By ten fifteen, Delia had learned that coastal weather forecasts were expressions of hope.
The morning had begun with a pale strip of blue above the cottage. Now the sky was low and solid, and the woman leading the walking group was telling twelve people that they could turn back whenever they wished, provided they told somebody first.
“I’m serious about that,” she said. “Don’t wander off and make me count you twice.”
Delia liked her immediately.
Soren arrived while the woman was explaining the route. He wore a dark jacket and carried a small backpack. His hair was flattened on one side, and he looked less composed than he had behind the cinema counter.
“Sorry,” he whispered, taking a place beside Delia.
“Did the ticket machine escape?”
“No. Alarm failed.”
“Mechanical trouble everywhere.”
“I turned it off. The alarm was innocent.”
She smiled and looked back toward the guide before he could see how pleased she was that he had come.
The path climbed above the beach between tough grasses and low shrubs. At first everyone walked in a loose cluster, making the small, cautious remarks people used when they did not yet know whom they would like. A man asked Delia where she was staying. She told him. He explained that he and his partner came every spring because the summer traffic was intolerable.
She said traffic could be difficult, a sentence so empty she wanted to retrieve it.
Soren had fallen behind to close a gate. When he caught up, he was talking to an older woman about a film she remembered seeing at The Lantern when she was young. Delia listened without joining in. He asked questions rather than correcting her uncertain recollection, although he did suggest that the actor she named might have been somebody else.
“No,” the woman said firmly. “I was in love with him. I’d know.”
“Fair enough.”
They reached a rise where the sea opened out below them. Wind pressed Delia’s jacket against her body. She put a hand over her hair, then gave up when several curls escaped at once.
Soren stopped beside her.
“Worth getting up?” he asked.
“I was up.”
“Worth watching me arrive late, then.”
She looked at the water. Close to shore it was green, farther out a darker gray. White lines appeared and vanished where waves broke over submerged rock.
“Yes,” she said.
He followed her gaze and said nothing for a while.
Ahead, a couple had stopped to take a photograph. The man held the woman’s scarf away from her face while she laughed. They looked comfortable together, careless in the way Delia had once believed comfort made possible.
She turned away before the photograph was taken.
The guide announced that they would continue to the next shelter and assess the weather there. Several walkers discussed waterproof clothing with the solemnity of people sharing professional knowledge. Delia checked that her phone was zipped inside her pocket.
“You all right?” Soren asked.
“Yes.”
It came out too sharply.
He stepped aside to let her go first along the narrower stretch. She regretted the tone, then resented having to think about it. The path required attention. She watched where she put her feet.
Before the shelter, they stopped at a weathered information board. Its transparent cover had clouded until the map beneath looked submerged. The guide explained that there had once been a small loading platform below them, used for moving stone onto boats.
A boy near the front asked where it had gone.
“Storm took most of it,” the guide said. “Long before my time.”
“Why did they build it there?”
“It was where they needed it.”
The boy seemed dissatisfied. Delia understood the feeling. Adults often answered a practical question with a sentence that closed it.
She crouched a little beside the board, trying to see through the milky cover. At one edge, beneath a spreading patch of green, a black line connected the shore to a rectangle inland.
“There might have been a quarry up there,” she said. “See that line? It could be a track.”
The guide came closer. “There was. Behind the rise.”
The boy peered at the board, then at the sea.
“So they didn’t have to take it all the way around?”
“I think so,” Delia said.
He nodded, satisfied this time, and ran back to the adult who had brought him.
Soren stood beside her while the others began moving again.
“You do that quickly.”
“What?”
“Find the bit someone actually wants to know.”
She straightened. “Sometimes. Sometimes I tell a room full of children something fascinating and discover they all want to know whether the display animal is real.”
“Is it?”
“Depends which one.”
He looked down at the board. “I’d never noticed the track.”
“Neither had I until he asked.”
He took a photograph of the map, wiped the rain beginning to spot his screen, and put the phone away.
“What for?” she asked.
“There’s an old short film in the local collection. Boats, mostly. I wondered if this was the place in one of the shots.”
“Do you show it?”
“Occasionally. People like seeing something they recognize. Then they argue about the year.”
“Do you know the year?”
“Usually. Doesn’t stop them.”
They hurried to catch the group. Delia felt warmer from the climb, her earlier sharpness fading into ordinary concentration. Soren moved ahead to hold back a branch that had bent across the path. She ducked beneath it and thanked him, then caught it for the person behind her so he could let go.
The branch sprang free after the last walker, scattering cold droplets down the back of his collar. He froze, shoulders lifted, then turned a look of such wounded surprise toward the shrub that Delia had to bite the inside of her cheek.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I haven’t.”
“You’re about to.”
At the shelter, the scattered drops became a steady rain. Everyone moved under the low roof, bringing with them the smell of wet fabric. Delia stood near the edge beside the laughing woman from the photograph.
“Your husband takes a lot of pictures,” she said, because the man was still outside trying to photograph the sea.
“My brother,” the woman replied.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“No harm done.” She pulled off a glove with her teeth. “He sends them to his wife. She couldn’t get away this week.”
Delia looked out at him. He was holding the phone high, trying to keep rain off the lens with one hand.
“We bring our father down every year,” the woman went on. “He’s in the hotel today. Says he’s seen enough weather.”
Delia smiled weakly.
“I assumed.”
“People do.”
The woman shook water from her scarf and moved to make room for another walker. Delia stepped back against the wall, making room for the brother when he came in.
Soren stood on the other side of the shelter, trying to zip his jacket with damp fingers. She watched him struggle, felt an unhelpful urge to do it for him, and kept her hands in her pockets.
The guide stepped out from under the roof, looked at the thickening rain, and came straight back.
“We’re turning around.”
One man protested that the next viewpoint was close.
“It will still be close another day.”
Delia laughed. Soren looked across and caught her eye.
On the way down, the group stretched into pairs and threes. Water ran along the center of the path. Soren walked beside Delia where it widened, behind her where it narrowed.
After a while she said, “Sorry I snapped earlier.”
“You didn’t particularly.”
“I did a little.”
“All right. A little.”
She laughed again, surprised by how easy it was to admit something when the other person didn’t insist she hadn’t done it.
“I keep looking at strangers and deciding things about them.”
“Dangerous hobby.”
“What have you decided about me?”
He glanced at her. “That you prefer a film to tell you where everyone’s going.”
“That’s evidence, not a guess.”
“I’m trying to be careful.”
The rain made small dark spots on his collar. One drop clung to his beard. Delia looked away from it too late to avoid noticing that she wanted to touch it.
“Do you live here?” she asked.
“Over the cinema.”
“That sounds convenient.”
“It is. Also makes it easy to go downstairs and do one more thing at eleven at night.”
“Does anyone object?”
The question sounded different after she said it. She wished she had asked whether the noise traveled upstairs.
He took a few steps before answering.
“No one there now. I’m divorced.”
“Oh.”
“Four years.”
“Any children?”
“No.”
She nodded, watching a ribbon of water curl around a stone.
“I wasn’t conducting an interview.”
“It was a fairly short one.”
“Still.”
He pulled his hood up, then immediately pushed it back because it blocked his view.
“It’s all right,” he said.
They walked quietly until the path broadened near the gate. The wind had turned, driving the rain at their faces. Delia’s shoes made a soft, unpleasant sound with every step.
“I was told these were water resistant.”
“Have they resisted at all?”
“Briefly. Then they welcomed it in.”
Soren looked down at his own shoes. “Mine surrendered at the shelter.”
She began to laugh. It was not especially funny, but the sound arrived with force, and once it started she couldn’t stop. Her wet hair clung to her cheek. Her socks were cold. The man beside her was holding his hood in place with one hand while rain ran down his nose.
He laughed too, partly at her, she thought, and she didn’t mind.
At the gate the guide counted everyone. The man who had wanted the next viewpoint was now asking where he could get coffee. His wife, or sister, or someone Delia knew absolutely nothing about, handed him a tissue.
They dispersed by the beach steps. A few went toward the town center. Others hurried to parked cars. Delia and Soren stood beneath the narrow awning of a closed kiosk while she tried to operate her phone with damp fingertips.
“Checking the forecast?” he asked.
“I’m going to complain to it.”
He leaned a shoulder against the wall. Up close, she could see a faint line where his collar had rubbed his neck. He smelled of rain and clean wool. The awareness embarrassed her so much that she dropped the phone into her pocket without checking anything.
“I should go change,” she said.
“Me too.”
Neither moved immediately.
He looked toward the road, then back at her.
“Would you like coffee tomorrow?”
She heard the difference between that and the walking group. No list of other people. No public schedule he happened to be attending.
“What time?”
“Eleven? There’s a place near the harbor. I can meet you outside the cinema and walk over.”
She could have asked whether he meant it as a date. She could have told him she had only been unmarried for a few days, which wasn’t quite the right word for what had happened. Her mind offered explanations, qualifications, ways to make the answer less exposed.
“Yes,” she said.
His smile came slowly. “Good.”
“Assuming your alarm cooperates.”
“I’ll give it a formal warning.”
He stepped out from under the awning first, lifting a hand as he turned toward town. Delia watched him go for several steps, then made herself look at the beach instead.
Back at the cottage, she left her shoes on a folded newspaper by the door and peeled off her socks. Her toes were pale and wrinkled. She rubbed them dry with a towel, sitting on the floor beside the heater, and laughed once more at the sound her shoes had made.
The room was warm enough that the window began to mist at its lower corners. She put on dry clothes, made tea, and stood in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to stop its noisy complaint.
Coffee tomorrow.
She took a mug from the shelf, put it down, and took another because the first had a chip at the rim.
It was only coffee. Yet she had looked at his mouth beneath the rain and known she was looking. That fact could not be reduced by choosing a casual name for the invitation.
Her phone lay on the table. She picked it up, opened a message to Yasmin, and typed Met someone.
She stared at the words.
They looked like the beginning of a story she didn’t know how to tell. Yasmin would ask who, and whether he was nice, and whether Delia was sure this was a good idea. Or she might be delighted too quickly, which would be worse.
Delia deleted the message and sent a photograph of her shoes instead.
Walk was damp.
Yasmin replied with a picture of a paintbrush submerged in a jar of muddy water. Same.
Delia put the phone down and opened her book. This time she read six pages before she lost the thread. She went back one paragraph, found her place, and continued.
By late afternoon the rain had stopped. Sunlight caught the wet window box, turning each leaf bright at the edge. Delia went outside to hang her socks over the back of the porch chair. A couple passed on the public path below, walking apart, then coming together to let someone else through.
She let them pass without deciding anything about them.
Inside, her orange notebook lay open to yesterday’s list. She wrote coffee beneath the walking group’s time, then stopped before adding a question mark.
She had already said yes.