COLD WATER

The house at Montauk stood alone on a bluff at the end of the island, above a beach that had no name on any map, and it looked, from the road, like something the sea had decided to leave behind.

It was a long low structure of gray cedar and glass, built in 1962 for a painter who had gone mad in the first winter and walked into the surf with his easel. There were no neighbors for two miles. There was a lighthouse in the distance, white against a white sky, turning its slow useless beam in the daylight. The wind blew all the time. It came off the Atlantic in long unbroken sheets that smelled of kelp and diesel and snow, and it hummed in the eaves of the house with a sound like a held note.

Win stood on the deck on the first Saturday in December and watched the sea.

It was the color of pewter. It was heaving, slow and heavy, in long gray ridges that rose against the sand and fell back in wreaths of dirty foam. The thermometer clipped to the rail said thirty-four degrees in the air. The water, according to a printed card that had come in the car, was forty-six.

"Ms. Callaghan."

She turned. Margaux Teague stood in the doorway in a black wool coat, holding a folded white towel in each hand and an expression of such rigid composure that Win suspected she had been up since four.

"Mr. Draycott is on the beach."

"I saw."

"He asked me to say that the game is voluntary, as always. Under clause three you may decline, and no explanation will be sought."

"Under clause three," said Win, "and clause twelve."

"And clause twelve."

"What's the game?"

Margaux's eyes went to the water. A thin gray line appeared between her brows, and was gone.

"Cold Water," she said. "You enter the sea at the point he indicates. You remain in the water for sixty seconds. You return on your own, or on the word."

"That's all?"

"That is the entirety of the rule."

"Is there a clause regarding hypothermia?"

"Sixty seconds at forty-six degrees is not clinically hazardous to a healthy adult." Margaux's tone did not alter. "I have consulted a physician. Not about you. In general."

"How generous."

"I thought so," said Margaux, and held out a towel.

…

She went down the steps in a black swimsuit and a long white robe.

The sand was damp and cold and packed hard as tile. She walked along it with the wind lashing her hair across her face, and the robe snapping at her calves, and the slow thud of the surf growing louder with each step. Ahead, at the edge of the foam, a man stood with his hands in the pockets of a gray overcoat and his back to the land.

He didn't turn. He had heard her. She saw the movement of his head, a quarter turn, and stopped.

"You came," said Callum.

"You gave me a choice."

"I always give a choice."

"I'm told that's your signature move. It's why the lawyers weep."

He turned then. The wind was in his hair and his eyes were the color of the water, gray and unreadable, and there was a kind of hush about him she had not seen before. He looked tired. He looked, if she was honest, like a man who had spent the night walking up and down a corridor.

"I want to set a limit," he said.

"I'm listening."

"If at any point you want it to stop, you say the word. You walk out. I don't touch you, I don't speak, I don't help. That's the rule of the game. The host stands on the sand and counts. The guest decides."

"That seems fair."

"It's the only rule I've never broken."

"Then there's nothing to worry about."

"No," said Callum.

He looked at the sea. A long gray wave collapsed on the beach in front of them and slid, hissing, up the sand to within a foot of his shoes. He did not step back. The foam ran away from him in lace, leaving a rim of silver on the wet.

"I'll count aloud," he said. "From one. When I reach sixty, you may come out."

"And if I'm done at forty?"

"Then you come out at forty."

"And if I'm not done at sixty?"

He turned his head. For the first time since she'd reached the beach, he looked straight at her; and what she saw in the gray eyes was so naked, so ungovernably wary, that she had to look away.

"Win," he said. "The game is sixty seconds."

"I know."

"I'd prefer it if you didn't test the limit."

"I'm a claims adjuster," said Win. "Testing the limit is my religion."

She took off the robe.

…

She did not decide to laugh. It happened the way a sneeze happens. She walked down the slope of sand with the robe in her hand and her arms bare, and the wind went over her skin like a wire brush, and the foam closed round her ankles, and she thought, with perfect clarity: this is the stupidest thing I have ever done.

Then she thought: I'm so alive.

It was an absurd sensation. It was a ridiculous time for it. The cold was a blow; it hit her shins and her knees and the soft insides of her thighs with a bright, appalling, hammering shock, as if the sea had reached up and slapped her in the face. Her breath went out of her in a gasp. Every nerve in her body stood up and screamed.

She waded in.

The swell caught her at the waist. It lifted her a little and put her down, with a long slow lurch, and the cold went into the soft place under her ribs where the pain lived, and for a moment she thought, oh, it will be a relief. It numbed. It was the first quiet that organ had known in six weeks.

"One," said Callum, from the beach.

His voice carried. It was calm and level. She turned her face to the wind.

"Two. Three."

She walked out until the water reached her breastbone. The sea came up around her in great cold hands. She was shivering already, hard, in long ugly waves, and her teeth had begun to clatter. The sky was white. The horizon was a gray line a hundred miles off. She stood in the Atlantic in the first week of December with her arms wrapped round herself, and the whole world had narrowed to a number.

"Eleven. Twelve."

Count, she told herself. Count with him.

Ten. Nine. Eight.

It was the wrong direction. She changed it. She counted up, along with his voice, the way you swim with a tide. Thirteen. Fourteen. The cold had stopped being a sensation and become a landscape; she lived in it now, and it was enormous and clean and perfectly, abstractly pure. For the first time since the vinyl bench she felt no fear, no regret, no arithmetic. There was just the sea, and the sound of a man counting, and her body, which was somehow more present than she had known.

"Twenty-four."

A wave broke over her shoulder. She spat salt.

"Twenty-nine. Thirty."

She was laughing. She could hear it, a high, cracked, joyous noise, thin as paper in the wind. She threw back her head. Gray spray burst on her face. Over the water, the white lighthouse turned and turned its beam, and the sky opened for a second in a seam of pale gold at the edge of the world.

I'd forgotten, she thought. I'd forgotten it could be like this.

"Thirty-eight."

His voice had changed.

She noticed it only dimly, through the roar. It had been level; now it was a half tone higher, with something stretched in it, like a wire going taut. She turned her head. Through the wet hair across her eyes she saw him at the water's edge, quite alone, with his hands out of his pockets, and the gray overcoat blowing open round his knees.

He was walking forward.

"Thirty-nine."

No, she thought, no, that's the rule, you don't

"Forty."

He broke into a run.

…

It was the most extraordinary thing she had ever seen.

A man of thirty-nine, who owned buildings, who had ordered a woman thrown out of a house for a tear, who stood in rooms and made them go silent, ran down a beach in the first week of December in a three-thousand-dollar overcoat. He ran with his head down, full speed, as if there were no ground. He hit the surf without breaking stride. The foam exploded round his shins, then his thighs, and he plunged on, wading, lunging, swearing, with the gray cloth dragging at him and the sea heaving up to meet him at the chest.

"Win!"

His voice was raw. He reached her in six strides. His hands closed on her upper arms, hard enough to bruise, and wrenched her round, and she felt his whole body shaking with a violence that had nothing to do with the cold.

"What are you doing?" she cried.

"Out. Now."

"It's not sixty! You're breaking the rule!"

"I don't give a damn about the rule!"

He hauled her. She went, because there was nothing else to do, with her heels skidding on the sand and her arms dragged forward and the sea sucking at their legs. He did not look at her. He was staring straight ahead at the beach with an expression she knew. She'd seen it once before, at forty-one floors, on a glass floor above the city: the face of a man who had gone a very long way inside himself, and was looking out of a window.

They fell on the sand together, above the tide line, in a tangle of wet cloth. He had his arms round her. She couldn't breathe. His chest was heaving against her back, and the coat was heavy and sodden and smelled of salt, and under it his heart was going so hard that she could feel it through her spine, a wild uneven battering like a trapped bird.

"Callum."

"Don't."

"Callum. I'm all right."

"You were blue." His voice cracked. "Your lips. They were blue, I could see it from the beach. And you were just standing there, laughing—"

"I was fine!"

"You were not fine."

"It was forty seconds! I've been colder than that in a hospital waiting room!"

She stopped.

It was out before she could catch it. It lay between them on the cold sand, a small bright object, like a coin dropped from a pocket. She felt his arms go rigid round her. She felt the whole length of his body listen.

Hospital.

Clause eleven, said a calm voice in the back of her head. Clause eleven, clause eleven.

He said nothing. Not a word. She waited for the question, and it didn't come; and the silence that stood in its place was worse than any question, a heavy, rigid, shaking silence, in which she could hear him breathing through his teeth.

Then he released her.

…

She sat up. The cold, which had retreated while the adrenaline held, came back all at once. It was brutal. It went through her like a blade, and the shivering took her entire body, so violent that for a moment she could not speak. Her teeth clacked. Her hands, when she looked at them, were the color of tallow.

"Margaux," said Callum, over his shoulder.

She was already there. She had come down the dunes in a dead run, in her black coat, with a stack of towels and two blankets and a flask. She said nothing. She threw a blanket over Win's shoulders and another over Callum's and knelt on the sand to wrap a towel round Win's feet, with her narrow, fierce, composed face utterly still.

"You," she said to Callum, in a tone Win would not have believed her capable of, "are going to kill yourself."

"Yes."

"Do you know what the water temperature—"

"Margaux."

"Mr. Draycott, I will not—"

"Please," said Callum.

She stopped.

It was a word Win had never heard him use. It lay on the beach between the two of them, plain and unadorned, and Margaux Teague, who had been Callum's shadow for sixteen years, looked up at his face and seemed to see something there that took the argument out of her. She bowed her head. She poured something from the flask into its cap and held it to Win's lips. It was brandy. It burned.

"The bath is running," she said, in an altered voice. "I'll have the fires lit."

…

They sat together by the fire in the great room until it was dark.

The painter's house had a stone hearth big enough to roast an ox. Someone had built a blaze in it that roared up the chimney, and in front of it, on a pile of cushions, Win sat wrapped in two blankets and a man's gray cashmere sweater with a mug of hot sweet tea going cold in her hands. She had bathed. She'd lain in a copper tub in a room full of steam for twenty minutes with her eyes closed, and the sensation had come slowly back to her fingers like blood to a sleeping foot.

He sat three feet away.

He had changed into dry things. A black shirt, gray trousers, bare feet. His hair was still wet. His hands lay open on his knees, palms up, and in the firelight she could see that they had not stopped shaking. He had not spoken since the beach. He had not touched her. He sat with his back against the stone and his gaze on the flames, and the silver watch lay on the hearth beside him, closed.

She didn't speak either. It seemed unkind.

The wind rose and fell in the eaves. Somewhere in the house a shutter banged. The fire popped, and a cascade of sparks went up the flue, and then, in the silence after, he said, in a voice she barely knew:

"I broke the rule."

"You did."

"I wrote it myself."

"I know."

"I'll pay the penalty. Five hundred thousand, to the foundation you named. I'll have Margaux wire it in the morning."

She stared at him.

"You'd pay?"

"You wrote it into the contract."

"The penalty was for breach of the schedules. Limits. Weapons, injury. You didn't breach—"

"I breached the spirit." His jaw tightened. "The host stands on the sand. It's the one thing I've never failed to do. And I—" He stopped. "I ran."

"You ran."

"I don't run."

"I'd noticed."

"It's not a thing I do." He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. "I stood there counting. I got to thirty-eight. And I looked at you in the water, and I thought, she's going under. And then I was in the sea and I don't remember any part of it."

She was silent.

She thought of a dock on a lake, and a boy with a paperback, and forty seconds. She did not know the story; she only knew the shape of the hole it had left. She knew it as one knows the profile of a coastline in fog.

"You were never going to let me get to sixty," she said gently.

"No."

"Then why put it in the game?"

"I thought I could."

"Callum."

"I thought I could stand there," he said, "and watch."

The words fell into the room and lay there, like stones.

She set her mug on the hearth. She moved, very slowly, across the three feet of cushion that divided them, trailing blankets, and sat down beside him. He did not look at her. She took his right hand in both of hers, the one that held the watch, the one with the scar above the wrist. It was warm and rough and damp, and its tremor passed up her arms like current through a wire.

"I don't know why I did it," he said.

His voice was almost inaudible.

"I know," said Win.

"You don't."

"I think I do."

"Then—"

"Don't say it." She laid her cheek against his shoulder. His wet hair brushed her temple. "Please. I know what clause eleven says. I'm not asking. I'm not going to ask. I only want you to know I saw, and it's all right, and you don't have to tell me what it was. You don't have to tell me anything."

He was silent for a long time.

Then he turned his hand over in hers, so that palm lay against palm, and laced his fingers through hers, slowly, as a man might close a book he intended to open again.

They sat together until the fire burned down. At some point the wind dropped. At some point she slept, with her head on his shoulder and his arm around her, and the sound of the sea going out and coming in beyond the glass like the breathing of a patient animal; and when she woke, long past midnight, the room was dark and the embers glowed red, and he was awake.

He had not moved. He was watching the fire with the closed, intent, unshuttered face of a man who had spent six hours listening to another person breathe.

"You didn't sleep," she whispered.

"I don't."

"Is it the nightmares?"

He turned his head. In the red light his eyes were enormous.

"Clause eleven," he said, so gently that it was almost a smile.

She laughed, softly, against his collar. She closed her eyes, and let the dark take her again, and the last thing she heard before sleep was the very small, very precise click of a silver lid opening, and closing, and opening, like the ticking of a heart.