“What did I do before I met you?” I said, and he kissed me again and said, “Same as you’ll do when I’m gone,” and I said, “Never,” and he said, “Jude. That’s a terrible word.”

We took off our wetsuits, and naked we were soft as velvet and so was the rock and I’m not telling you any more about it, because some of this must be mine to keep, surely, even while none of it is. So keep out, no trespassing, nobody’s business.

Afterward, I had no idea how long, we both lay there, our bodies the warp and weft of each other, still holding, lullabied by the breathe-in, breathe-out music of the sea.

When I woke up the tight circle of sky above us was darker than the rock and we should have been cold, we really should have been freezing to death, but I didn’t feel it. Our suits had dried and we put them back on and slipped wordlessly into the graphite-black water. Novo took my hand and he didn’t let go while we swam through that blackness, and I had that feeling again, that I couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the sea began, because all around us was just littered with stars.

EIGHTEEN

For a while, from the moment I saw him, there was nobody but Novo. I can’t be sure how long the while lasted, but I guess that doesn’t matter, because real time didn’t apply to me and him. We were past that, way beyond it, astronauts circling the home planet, watching the sun rise sixteen times in a day. My absence might be nothing more than a glazing over in the kitchen while my mum talked. That’s what Novo said. Time didn’t stop moving without me, everything else carried on, but whole days for me and Novo wouldn’t have lasted longer than it took for someone else to catch me staring off into space, for Mum to ask if she was boring me, or if I’d zoned out.

“What about Henry?” I said. “Henry will notice, won’t he?”

“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll be there and you won’t be. It’s covered,” and when I said, “Can you do that?” he laughed. “You know already. There’s nothing I can’t do.”

“Oh yeah? Really?”

“And there’s nothing you can’t do when you’re with me either. In fact, you have way more power than you think.”

“Why, thank you.”

We took a yacht and it sailed itself out, tiller slicing through the current, sails adjusting to the wind seamlessly while we jumped off to swim, dropping anchor when we climbed ashore to lie on every tiny bay we could find. You could do that trip a hundred times and see nothing, but with him it was different. Gray seals on the black rocks, dozens of them, pumped up and buoyant with fat, lolled in the middle of the estuary mouth, lifted their sleek heads and switched their feathered whiskers to look straight at us with their lacquer eyes. A pod of bottle-nosed dolphins slicked their backs in and out of the water and followed us, talking incessantly and opening up their laughing mouths. Novo knew the birds: cormorants, fulmars, gannets, guillemot, and razorbills. Skua, shearwater, petrel, kittiwake. Tern and falcon and raven. They flocked to him when he called them in their own voices, gathered on scraps and outcrops of rock, fussing and flapping for his attention like kids at a playground.