The Cove

She stays in the forward cabin for an hour after the harbor disappears. You let her. You need the hour too.

When she finally comes up, the cap is gone and the windbreaker is tied around her waist, and she climbs into the cockpit blinking in the sun like something let out of a box.

"Is it safe?"

"Define safe."

"Nobody with binoculars."

You sweep the horizon. Blue. Blue. A smudge of Isola Fenice to the east. One fishing boat, far off, heading home. "Nobody with binoculars."

She sits down on the cockpit bench, then immediately stands up again because the boat heels in a gust and she isn't ready for it. She grabs the backstay. Laughs, short and startled, and claps a hand over her mouth.

"Sorry," she says through her fingers.

"For what?"

"I'm not supposed to laugh like that. With the noise. My etiquette tutor said it sounds like a goose being stepped on."

"Your etiquette tutor sounds like a joy."

"Madame Orsini. She's still alive. She's ninety-one. She'll outlive all of us out of spite." Lena sits again, carefully this time, and turns her face up to the wind. "Where are we going?"

"Cala Serena. An empty cove on the south side of a rock nobody owns. No village, no road, no reception most of the time. We'll anchor there tonight and figure out tomorrow tomorrow."

"Figure out tomorrow tomorrow," she repeats softly, like a phrase in a foreign language she wants to remember.

She is, it turns out, terrible at sailing and fantastic at asking questions.

What does that rope do. It's a line, not a rope. What does that line do. Why is it called a sheet if it's a line. Why does the boat lean. Is it supposed to lean that much. Why are you smiling, is that a yes. How do you know where the wind is coming from. Can you teach me. Can I steer. Can I steer now.

You let her steer. She grips the wheel at ten and two like a driving-school student and stares at the horizon so hard her eyes water. The Second Wind wanders twenty degrees off course and back again. A wave slaps the bow and showers you both with spray and she gasps, and then she laughs again, the goose laugh, loud and helpless, and this time she doesn't cover her mouth.

"Again," she says. "Can you make it do that again?"

"I don't control the waves, Lena."

"You look like you do."

You don't know what to do with that, so you adjust the jib sheet.

In the afternoon she makes sandwiches from Stelio's box with the concentration of a surgeon. They're structurally unsound. She watches you eat yours like your reaction is going to be printed in the paper.

"Good?"

"Very good."

"You're lying."

"The tomatoes are good."

"I sliced those." She looks so pleased with herself that you have to look away.

She asks about you, too. Where you're from. How long you've had the boat. Why Porto Vello, which she says the way people from the capital always say it, like it's a place you'd only end up by accident. You give her short answers. Inland. Three years. It was quiet. She notices the shortness. You can tell because she stops asking, and she watches you instead, which is worse.

"What did you do," she says eventually, "before the boat?"

"This and that."

"That's not an answer."

"You said no questions."

"I said no questions for me." But she smiles when she says it, and lets it go.

She tells you about the palace instead, a little. Not the parts that would be in a magazine. The parts that wouldn't. Three hundred and twelve rooms and every door with someone outside it. A schedule printed on cream card and slid under her door every night, every hour of the next day accounted for, down to "15:40–15:45: Rest." Lunches where she wasn't allowed to finish her plate because photographers might catch her chewing.

"It's beautiful," she says. "It's a beautiful room with no doors."

The sun is going down orange behind Cala Serena when you round the point. The cove is exactly as you remember it: a crescent of pale stone, water so clear you can see the anchor all the way to the sand, cliffs that blush pink in the evening. No houses. No lights. Just goats somewhere, complaining.

Lena stands up at the bow and doesn't say anything for a long time.

"Nobody knows I'm here, Ethan," she says at last.

"Nobody knows you're here."

She turns around. Her eyes are wet and she isn't bothering to hide it now. "Thank you, Ethan."

You eat on deck. You open a bottle of Stelio's cousin's wine that tastes faintly of pine. She asks for a second glass and then asks you whether she's allowed a second glass, and then laughs at herself for asking.

The stars come out all at once, the way they only do this far from anything. She lies back on the cockpit bench to look at them. You sit on the other side, a careful distance away.

That's when you hear it.

A thudding, low and rhythmic, coming over the cliffs from the north. You know it before you see it. You sit up.

"What is—"

"Helicopter."

A beam of white light swings out over the sea beyond the point, sweeping slowly along the water like a finger reading a page.

"Lights off," you say, and reach over and kill the cabin lamp and the anchor light in one motion. Then you grab her wrist. "Down. On the floor."

She goes down into the footwell of the cockpit and you go down with her, both of you pressed flat against the teak, the bench above you like a roof. The space is narrow. Her shoulder is against your chest, her head tucked under your chin. Her hair smells like salt and somebody else's shampoo, something expensive, the last thing she brought from the palace.

The thudding gets louder. The light comes around the point and into the cove.

It crawls across the water toward the boat. White. Blinding. It slides over the bow, over the cabin top, over the cockpit. For one long second it's directly on you, so bright you can see every grain in the deck, every freckle on the back of her hand where it's clutching your sleeve.

Neither of you breathes.

The light moves on. Slides off the stern. Sweeps the cliffs. The thudding fades north, then east, then becomes nothing, and the dark comes back, enormous and soft.

You realize you still have your hand around her wrist. Her pulse is going like a bird's.

"It's gone," you say.

"I know." She doesn't move. "Give me a second."

You give her a second. You give her ten. Then she sits up abruptly and doesn't look at you and says, "I'm going to bed," and disappears down the companionway. The forward cabin door clicks shut.

You sit alone in the dark cockpit with your heart still pounding, staring at the place where the light was.

Your phone buzzes in your pocket.

Unknown number. You open it.

It's me. Lena. Well. Elena.

Then the dots appear, and disappear, and appear again, ten feet away on the other side of a door.