“And then I saw her,” Henry said. “The woman next to me was trying to comfort her daughter. The little girl screamed with each drop of the wave, screamed with everything she had. I could see the white arcs of her teeth and the back of her throat, but I could hardly hear her over the noise. And then she lifted her head and looked at me.”

“The woman?”

“No. The girl. She looked at me and her eyes saw everything. With the movement of the waves, the high sky, and the dark slap of the water, she was there and then gone, there and then gone. But still, she anchored me to something. Just the sight of her stilled that storm, for me.”

“Yes,” Novo said. “That’s it.”

That thread between them again, turning and glinting. A secret understanding. The look they shared keeping me out.

The storm in the room dropped. The waves of Henry’s memory flattened out. The water at our feet went still, like dirty glass.

“And then?” I said.

Henry said, “She asked her mother, ‘Are we dead?’ and I could see in her eyes that the woman wasn’t sure when she told her daughter, ‘No.’ I looked away from her for half a second. Less. And when I looked back, she was gone.”

“Gone?” I said. “How could she be gone?”

Henry shrugged. “I couldn’t find her,” he told me as the water drained through the floorboards, leaving dirty great marks on the walls and the skirting boards. I pictured Mum downstairs, seawater raining down on her in her new kitchen. I half expected to hear her call out, but she didn’t. The rest of the house was silent. The sky outside was blue and still. There wasn’t a leaf moving on the trees.

Novo let go of Henry’s hand. “And after that?” he said. “The next time?”

“It was here. I saw the back of her, going into this house. She was older. But I knew her instantly. I would have known her anywhere.”

The memory glowed on his face, warm as the sun on a bright wall. We all felt it. Henry closed his eyes again. “She went in and left the door open, and I tried to see something more in that brief slice of inside, but there was nothing there for me to see, just her disappearing into the dark. She looked like she was stepping out of one world and into another. I knew even then that before long I would go in, that a part of me already had.”

“So when did you?” I said.

“Not right away. I walked past, every day, for weeks, but the house looked so shut up and abandoned. I started to lose hope. And then, one day, there she was, at an upstairs window. This window, in fact.” He pointed. “This one right here.”

“And what happened?” Novo said.