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CHAPTER ONE

The wind was so strong that Dimity felt herself pulled between two worlds; caught in a waking dream so vivid that the edges blurred, and then vanished. The gale tore around the corners of the cottage, humming down the chimney, crashing in the trees outside. But louder than any of that was the sea, beating against the stony shore, breaking over the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. A bass roar that Dimity seemed to feel in her chest, thumping up through her bones from the ground beneath her feet.

She’d been dozing in her chair by the remnants of the fire. Too old and tired to rise, to take herself upstairs to bed. But now the wind had wrenched the kitchen window open and was flinging it wide against its hinges, hard enough that the next bang might be its last. The frame was rotten; it had been years since the window was held shut by anything more than a wedge of folded paper. The sound came into her dream, and woke her, and she hovered on the verge of sleep as the cold night air poured in, pooling at her feet like the rising tide. She had to get up and wedge the window shut before the pane smashed. Dimity opened her eyes, and could see the gray outlines of the room well enough. Outside the window the moon raced across the sky, clouds streaking past it.

Shivering, she made her way to the kitchen window, where the storm was caking the glass with salt. The bones of her feet ached as they pushed through her skin. Sleeping in the chair made her hips and back stiffen up like swollen wood, and it was an effort to push the joints into movement. The wind coming in lifted her hair and made her shiver, but she shut her eyes to sniff at it, because the smell of the sea was so dear, so familiar.

Celeste was there. Out there on the cliffs, standing with her back to the cottage, facing out to sea, cast in silver by the moonlight. The surface of the Channel heaved and churned, spindrift whipped from white crests and flung stinging against the shore. Dimity felt tiny flecks of it land on her face, hard and corrosive. How could Celeste be there? After so many long years, after she vanished so completely? But it was her, for certain. That long, familiar back, a supple spine descending into the voluptuous curves of her hips; arms straight by her sides with her fingers spread. I like the touch of the wind, running through my hands. Her words seemed to whisper through the window, with that strange guttural accent of hers. Long hair and long, shapeless dress, rippling out behind her; the fabric pressed against the contours of her thighs and waist and shoulders. Then came a sudden clear image-of him, sketching Celeste, his eyes flicking up with that frightening intensity, that unbreakable concentration. She shut her eyes again, and held them tight. The memory was both beloved and unbearable.