Read Chapter 5: High Water

The tide chart on Maëlle’s wall said the water would crest at 23:47. She’d circled it in pencil the way her mother used to mark the phases of the moon, a small ritual she’d adopted without thinking. By evening, the sea had settled into a deceptive calm, the kind that came after bad weather like a held breath. The stranger spent the afternoon in the chair by the window, watching the horizon through the salt-streaked glass. He didn’t shiver anymore, but his skin had taken on a fish-belly pallor, and his hands trembled around the tin cup of broth she insisted he drink. “The singing,” he said once, not turning. “It’s closer today.”

Maëlle scraped dried kelp from her boots at the door. “What does it sound like?”

He paused, his brow furrowing like he was trying to hold water in his fists. “Like someone calling me home. But I don’t know the voice.”

She thought of the bronze locket against his chest, warm from his skin. Her mother’s face, salt-eaten into memory. *Don’t trust anything the sea returns.* His hands shook harder now, rattling the cup. When she reached to take it from him, his fingers were so cold they felt wet.

“You need to rest,” she said, but her voice caught. He wasn’t looking at the horizon anymore. He was looking down at the floor, where the stones had begun to glisten, damp despite the clear evening.

By ten o’clock the dampness had crept up the walls. The air inside the lighthouse grew heavy, thick as low tide, and the stranger had slid off the chair onto the flagstones. Maëlle found him there when she came down from trimming the lamp, curled on his side, his clothes soaked through as if he’d been pulled from the sea. His breath came in a shuddering rasp, and his teeth chattered hard enough to click. She put her hands to his face. The cold didn’t stop at his skin—it went through, like touching glacier water, and she pulled back with a hiss.

“Hey. Hey, stay with me.” She grabbed the wool blanket from the cot and wrapped it around his shoulders. He didn’t respond. His eyes were open but rolled back, the pupils gone a pale, milky blue, the color of a dead swell. His back arched suddenly, a convulsion that lifted his hips off the stone, and a sound came out of him that wasn’t a voice—a rising, harmonic cry, like a seal under water.

“Jesus.” Maëlle released him and staggered back. The locket had slipped from under his collar and lay against his throat, its bronze surface fogged with cold. The sea outside had begun a low, rhythmic hiss. She looked toward the door. The tide was rising. It had reached the first step of the lighthouse threshold, creeping over the stone, sliding fingers of foam around the base.

She knelt beside him again, unsure what to do. His convulsions quieted, but his chest barely moved. His skin was scaling now, patches that caught the lamplight like chainmail, and she thought of the scars she’d seen on his back in the lamplight two nights ago—like claw marks, like the lines left when something tried to pull open sealed skin.

“What are you?” she whispered.

His lips moved. “Water,” he said. Not a request. A need, like a word the tide had put in his mouth.

The sea touched the threshold. A cold draught swept under the door, and the flame of her lantern guttered. The stranger’s body went suddenly, terrifyingly still. Then, with a fluid grace that had nothing to do with a man who’d been convulsing moments before, he rose to his feet. Maëlle cried out and grabbed for his arm, but his skin slid through her grip, slick with something that was not sweat. He walked to the door, unmoored, calm as a dreamer.

“Don’t.” She threw herself between him and the frame. “The tide’s up. You’ll drown.”

He looked at her. For a moment his face was his own—pale, unknowing, faintly sad. Then something else moved behind his eyes, vast and slow as fog. “She waits,” he said. And he opened the door as if the latch weighed nothing, and the sea poured in ankle-deep around his bare feet, and he crossed the threshold into the dark.

Maëlle followed him out onto the rocks, screaming his name—no, she didn’t have his name, she had nothing—and watched him walk down the jagged slope into the black lace of the swells. He didn’t fight the current. He went with it, vanishing soundlessly, head under, gone.

She stood on the rocks until her legs gave out, until the tide had receded and left her soaked and shivering on the shore. She didn’t sleep. She sat on the lighthouse steps, the locket cold in her palm. It had fallen off him when he crossed the threshold. Her mother’s bronze face stared up, worn smooth by nineteen years of salt and grief. She opened the clasp. Inside, a tiny curl of dark hair, and an inscription she’d never known was there, so fine she had to tilt it to the lantern light to read it: *Y.A.*

Yann Anastase.

She closed her fist around it and waited for dawn, and for a body that would not wash up, and for whatever the sea might decide to give back instead.

At first light, the strand lay empty. By noon, the gulls had grown bored. Maëlle drafted a message to the coast guard twice and burned both. She was coiling rope in the shadow of the tower when the tide began to rise a second time. The water rolled in quiet, almost gentle. And there, where the foam met the low rocks, a sprawl of pale limbs.

He came back with the flood, crawling up the shingle onto his hands and knees, seawater streaming from his hair. He coughed once, twice, then stood, naked to the waist, perfectly unharmed. His skin was clean of the scaling patches, his eyes clear as deep water in sunlight. He looked at her with a calm, restored vacancy.

“I fell,” he said, and the lie was so plain, so ordinary, that Maëlle nearly laughed.

He didn’t remember walking into the sea. He didn’t remember the door opening, the cold on the floor, the singing, the locket. She turned the bronze circle over in her pocket and said nothing.

That evening the village caught word. A stranger had come to the lighthouse, and the sea had taken him, and given him back. By the bell for vespers, the churchyard had its first dozen pilgrims.

Maëlle watched them approach down the headland path, old women in black shawls and young mothers carrying kerchiefs of bread, and knew that whatever she’d dragged out of the storm two days ago was not a man the sea had spared. It was a gift the sea had sent back with a price attached—one she was only beginning to understand.