‘I’m looking for strength,’ she said simply.

‘He’ll have a safe passage,’ said Nefyn.

Efa felt her body relax. She swallowed down her tears.

‘He’s a little better today.’

Nefyn knew that already.

‘I know.’

Efa looked at her hands. Nefyn placed hers over them. Efa didn’t know whether or not to pray.

‘I wish I had listened to myself earlier,’ Nefyn said. ‘I wish I had opened the door years ago.’

Efa smiled. Felt Nefyn’s hair on her cheek.

‘I wish you had, too.’

They sat in silence for a moment, Efa struggling with the burning of tears in her throat.

‘I wanted you to know something about my mother.’ Efa listened, Nefyn’s voice seamless and smooth. ‘I think she’d like you to know.’ Nefyn’s skin was startlingly white and soft against her own. She opened her hand, held Nefyn’s palm on hers. Tried to memorize the picture it made. ‘She left us. She went back to the sea.’

Efa nodded.

‘I was scared about your father … that maybe he’d done something …’

Nefyn shook her head.

‘No.’

Nefyn smoothed out Efa’s skin in her fingers.

‘She wanted to go. But …’

Efa listened as Nefyn’s voice became even softer, delicate, nebulous almost.

‘She sent a storm for him.’ Efa’s eyes turned. Nefyn continued. ‘She waited until we were old enough to be without him.’

Efa had often wondered about the ferocity of the storm that took Nefyn’s father. Such an experienced sailor would never have ventured forth in such conditions.

‘That storm that came from nowhere?’ Efa asked.

Nefyn nodded.

‘It was for him. For taking her, for forcing her to have children, for beating her …’ Nefyn quietened. ‘I watched her go.’ Her eyes were far away now. ‘My father thought it was sudden, but it wasn’t. It took months.’ She smiled sadly. ‘The quietness, the walks she took in the night, the praying.’ Efa thought of Arianell in the church. ‘It was killing her. I could see it. And then, she waited until my father was fishing, sent Joseph on an errand.’ Efa listened, the silence around them pressing on each word. ‘It was like she’d found something … she always said it was a cloak, but it was something more than that. She wasn’t handed her freedom, she took it. She had no choice. It was life or death.’

Efa thought of Nefyn’s father. The boy she had known in school. The way he had grown. The way Efa had felt when his body had been found. The nothingness.

‘I think it was harder for Joseph to understand.’

Efa thought about leaving a child. Thought of the desperation that that would take.

‘Anyway,’ said Nefyn quietly, ‘I think she would have liked you to know.’

Efa turned to her.