of his hands. Maybe it’s shelter. Maybe distraction. Or something else entirely. But there is old pain in me and we kiss as though we have kissed a thousand times before, as though in other lives we kissed every day, we kiss as though we have been waiting years to do so. He tastes of salt. I recognize his body against mine. And then I disentangle myself, saying, “I can’t,” and, “I’m sorry,” and I walk outside to the black sand and the blood-red kelp and the bones, I walk among the bones to the sea’s edge, this sea that brought me here.

If he has killed my husband.

What then. What will I be.