So they left. In twos, in fours, in families, belongings belted to their backs. There was no shame to the exodus. A mild embarrassment, perhaps, expressed in the hurried goodbyes and a reluctance to converse in absolutes. We might come back, they said. Could come back, would come back, will come back if the inquest ends in profit. But no shame. The town hollowed of its borrowed citizenry and lapsed into a kind of half-hearted, shambolic alcoholism.

“I’d drink to that.” Jamie emptied the dregs of his cider, the sunlight brindling his hair with bronze. It glowed on his mouth, his lips sticky with the gleam of the sky. “Tell me, Henrik, you ever plan to go back to your wife? The Barracuda’s worried sick about you.”

He stiffened. “When I am better.”

“If you can drink six pints of bad ale and eat a whole roast dinner by yourself, you’re well enough to be a husband to the poor lass.” Jamie palmed his cheek, chin propped on the helm of his hand, and sighed, a whistle of sound that cut so sharply across the throat of the slurring hummadruz that it stopped, looked up in bleary-eyed consternation. “Ingrid misses you.”

Henrik gazed down at his hands—two fingers on the right still swaddled in bandages, a finger on the left foreshortened at the first knuckle—and clenched them both. When he spoke again, his voice was small. “I know. But we’d come to an agreement. It’s better this way. I can send her money and she can keep the business running. I’m not in a position to be a good husband yet.”

“And how will you ever get into that position again if you don’t go home? Marriages can’t heal from a distance. Are you scared of bringing trouble back to her? Is that it? Because I can tell you, it probably wasn’t the Polish who sank the ship, if that’s what you’re thinking. And even if it were, they’re hardly going to send assassins after a sailor and his wife.”

“I hope you are right.” Henrik lied. Outside, the day grew chandeliered with a salt-teethed murk, gray save for how the sunlight haloed the clouds. It bathed the city-line in a dreariness that seemed almost foreign now after a summer of faultless blue sky. Unbidden, his thoughts gyred back to his wife and memories of her long white body pouring into the sea, her expression stern, even foreboding as she sank from view.

In their time together, Henrik had only seen her smile once: an expression of radiant discovery and unassailable hope, tender in a fashion he had no idea she was capable of telegraphing, her face ordinarily so cragged with thought that Henrik had often wondered if that was why their life was barren of children, her body and her mind too preoccupied with her introspections to allow a baby into the equation.