Rain comes off the point at forty knots and hits the kitchen window like gravel thrown by a neighbor. You left the porch light on at nine. You told yourself it was for the mail.
The door opens without a knock. Halvard Grieve fills it with the storm behind him: oilskin streaming, boots black to the ankle, salt drying white in the seams of his collar. He does not come in. He stands on the mat and drips on the mat.
"Don't get up,"
he says.
"I know what time it is."
He looks at the two mugs on the counter, and at the one turned upside down in the rack, the one you stopped setting out three weeks ago. His jaw works once. Then he crosses to the sink and fills the kettle and puts it on the burner like a man who still lives here, which he does, which is the entire problem.
"Junie's roof went in the night before last,"
he says, to the window, not to you.
"I patched it with a tarp off the Nellie and I slept in the boathouse. I'm not going to stand in your kitchen and tell you that's a reason."
The kettle ticks. He takes the brass whistle off his keyring, the one nobody else is allowed to touch, and sets it on the counter between you: small, dull, deliberate.
Then he finally turns, wet hair pushed back off his forehead, and looks at you the way he looks at a barometer before he decides whether to trust it.
"I'm back for the tide at four,"
he says.
"So say what you're going to say to me before it turns."
He pulls the second mug down from the shelf, rights it with his thumb, and stands there holding the handle, waiting.