Sam's boots were wet.

He'd noticed ten minutes ago, standing on the harbour wall with his coffee and the dawn coming in grey and soft over the headland. The spray had come over the stones and found him. Nothing dramatic — a fine mist settling on the leather, darkening the toes, soaking through the seam where the left boot had needed restitching last winter. The way spray found everyone who stood too close to the edge on a morning like this.

Except Sam had never been too close. He'd stood in this exact spot since he was old enough to walk the harbour wall alone, and the water had always left him dry. A patch of pale stone where his feet were, spray arcing to either side, settling into its pattern around him the way currents settled around a fixed object. He'd never questioned it. The sea knew him. He knew the sea. They had an understanding that was older than language and required none.

The understanding had changed.

It had started in March — after the storm on the harbour wall, after the name that had come out of his mouth from somewhere he couldn't reach. Llŷr. He'd known it in the moment, the way you know things in dreams, completely and without question. By morning, it was just a sound. Welsh. Old. The sea had gone restless. Tides coming in a few minutes early. The harbour water sitting higher than the gauge said it should. A feeling, when he was working on an engine down at the slipway, that the water in the bilge was leaning toward him.

By April, it was worse. His oilskins were damp after every shift. Salt crusted on the collar of his jacket overnight, even when he'd hung it inside. The puddle that always formed near the diesel pump had started appearing three feet to the left — closer to where Sam parked the trolley.

And now, his boots. Wet on a wall that should have kept him dry.

The water wasn't hostile. That was the strange part. It wound around him the way a cat wound around your ankles when you came through the door — insistent, completely ignoring the fact that you hadn't invited it. Every wave that broke against the harbour stones sent a little more spray in his direction, landing on him with the accuracy of something that knew exactly where he was.

Sam drank his coffee. Watched the fishing boats.

Nerys was bringing the Madog in early, which meant the mackerel were running shallow, or she'd had a row with Huw about something. Probably both. Owen's boy was on the quay coiling rope with the concentration of someone doing it for the first time, and doing it wrong, but Owen was letting him get on with it. A yacht had come in overnight — unfamiliar, English registration, well-maintained. Someone with money and taste who'd picked the right coast.

These were Sam's mornings. The harbour waking in pieces, each piece slotting into the next. He knew the rhythm the way he knew the inside of a marine engine — every sound accounted for, every silence a potential problem. Fifteen years as a mechanic, ten on the lifeboat crew. Môrlan's harbour was as much his workspace as the boatyard, and he paid attention to it with the same quiet thoroughness he paid to everything.

A wave broke higher than it should have and spray reached his face. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. Salt on his lips. The water at the harbour mouth had a quality he couldn't name — a sheen beneath the surface, greenish, moving against the current. He'd seen it at night too, lying awake at two in the morning knowing the sea was doing something it shouldn't.

Footsteps on the stone behind him. Unhurried. The particular weight and pace of someone who didn't need to announce herself.

Cate appeared at his shoulder. No coffee — she'd have left hers in the office, half-drunk and already cold. She'd been harbourmaster for a month now and hadn't yet learned to finish a cup before something needed doing.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning."

They stood. The silence between them had been there since the first week and neither of them had ever felt the need to furnish it. They watched the water. The Madog was tying up and Nerys was shouting something at Huw that the wind carried away before it reached the quay.

"Your boots are wet," Cate said.

Sam looked down. The leather was dark to the ankle, a tide line of salt forming where it was already beginning to dry.

"Spray," he said.

Cate didn't answer immediately. She was looking at the wall where he stood — the patch of stone around his feet, damp now, the same grey as everywhere else. Sam knew what she was seeing, because Cate noticed things — it was what she did. She'd have clocked the dry patch weeks ago and filed it under interesting, not urgent.

"It used to go around you," she said. Not a question.

"Yeah."

"Since when?"

"Few weeks. Getting worse."

Cate considered this with the focused attention she gave to anything that didn't add up. Sam could see her weighing it — the practical part of her brain running through explanations, the other part, the part that had found a circle and fought a binding and brought her mother home, already knowing that no practical explanation was going to cut it.

"You should talk to Non," she said.

"I know."

"But you won't."

Sam finished his coffee. The sea sent another ripple of spray across the stone, and this time it found the gap between his collar and his neck. Cold. Familiar. Almost gentle.

"Not yet," he said.