It snowed on the fourteenth of December, the first real snow of the year, and I stood on the porch of my rented house on the south side of the city and watched it come down over the harbor. The house was small and old and I had bought it with money I did not have yet, against money I would earn, on the strength of one salvage job: a small coastal museum had agreed to let me curate an exhibition on the history of the ridge, and the museum's director had called me personally because the story had run and she had decided that hiring me was not a risk but a statement. It paid half what the gallery had paid. It paid enough.
Wes had gone back to the survey work. We were not together. We were something else, a thing with no name yet, a phone call every few days, a walk on the pier, a shared plat
