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The hospice nurse came at ten past six and found him reading.

Her name was Delia. She had been coming for eleven weeks, a stout, tender, unhurried woman from Biddeford with a rolling bag and a laugh that she kept in her pocket for emergencies, and she stopped in the doorway of the front room with her key still in her hand. The curtains were open. The light was coming up gray over the harbor and lay on the quilt, on the long still shape under it, on the man in the chair beside the bed with a paperback open on his knee. He had closed her eyes. He had straightened the sheet. He had turned her face a little towards the window, so that she would have the water.

“Oh, honey,” said Delia.

“She went at ten past four.” He did not look up. “I counted.”

“Did you read to her? At the end?”

“Yes.”

It came out whole. It had no hole in it anywhere; he had been practicing, for four years nine months, on a woman with reading glasses on a chain, and he was good now. He heard Delia take a breath that was half a sob, and set down her bag, and cross the room in her squeaking shoes to put a hand on his shoulder, and he let her. He turned his head and looked up and gave her what the moment required, which was wet eyes and a shaking mouth and a gratitude so exact that she wept outright. All of it was true. That was the strange part. Nothing he showed her was false. He simply did not mention that he had been sitting for two hours with the book open at page ninety-one, reading one sentence.

Jeg kommer til å finne ham.

I am going to find him. Marit Skaar says it to a kitchen wall, in the dark, with her coat on. Skau gives it no italics and no exclamation; he gives it a paragraph to itself, and a full stop. He had first read it in English, on page ninety-one of a printout that smelled of coffee and green pencil, one night that August in bed, with a woman asleep against his arm, and had thought: I know exactly how you feel.

“Is there anyone I can call?” said Delia. “Family?”

“Ned Pratt,” he said. “Port Ellis Rescue. He’ll know what to do.”

“And you, hon. Is there anyone for you?”

He looked at her. It was an ordinary question. She asked it of everyone. She was trying to be good.

“No,” said Emory. “I don’t think there is.”

* * *

They buried her on Saturday, in the old part of the Evergreen Cemetery under a copper beech she had picked out herself in June, from a photograph, propped on a pillow. It rained. Ned read from Psalm 107, the one about those that go down to the sea in ships, because she had told him to and had told him also that if he cried she would haunt him; and Ned cried; and Mary held his arm. Two hundred people stood in the wet. Half of them were patients. A great number of them said, in the grass afterwards, with their hats in their hands, she saved my life, or she saw me when nobody else did, or she never once made me feel like it was a trouble, and Emory shook all their hands and said thank you and she’d have been glad you came, in exactly the right voice, and counted nothing at all. It was the one day in five years he forgot to count.

Afterward Ned found him at the end of the row, alone, with his collar turned up and his hands in the pockets of the black coat, looking not at the grave but at the sky.

“Come back to the house,” said Ned. “Mary’s got ham. She’s got that scalloped thing.”

“I will. In a minute.”

“You’ve been standing here forty.” The old man came and stood beside him. He had gotten thin that year. He had the hands of a man who had hauled traps for half a century, thick-knuckled and spotted, and he put one now on Emory’s sleeve and left it there. “I’ve known you since you were a little scrap with a model boat. I held you at your father’s funeral, I don’t know if you remember. You didn’t make a sound. I thought, that boy’s gonna be all right, he’s got a spine. And then I thought, no. He’s got a lid.”

“Ned —”

“Let me say it. I’m seventy-one and she’s in a box and I’ve got nothing to lose.” He turned the sleeve gently, as though checking a line for chafe. “You’ve been living like that lamp of yours. Burning every night for a boat that isn’t coming. I don’t know whose boat. I never asked. Pip never said. But I’ve watched you eat standing up for five years and I’ve watched you pick up every phone in that station on the first ring, and I know what waiting looks like on a man, because I did it for my own brother in nineteen eighty-one.” He drew a breath. “She’s gone, son. Whatever you were holding the door for. You can go and find out if it’s still there. The Rescue’ll keep. Cody can run the boat a winter. You’d be amazed what runs without us.”

Emory said nothing for a time. The rain ran off the brim of the copper beech in long strings and ticked on the lid.

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

“That’s all right.” Ned patted the sleeve. “That’s what I wanted. Just the thinking.”

He did not say that he had already finished.

* * *

The first thing he did, on Tuesday, was type her name.

He sat in the cab of the truck in the lot behind the Rockland library, with the engine off and the windshield running with rain, and held the phone in both hands for a minute without doing anything. He had not typed her name in four years and ten months. He’d had a rule, and he had kept it the way he kept all of his rules, by making it a part of the furniture, until it stopped feeling like a rule and felt like a wall. He knew where the wall was. He knew the exact texture of it. He put his thumb on the glass.

He did not type Corinne Aldermere. She would be dead on every search page that mattered, he thought; she would have taken care of that. He typed instead the thing that she could not have changed: a Norwegian name and a title. Anders Skau. The Drowned Hour. English translation.

The screen thought about it. Then it gave him a page.

The Drowned Hour, by Anders Skau. Translated from the Norwegian by Nora Lind. Loomis & Vane, Minneapolis, paperback, June 2030. Seventeen ninety-nine. A cover in sea-green and black, with a small lit window and a figure in a raincoat. Four-point-two stars. Six hundred and eleven reviews. Chilly, exact, relentless, said somebody in a newspaper. A translation as clean as cold water.

Nora Lind.

He read it again. Lind: the maiden name of a woman who had died at forty-seven in Worcester, and the name Corinne had given him across a breakfast table, once, with her eyes on her plate: her grandmother’s, off a boat from Gothenburg. Nora: the woman in Ibsen’s play who walks out of a house and closes the door on it. He thought that whoever had picked it had a sense of humor, and found, with a feeling like a small warm hand turning over in his chest, that he liked her for it.

He sat for a time in the rain. There was nothing in him that could be called triumph. It was more like the sensation of a man who has carried a full cup across a long dark room for years, and sets it at last on a table, and finds that his arm is shaking.

It could be anyone, he told himself. He said it clearly. It could be a coincidence. Lind is a common name.

Then he started the truck, and drove to Portland, and walked into a bookshop.

It was the first time in four years and ten months. It was a long narrow shop on Congress Street with a bell on the door and a cat asleep in the window, and the new fiction table stood just inside, lit from above, stacked with the autumn’s books like a display of fruit. He stopped in front of it. He did not look at anything on it. He looked at the grain of the wood.

“Can I help you find something?”

The woman behind the register was in her sixties, with a gray braid and half-glasses and a green cardigan gone at the elbows. She had the slightly wary courtesy of a bookseller who has been asked, in her time, for a great many books by their color.

“The Skau,” he said. “The Drowned Hour. In English.”

“Oh! We have it. We only have the two copies, but they haven’t stopped.” She came around the counter with an unhurried step and went straight to the back of the shop, to a low shelf marked TRANSLATED CRIME, and took down a green-and-black paperback. “It’s marvelous. You’ll love it. It’s a bit of a surprise, in fact. It was supposed to come out in the spring of last year, and then there was a rights fuss, and it sat in a drawer until June, and I’d more or less written it off. And then it came, and it’s —” She stopped. She looked at the book, and then at him. “It’s very odd. I can’t say it well. Most translations, you read them and you’re aware of the person; or you’re aware of the lack of one. This one, you’re aware of somebody being very careful not to be aware of. Does that make sense? There’s a person in the room who doesn’t want to be seen. And you can feel her anyway.”

“Her.”

“Oh — I assume. It’s usually a woman, in my experience. Women do the translating, men get the prizes.” She turned it over. “There’s hardly anything about her. Look. Nora Lind translates from Norwegian and Swedish. She lives in Bergen. I always wish they’d say more. I’d like to know if she’s got a dog.”

“Bergen,” said Emory.

“It’s on the west coast. It rains a lot. I’m told it’s beautiful.” She held the book out. “Will that be all?”

He took it. He held it for a moment in both hands; and then, gravely, with a sense of ritual that he could not have explained to her, he opened it to the middle, to page ninety-one, and looked.

I’m going to find him.

It was not what she had written in August. In August, in the printout, the line had been I will find him. I will. Two sentences, a catch in the middle. This was plain and level, almost without breath. I’m going to find him. A different woman, standing at a different wall.

But the paragraph did not end there.

“Is it all right?” said the bookseller.

“Yes,” said Emory, and he found he could hardly hear himself. “It’s fine. I’ll take it. Thank you.”

* * *

He read it in the room that had been hers.

He had not let anyone use it in five years. It was on the second floor of the house at the end of the point, a narrow plain white room with a desk under the western window and a view of the lamp, and he had kept it as one keeps the room of a child who has gone to sea. The desk was clear. The chair was pushed in. In the left-hand drawer, in a gray archive box he had labeled in capitals and not looked at in months, lay a hundred and sixty pages of English: her first draft of the first four chapters of The Drowned Hour, printed out that August to mark up by hand with a green pencil, and left on this desk when she had stopped being able to work in this room.

He took them out. He laid them in a stack on the left of the desk.

On the right he put the Norwegian paperback, the one with the broken spine and the pencil in the margins. In the middle he put the new one.

He read it as one reads a will. It took him through the night.

The first forty pages were no one at all. He had known they would be. They were competent, correct, grammatical, careful. Commas where the grammar demanded them. Sentences that ran out when they were finished. It was as if somebody had taken a clear glass and polished it, and polished it, until there was nothing left in it of the hand. He read page after page of it with his chin on his fist and the lamp turning outside the window, and the old well-trained animal in him lay down and said: no, this isn’t her. You were wrong. You wanted it too much.

He turned to page forty-one, and something shifted.

He could not have said what it was. A paragraph, an ordinary paragraph, in which a woman crossed a kitchen. She put down the cup. She went to the window, where the rain had begun, and stood. She did not turn when the door opened. He read it twice. He took out the Norwegian and found the passage, which ended, as the Norwegian does, with the weather: … hvor regnet hadde begynt, og sto der, i det mørke. The original had the dark at the end. The English had given it up. The English had swung the sentence, a little, like a door on a hinge, so that it fell not on the dark but on did not turn — on a verb, with a flat, dry, final weight, like a stone set down on a letter.

He sat very still.

Once is nothing, he thought. A translator can end a paragraph how she likes.

He took a pencil. He drew three columns on a clean page of the fourteenth notebook, and began, for the first time in his life, to do what she had once told him it was possible to do to a stranger’s voice: not read it, but weigh it. He took a hundred paragraphs from the Norwegian, at random, and counted the ones that finished on a verb. Fourteen. He took a hundred from her August pages, and counted. Seventy-one. He took a hundred from the Loomis & Vane, from pages one to forty, the tax-return pages, and counted. Thirteen. It was as it should be. She had been so careful.

He took a hundred from pages forty-one to a hundred and sixty. Twenty-two.

He took a hundred from the next hundred pages. Thirty-eight.

He took a hundred from the next. Fifty-three.

By the end of the night he had it plotted down the side of the page in neat dots, and it climbed. It climbed the way a tide climbs a beach, not smoothly, but with a reluctant push and slide and push, back and forth, each wave a little higher up the sand. She had come to the book frozen. She had come out of it like a woman waking in cold water, one limb at a time. Somewhere in the winter of the world, in a room he had never seen, she had begun to put her voice back; and she had not known she was doing it.

At twenty past five in the morning, in the blue before light, he came to the last page.

It was the child’s room. The woman, who had been looking for her daughter for three hundred and seventy-nine pages, comes at last into the small cold bedroom where the child has been sleeping the whole time, unharmed and unobserved, in a house across the street from her own. She does not wake her. She stands in the doorway until the light comes. And the last paragraph, in the Norwegian, ended as the whole book ended, on a sentence about the morning: … og det var morgen, og lyset kom.

In English it ended:

She stood in the doorway for a long time, listening to her daughter breathe, until the light came up the wall and touched the quilt and the small fist and the hair; and then, very quietly, so as not to wake her, she went in, and sat down on the edge of the bed, and stayed.

Emory read it.

He read it a second time, and a third. He closed the book. He sat with his hand flat on the cover, in the cold gray light, and the lamp went round once more in its housing, and was still; and he heard, quite clearly, in the empty room, in his own voice, something he had said in this very room, in June, with the sun lying on the floor, to a woman who had laughed.

I’d know it anywhere. In a hundred books. In a thousand.

“Hello, Cor,” said Emory.

He did not weep. He had expected to. He sat in her chair, at her desk, in her room, and was filled instead with a feeling so large and so clean and so quiet that it had no edges at all. It was like standing on a headland at dawn. Everything he had been holding in his hands for five years was suddenly, simply, gone, and what remained was a great wide shining flatness and a direction.

Stayed.

She had put it at the end. She hadn’t heard it. She, of all people, who could hear a misplaced comma through a wall.

He took out the notebook, and a pencil, and wrote under the last of the dots, in capitals, steadily: BERGEN.

* * *

Dr. Fenn took off her glasses and let them fall on their chain.

It was the second Tuesday in October, a clear bright cold day, with the harbor showing very blue beyond her window and the masts all standing still. He had come on time. He had sat in the same chair. He had spoken about the funeral, and the ham, and the scalloped thing, and Ned, and the empty bed in the front room, which Delia and her colleague had come for on the Monday and taken away in two parts; and he had spoken evenly, and with grief, in good sentences, and not one of them had held a hole.

“You’ve been very quiet,” said Fenn.

“I thought you liked quiet.”

“I like it when it means something.” She looked at him with her head on one side. She was sixty, and her face in the afternoon light looked like a good map, creased and exact. “Emory. I’ve been counting your okays for nearly five years. I know what you sound like when you’re keeping a thing behind your teeth. Today you’ve said it twice, and both times you meant it, and it’s a very odd thing. I don’t quite know where you’ve gone.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere.”

“Haven’t you?”

“I’ve been thinking of taking a trip.” He said it lightly. He had rehearsed it in the shower. “Ned thinks I should. There’s an exchange, with the Norwegian sea-rescue people, the Redningsselskapet. A few weeks in winter, on one of their stations. I’d learn something. I’ve been reading the language for years, I thought I might as well hear it.”

It was the cleanest lie he had ever told. It had no seam in it. He had taken his breath a full second early, in the elevator, and let it go on the last word, so that the half-beat never came; and he watched, with detached admiration, as she listened for it, and did not find it.

Fenn said nothing for a while. A truck went by on the street below. A gull came down to the ledge outside her window, looked in, and left.

“Where in Norway?”

“The west. Bergen, I think. That’s where they’ve a base.”

“Bergen.”

“I’m told it rains.”

“Em.” She leaned forward. She put her hands together in her lap, the thin competent hands of a woman who has held a good many people’s lives and put them gently down. “I want to tell you something, and I’d like you to listen to it, and not tell me okay. May I?”

“Yes.”

“For nearly five years you have been a very good patient. I mean that precisely. You’ve done everything I asked. You learned to catch yourself. You learned to say no in this room, once, to my face, about a window, and I thought it was the best hour of my career. And in the course of all that work, you learned to close the gap. You told me so. You told me you’d learned to breathe in early.” She paused. “I could always hear it, before. A little wrongness at the end of the sentence, like a drawer not quite shut. It was how I knew what you’d been doing. It was how I knew you were trying. And today you’ve sat in that chair for fifty minutes, and told me you’re going to the other side of the world, and I cannot hear a thing.”

“Then maybe it’s true.”

“Maybe.” She said it gently. “Or maybe you’ve finished learning. Do you see? That’s what frightens me. A man who can’t stop is a man I can treat. A man who has become so skilled at the look of stopping that he no longer needs the stopping —” She did not finish. “I have no instrument for that. I have no way to know.”

He looked at her. He was surprised, a little, to find that he was moved.

“I’d tell you if I was going to hurt someone,” he said.

It was an honest sentence. He listened to it all the way out, for the hole, and there was none, and he wondered, distantly, whether this was because it was true or because he’d stopped being able to tell.

“Would you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll ask you for one thing.” Fenn put her glasses back on. “Wherever you go, whatever it is that you are about to do. Do it in front of a witness. Someone who knows your name and what you are. Promise me that.”

“I promise,” said Emory.

She watched him a long moment through the lenses. She had seen nearly five years of him: the boy who had sat in that chair with his knees together and said I don’t see what the problem is, and the young man who had wept in it, and this man, with his coat on his knee and his hands at rest. She nodded slowly, as if he had said something else.

“There,” she said. “That one I couldn’t hear either.”

He stood. He shook her hand. At the door, with the light lying across the carpet, he turned and said, “Thank you, Marguerite,” which he had never called her; and she smiled, a little crookedly, and didn’t say anything; and he went down the three flights of stairs and out into the cold blue day, and she stood at her window a long time with her arms folded, watching him cross Exchange Street without once looking back, as a person walks who has a train to catch.

* * *

He left on the third of February, a Monday, at dawn.

He did it as he did all things, thoroughly. In December, with Ned’s blessing and Mary’s tears, he turned the rescue boat over to Cody Pratt for the winter, with the logbooks and the thermals and the spare radio, and stood on the dock with his hands in his pockets watching the younger man bring her round the point for the first time, white-knuckled and grinning. He wrote out the lamp schedule on an index card and taped it to the inside of the lantern-room door. He hired a boy from the high school to do the Wednesday tours. In the last week of January, he took the eleven keys off their carabiner, one by one, and laid them out on Mary Pratt’s kitchen table in a row, with a tag on each: house, boat shed, oil room, lamp, the Volvo, the old Pellerton barn, and five more that nobody had used in years.

“What’s that one?” said Mary, touching a small brass thing at the end.

“It opens the cellar.”

“Does it? I never knew there was a cellar door you needed a key for.”

“There isn’t now,” said Emory. “It’s off its hinges.” He folded her fingers over the row. “Keep these for me.”

He had always said: a man with one key has none. It was a joke, in the first place, from the summer of the lighthouse, over a ring of keys on a nail; and it had stopped being one a long time ago. He stood in the Pratts’ kitchen with the smell of ham and furniture polish and a clock ticking on the wall, and he thought of his mother in a front room saying them, and he put one hand into his coat. In the pocket was the key to the house. He held it a moment. Then he went back to the table and took the small brass one off the end of the row, the one that opened a door that was no longer there, and put it in his pocket beside the other.

Mary said nothing. She had gone very still. She was a sensible woman, and had spent a lifetime among men who went out in boats, and she knew a goodbye when she saw one.

“You’ll write,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’ll call.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll come home.”

He looked at her. And because she was kind, and was crying, and had put ham on his plate for twenty years, he took her hand and said it with the whole of his face, and with every ounce of the skill that he had.

“I’ll come home, Mary.”

It was perfect. It had no hole in it at all.

He flew from Portland to Boston, and from Boston to Oslo, and from Oslo, in the early dark of a Tuesday afternoon, across the mountains in a small propeller plane that shuddered and tilted in the wind and set down at last on a wet black runway in a country made of rain. The air outside the terminal doors was cold and fine and smelled of wet stone and diesel. Water hung in it as flour hangs in a mill. He stood on the curb with a single bag and watched the lights of the airport bus come swimming up out of the dark, with the word BERGEN lit above the windshield in amber, and a little coiled wind came off the fjord and touched his face like a hand.

He thought of his mother. He thought, as he had thought on the morning she died, of the cold small voice that was nobody’s, which had said Now.

He had promised that he would let her go.

He had been careful about the wording. He had gone over it a hundred times, in a gray room, with a green lamp, at night. Let them go, she had said. And he had said I promise, and she had seen the hole in it, and had not asked him to fill it. He thought she had known. He thought she had given him, in her last act, exactly enough room to do what he was going to do, and that she had done it because she loved him; and that she had done it, also, because she was fair, and a fair woman does not ask a man for a thing that he cannot give. He would let them go. He would never again put a hand on her that she didn’t want. He would not touch. He would not take. He would only look.

Looking is not holding, said the notebook, in capitals.

He got on the bus. He found a seat by the window. He put his forehead against the cold glass, and watched the rain run down it in long bright threads, and the lights of the town come up out of the dark ahead of him one by one, a long curved necklace laid on the black water.

Jeg kommer alltid til å finne deg, he said, under his breath, in a Norwegian that sounded as if he had been born there.

It was not a promise. It had never been a promise.

It was only a forecast.