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.

We walked back along the road, our shorts heavy with water and sticking to our legs like wet plaster, the cars going past us so fast I could feel the hard smack of pushed air against our bodies. Three, four inches to the right and we’d have felt the full impact of metal and engine and glass. So close, that devastation. And then the soft, quiet spaces between them, no engine, no throttle, just the air in the long grass and our feet on the tarmac, and him whistling.

We walked for days. Up on the cliffs, the narrow crumbling edges. Another fault line, another border—the land sliced and dropping straight into sea. Novo was comfortable there, at the margins of things, at the place where things change. We climbed until my lungs and my legs burned, but he wouldn’t let me stop when I wanted to, would never let me stop because he could always see another place ahead, something different. Farther. Better. More.

We walked at night too, diffuse with the low, secondhand light of the moon, and we lay on our backs in the silvered grass to map stars. Novo gave me a meteor shower, because I’d never seen one. “Every time someone says they see a shooting star,” I told him, “I’m blinking, or looking down, for that split second. It’s not even funny.” And before I’d even finished talking, the night was filled with dropping lights, and it stunned me into silence, the total quiet of all that movement, the utter vastness of the sky. I slept, and in the very early morning, wild ponies cut fast across the moor to meet us, to meet him, and we gave them grass and the cores of our apples, and Novo pressed his forehead against theirs and spoke words and they shivered with pleasure and their heads swung up when he let them go.