Then I notice what’s missing: the familiar outline of the coast and islands. The lighthouses have also vanished. This isn’t real. No sea in the world has as many lighthouses, surrounded by waves and islands and huge blocks of granite, as the raging Iroise Sea at the western tip of Brittany, where the waves of the English Channel and the swell of the Celtic Sea and the Atlantic meet with a crash.

But where are the lighthouses of La Jument, Pierres Noires, and Le Four? Where is the Molène archipelago and the island of Ouessant, beyond which, as ancient legend has it, infinity begins?

“We’re nearly there,” my father repeats.

I glance over my shoulder. He’s smoking a filterless cigarette, holding it between his thumb and forefinger as always, but the smoke smells strangely faint. He’s wearing his sea face—extremely calm, his eyes accustomed to staring into the distance and coping with the vast expanse of water, which is unlit and immense at night and a huge, fierce, foaming creature by day.

My father, Yvan, is wearing a blue-and-white-striped fisherman’s sweater with three buttons on the left shoulder, a pair of faded jeans, and no socks. Yvan Le Goff always goes without socks from April to October. He was wearing the same outfit on the day he died over thirty years ago.

I leap to my feet so quickly that the boat rocks. I jump away from my father to the other side of the bench.

My father died when I was thirteen, at the age of forty-two. He’s dead.

“You died,” I whisper. “I was there.”

My father doesn’t reply. He keeps on rowing. The blue boat glides silently over the unruffled surface.

I really was there.

WE WERE ROWING out to check the lobster pots by the buoys. It was in the middle of lobster season.

But then my father turned his back on the open sea, something he never normally did. It’s the Breton fisherman’s number one rule: “Never turn your back on her!”—“her” being the sea, the most unpredictable woman on earth. My father, however, was gazing at the land. I was trying to keep the boat on an even keel and thinking of the fib I was hatching for him and my grandfather later. I’d tell it casually so they believed it. I’d never lied to either of them before.

“This is a good spot, Henri. Keep the boat still!” my father called, grabbing hold of the slippery rope hooked onto the floating buoy, whose other end was fastened to the trap dragging along the sea bottom.

I planned to tell them that I was going to cycle to the festnoz in Porspoder, whereas I was actually meeting up with Sionie, who’d promised me a kiss.

“What’s this?” my father asked, tugging on the rope. The boat rocked. He still had his back to the sea.