They smelled the sea before they saw it.
It came through a crack in the window Sophie had left open a fraction — salt and cold and something wilder beneath it, the particular rawness of a coastline. Julian slowed the car as the road narrowed, stone walls rising on either side, the map on his phone directing them down a track that didn't look like it had been designed with anyone in mind except the people who already knew it was there.
"She chose well," Sophie said quietly, watching the sea appear between gaps in the hedge flat and grey and enormous, the horizon a clean line at the edge of everything. "Charlotte always said she wanted to live somewhere you could hear the water."
"She never mentioned it to me."
"She wouldn't have. It was the kind of thing she kept for people she was actu
