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They walked back to the village as the market opened. Esmé saw them coming and smiled, sweeping the salt from her doorstep. The bowl of memory was gone. In its place was a single dried lavender flower.

“What is it?”

Vince.

When she reached the shore, her father was waiting. Not with anger. With a life jacket. He had watched her steal the boat. He had called the coast guard. But when they arrived, there was no boat to find—only a girl floating on her back in the shallows, smiling at the sky.

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Her father, the silent shipwright, finally spoke. “I never built a boat for myself. Only for others. I was afraid to leave. I was more afraid to stay.”

And the girl would sit down, because that’s how memory works. Not as a chain. As a current. And currents always return to the shore. They walked back to the village as the market opened

That night, she stole one of her father’s unfinished boats—a shallow-hulled punt meant for calm waters. She rowed into a sea that wanted to kill her. The wind spoke in tongues. The waves rose like gray cathedrals. But Laure did not sink. The liquid memory inside her veins hummed like a tuning fork, aligning her with the current.