She woke to the sound of a chair on the porch.
It was a small sound. The kind of sound a wooden chair makes when someone leans back in it. She had not heard the chair before. She did not know there was a chair on the porch. She lay in the bed and listened.
The chair made the sound again.
She got up. She put on the slippers. She went to the window. The window of the bedroom looked out over the front of the cottage, and there was a porch below the window, and on the porch there was a man.
He was sitting in a chair she had not seen before — a wooden chair with a slatted back, the colour of old honey. He was reading a book. The book was open on his knee. He had one hand on the page and the other hand on the arm of the chair, and he was not moving. He was reading, or he was holding the book in the shape of reading, and he was very still, the way a person is still when they are thinking about something that has nothing to do with the book.
She stood at the window and looked at him.
He was tall, though she could not tell how tall because he was sitting. His hair was pale brown and did not stay put. His shoulders were straight but not stiff. He wore a jacket that was slightly too formal for sitting on a porch in the late-afternoon light. He wore no shoes. His feet were on the porch boards, and his socks were pale, and one of his socks had a darn at the heel. She noticed the darn. She did not know why she noticed the darn.
He turned a page.
She stood at the window for a long time. She thought: I should not let him know I am here. I should observe him. I should be careful. I have written myself a warning.
She went to the wardrobe. She put on the dress that was least hers. She went to the small mirror on the back of the door. She looked at her face. Her face was her own face, and she looked tired, and her hair was the way her hair always was. She thought: I am going to go downstairs and open the front door and walk onto the porch and say good afternoon to a man I have not met, in a place I do not recognise, in a dress that does not belong to me.
She thought: I am going to do this anyway.
She went down the stairs. She went through the hall. She undid the brass hook on the front door. The hook gave, and the door opened, and the air outside was the same air as the day before, the late-afternoon air that did not move, and the porch was three steps down from the front step, and the man was sitting in his chair.
He did not look up.
She stood in the doorway for a moment, and then she stepped onto the porch. The boards of the porch were warm under her feet. She did not say anything. She stood a few feet from his chair. He turned a page. He read. After a long time, he said, without looking up: I did not want to be the one to come in.
She said: I did not want you to come in either.
He turned a page. He did not look up.
She said: I have poured tea for you twice. I have not drunk it.
He said: I know. I have been drinking it after you have gone to bed.
She sat down on the porch step. The step was warm. She put her hands on her knees. She looked at the sea, which was the same sea as the day before. She said: what is your name.
He closed the book. He put his hand on the cover. He looked at the cover of the book for a long time, as if reading the title, although the title was a thing he had read many times before. Then he said: Alastair.
She said: Alastair what.
He said: I don’t know. Just Alastair.
She said: that is not a full name.
He said: it is the only one I have.
She looked at him. He looked at her, and his eyes were the colour of damp moss, and his face was a face that had not decided what expression to wear. He was, she thought, somewhere in his thirties, though she could not have said why. He did not look like a man who had lived very long. He looked like a man who had been made quite recently, and who had been made with care, and who was not entirely sure what to do with himself now that he was here.
She said: where did you come from.
He said: here.
She said: here is not a place.
He said: it is for me. I have been here as long as I have been anywhere. I do not remember a before.
She thought about this. She thought: a man has been living in this cottage since before I arrived, and he has no memory of arriving, and he does not have a surname, and he has been drinking my tea.
She said: how long have you been here.
He said: I don’t know. There has only ever been late afternoon.
They were quiet for a while. He opened the book again. He did not read. He held it in the shape of reading. After a long time, he said: would you like to walk down to the sea.
She said: yes.
He stood. He was taller than she had thought. He was taller than Daniel. He was taller than anyone she had ever dated. He put the book under his arm. He came down off the porch, and she came down off the porch after him, and they walked together down the path between the two low stone walls, and at the gate he stopped and looked at the sea and said, in a low voice, as if to himself: the tide is wrong.
She said: the tide is wrong how.
He said: I don’t know how to say it. The water is too far in, or too far out, or both. It is not at the place it should be at this time of day.
She looked at the sea. She did not know anything about tides. She had grown up inland. She had moved to the coast for university, and then she had stayed, because the coast was easier to be lonely in than a city, and she had never learned how to read the water. She said: how do you know what time of day it is.
He said: I don’t. I know it is late afternoon because the light is the colour of late afternoon. I know it is not the same late afternoon as yesterday, because the sand has been disturbed in a different way.
She looked at the sand. The sand was the colour of wet cardboard. She could not see that it had been disturbed at all. She said: I don’t see it.
He said: no.
He looked at her then, and the way he looked at her was the way she imagined her mother had once looked at her, in a photograph she had not seen, the way a person looks at a thing they have not yet decided whether to be tender with. He said: would you like to walk along the edge.
She said: yes.
They walked. Their feet made no sound in the sand. The water came up to their ankles and went back. The water was very cold. She said: I thought I was dead when I arrived here.
He said: I thought so too.
She said: are we both dead.
He said: I don’t know what we are. I have not died, as far as I can tell. I have not been born, as far as I can tell. I am here, and you are here, and the kettle boils, and the tea is good, and I don’t know what that makes us.
She said: the tea is good.
He said: the tea is good.
They walked. He did not ask her any questions. He did not ask her where she had come from. He did not ask her why she had stepped into the road. He did not ask her anything. He walked beside her, and his shoulder was a hand’s breadth from hers, and he did not touch her, and she did not touch him, and the water came up and went back, and the light did not change.
After a long time she said: I found a letter in the bedroom drawer. It was addressed to me. I had written it. The date was a date in the future.
He said: yes.
She said: do you know about the letter.
He said: I know there is a letter. I do not know what is in it.
She said: the letter says not to trust the man who finds me.
He stopped walking. He stood at the edge of the water. He did not look at her. He looked out at the sea. After a long time he said, in a voice that was very quiet: I see.
She said: I am not sure I wrote it.
He said: no.
She said: I am not sure I should trust the letter.
He turned to her then, and his face was the face of a man who had heard something he had been afraid of hearing, and was now standing in the hearing of it. He said: I am not asking you to trust me. I am asking you to walk with me.
She looked at him. She thought: he is afraid of me.
She thought: he is afraid of me in a way that is not the way a man is afraid of a woman. It is the way one is afraid of a thing one has made, when the thing one has made has begun to look back.
She said: all right.
They walked on. They did not speak. The sea went on. The light did not change. After a long time, he stopped at a rock that jutted out into the water, and he sat on it, and she sat beside him, and he said, without looking at her: would you like to come back to the cottage for dinner.
She said: yes.
He said: I will make the eggs the way you like them.
She said: I have not told you how I like my eggs.
He looked at her then. He looked at her in a way she could not place. He said: no. You have not.
He said, after a moment, without looking at her: I am sorry for that. I am sorry that you did not tell me, and that I know anyway. I do not know how I know. I only know that I do.
He got up from the rock. He held out his hand. She took it. His hand was warm. They walked back up to the cottage. At the gate, he let go of her hand, and he did not look at her, and she did not look at him, and they went into the cottage, and he began, in the kitchen, to make the eggs the way he had not been told to make them, and the way he made them was exactly the way her mother used to make them, with the white set and the yolk still soft, and a little salt, and a little pepper, and a piece of toast cut into soldiers, and she sat at the table and watched him, and the second cup was not on the table, and the kitchen was warm, and the clock still said three, and she did not ask him how he knew.
