Sally spied a red boot on the shore. She ran into the water, not stopping until she was shoulder deep. Without magic, Sally now had the ability to dive underwater, but she wasn’t a strong enough swimmer to retrieve the body and could only paddle above it. When Ian awoke to find the bed empty he’d immediately come looking for her, questioning the man with his dog, and running as fast as he ever had. He didn’t bother to take off his coat or his shoes when he saw her. Instead, he ran straight away into the green water where he’d gone swimming so often as a boy. He’d nearly lost his life here one bleak night when he was drunk out of his mind—one minute he was floating and the next he was passed out, facedown, breathing in water rather than air, until he snapped out of it. He’d counted himself lucky that he was a strong swimmer.
“Stay where you are!” Sally called to him. The water weeds could drown a man, but Ian was heedless and reckless and didn’t listen to a word she said, and the truth was she couldn’t stop what was to be. Look what could happen. Look at all there was to lose. Everything worthwhile was dangerous, her aunts had told her and they were usually right.
When Ian reached Sally, he grabbed for her and insisted she swim for shore. Sally had been out there so long her teeth were chattering with cold. “Go to the inn and have them call for an ambulance.”
Sally did as he said and swam to the shallows. But by the time she was out of the water, she realized why he’d demanded that she go back to the inn. He didn’t wish for her to catch sight of Franny as she now was, but Sally turned to see him carry the body to the shore, limp and heavy with water. There was no need for an ambulance. Sally stayed where she was on the shore. Franny was an old woman, but she looked so young, little more than a girl, her red hair wringing wet, leaving scarlet drops of madder root tint on the grass.
Ian delivered Franny to the bank of reeds. Sally knelt beside her, inconsolable, her face streaked with tears. She leaned down to place her ear to her aunt’s chest. No heartbeat. There was no sound at all. It was so quiet here, even the toads were silent, and the beetle had stopped its dreadful clatter. Sally’s weeping was the only sound. She had called Franny on the telephone when she was four years old, when tragedy struck and her parents died in a house fire, and she and Gillian were left alone. We’re coming to live with you, Sally had said, and they had, and everything their lives had become had been due to the loving care of their aunts. It was funny how you could come to love people who began as strangers, how they could change your fate, how surprised you could be by how grateful you were.
“I can’t give her up yet,” Sally told Ian and he understood and sat in silence while she sobbed in the grass. This is what love was, you stayed when you wanted to run away. You held on when you knew you had no choice but to let go.
Later, after the ambulance had come and the family had been asked to sit down in the parlor of the Three Hedges Inn to be told what had occurred, after Vincent had openly wept, and Kylie had been told none of this had been her fault, Ian finally went up to Sally’s room and stripped off his sopping wet clothes. He was still shaking from the cold when Sally followed with an armful of borrowed clothing the bartender kept in a bureau. Black trousers, a white shirt, a black tie. She clasped them to her chest, shy and reserved, but burning all the same. She wondered what it would feel like to be in love without holding anything back, to give everything you were to another person and expect everything in return. The story of Ian’s life was written all over him, but the one place he had never covered with ink was his heart. That was hers if she wanted it. She didn’t have to read his mind to know that, he told her out loud. He had dedicated himself to being alone, no matter how many women he was with, always concealing who he was. No one had ever read his story before. No one knew him. He was well aware that he talked too much, but he didn’t speak now. They wondered if they dared to do this, and then they stopped thinking. Thinking was good for some things, but not for others. They felt the sting of what was to be before it happened, a siren they would answer, gratefully and desperately. Ian went to Sally and unbuttoned her soaking-wet dress. She was slow to kiss him back, and then she wasn’t. His hands were hot even though the rest of him would be chilled for days to come. It was mortal love they had, but love all the same, deeper than the water beyond the fens, as deep as could be. This day had changed them. For this, and for a hundred other things, Sally would always be grateful to Franny, for on the day her aunt died, she was lucky enough to fall in love.