A gull cackled angrily as it flew overhead but then fell abruptly silent. It’s never a good omen when seabirds fall silent. I glanced up at the gull and just then I spotted the wave. It was big. Far too big.

“Dad!” I cried, but it was already upon us, a gray, raging wall of water, out of whose center a patch of blackness was exploding. The wave came crashing down on the boat like a hammer blow and next thing . . .

FOR A SECOND my skull splits with the pain—stinging, white pain. I sink down onto the bench and clutch my head in my hands. I hear a high-pitched wail like a saw, then the pain vanishes. I immediately pull my fingers away. This can’t be happening.

“Leave them!” my father says.

Them? Are they really here? Below the surface, silently floating, attached to invisible threads anchored to the sea bottom? Deeper than I know the Iroise to be? Of course, at some stage you’ll always touch the bottom, but what I just saw was floating over endless, impenetrable depths, with clouds scudding over the bottom.

“We’re here,” my father announces.

The boat has gently run aground on an island. It’s perhaps a hundred yards wide and two hundred yards long. It’s covered with hummocks and granite that glows gold in the sun, with a fine sandy beach running down to the water’s edge. On the shore stands a blue wooden door in a frame. The door is half-open. It’s identical to Ty Kerk’s front door.

Ty Kerk. Grandpa Malo’s pancakes, cooked over the open fire, then, straight from the hot griddle, spread with Breton sea-salt butter and sprinkled with sugar. Feeling pleasantly sleepy by the fireside on an autumn evening. Treading on crunchy snow and frosted pastures. Stars in a mauve sky.

Ty Kerk. The only place where everything was always fine.

Father’s death. My fault.

Eddie’s laugh. Her hand in mine on the table while we read. And me shattering my Eddie, setting a torch to her loving heart.

Sam’s thumb in his clenched hand. Seeing my child once and then never again.

My father jumps out of the boat and stows the oars in the bottom. “Come on!” he calls. “We’ve almost made it. You’re almost home.” He walks over to the door, then looks back and waits for me. Obediently I follow him. Is he going to give me a hug? Hug me again at long last?