Tearing my gaze from his, I peek again through the cab of the engine. I can’t see Victoria and Sean. They must still be on the ground. “Claire, come down from there.” If they’re, um, celebrating their engagement, I’d rather she didn’t see. I can talk knives with her, but I’m not volunteering to have that conversation with her. I also carefully don’t look at Peter again, at his intense eyes or softness of his black hair or the strength of his arms and bare tattooed chest. I wonder what it would have felt like if he’d welcomed me back from the void the way Victoria had greeted Sean, and it takes every bit of self-restraint not to look at his lips. “Let’s give them privacy.” I lead her around the house, and Peter follows.

Up ahead, I hear a noise. An unexpected, familiar, beautiful, crazy noise. Like waves, crashing on the shore. Speeding up, I round the corner of the house...and see the ocean.

A quarter mile away, waves lap at the desert. The dust storm swallows the ocean beyond, but the waves crash and crash and crash again on the sage brush and mesquites.

Peter stands next to me. I’m conscious of the warmth of his body near mine, and I think I will always know when he’s nearby. “Yours?”

“I don’t think I lost an ocean.” Except maybe I did, in a way. I had been thinking about the ocean while I was in the void. It can’t be a coincidence.

I’m walking toward it. Shortly, I’m kicking off my shoes and walking over the desert sand. It doesn’t feel the same as beach sand under my feet. It’s drier and hotter, but my eyes are glued on the beautiful, blue-and-white, wild, sparkling-in-the-sun waves. I’m aware of Peter behind me, watching me with his dark, beautiful eyes.

I inhale the smell of sea. It smells right. Salt water permeates my senses, filling my lungs so that I feel as if it’s leeching into my blood. The crash of the waves drowns out all other sound.

I wade in. The cool salty water wraps around my ankles and then withdraws. It hits again with enough force that I wobble. I put my arms out for balance. The horizon is shrouded in dust. But there’s ocean enough.

I wade deeper. Water pulls on my clothes, dragging them down around me, a weight. Soon, I’m up to my knees, my hips, and then I stretch my arms in front of me and glide forward. I feel the water curl around me.

I twist onto my back and look up at the sky.

It’s empty and blue, and for the barest instant, I feel as though I’m home.

Through the water, I hear splashing. I raise my head, and my legs sink. I tread water. The ocean floor, the desert, is close enough that my toes brush against it as I kick. Peter is wading into the water. He’s shed his trench coat and is shirtless. I stare at his tattoos, black feathers and swirls that curl over his chest muscles and around his biceps. Someday I need to ask him what they mean. He halts a few feet from me, the water halfway up his chest, just under his nipples. He looks like an angel, lost from Heaven, fallen into the sea. He thinks I’m beautiful, I think. I shake my head as if to clear that thought.

“You lost this ocean,” he says.

It’s a statement but I hear the question in it anyway. “Yes. I used to swim all the time as a kid.” There are memories upon memories in that simple sentence, a lifetime of moments drenched in salt water, of dreams and daydreams that I dared imagine while I floated on my back, of afternoons that didn’t end.

“Why did you stop?”

“I grew up.”

Peter quotes softly, “‘Why can’t you fly now, Mother?’ ‘Because I am grown up, dearest. When people grow up they forget the way.’”

“I ran out of time. I had to work. You know, those kinds of reasons. Bad reasons. Real reasons. But I did miss it. I don’t think I even knew I missed it. Do you think...it’s really here because of me?”

Instead of answering, he fills his lungs and then ducks underneath the water.

Mimicking him, I duck down, too, and open my eyes underwater. The salt water stings my eyes, but I ignore it. Underwater, the ocean teems with fish that shouldn’t be here: tropical fish of red, blue, and purple, iridescent deep-sea fish that glisten with their own rainbow light, freshwater salmon, dozens of pet-size goldfish... Suddenly, the fish part, startled, as Peter swims through the water toward me. He catches my hand, and we burst out of the water together to breathe. Water droplets bead on his chest and roll off his hair. And he looks so perfect that I want to touch him, to know he’s real.

“Thank you for saving me,” I say. “In the void.”

He nods. He’s looking at me so intensely that I feel as if I’m stuck in the sand. The water crashes around me, and I am motionless.

“You know it’s possible that there are sharks here,” he says.

“You had to say that.”

“I didn’t have to.” He’s grinning. “I chose to.”

I roll my eyes at him. Only a little while ago, I was so close to despair that I nearly died, and yet this man has the power to make me feel like laughing. “Luckily, I didn’t lose any sharks.”

“Have you ever seen one?”

“No.”

“Maybe you lost your chance to see one.”

“I’ve never seen a—”

Stepping closer, he puts his fingers on my lips. “Don’t tempt the void.” He’s dripping with water, seawater over his muscles. I’m aware my clothes are clinging to me. It’s suddenly harder to breathe air than it was to hold my breath under water. My eyes are drawn to his lips, and my body feels drawn to him as if my bones are metal and he is magnetic.

Abruptly, I step backward and look toward the void. It sits on top of the sea about a quarter mile away, plunging itself into the water. “Can it hear me? Is it alive?”

“Maybe, and not exactly.”

“But it can grow.”

“See, knew you were clever.”

I splash water at him. He skips backward and splashes me back. I sweep my arm through the water and fling the wave toward him. He retaliates by shoving water toward me. I skip back, trip, and fall into the water.

He holds out his hand like a gentleman. “I think that means I win.”

I kick his ankle in an attempt to sweep his feet out from under him. It doesn’t work. He doesn’t budge. Instead, he releases my hand, and I fall backward again, splashing into the water. When I come up to the surface, I’m laughing.

On the shore, in the desert, Claire is shouting, “Shark! Shark!” Victoria and Sean are shouting with her and pointing. Great, I think, everyone is mocking me and my ocean. Except that they couldn’t have heard Peter’s joke from shore...

I turn and see a dorsal fin. Waves push against my legs, and my feet sink into the sand. I feel the fish around my ankles, brushing their scales against my skin, touching their puckered lips to my legs and then vanishing in a swirl of water. Shark. I didn’t mean to—

And then the dolphin blows water out of its spout.

I laugh again, and my laugh feels wild and free.

It’s surreal, all of this. All of this is a crazy, extended, supertrippy dream.

“I am going for a ride,” I announce. I push forward through the water toward the dolphin. The dolphin swims in lazy figure eights. His fin breaks the waves. He’s silvery, sleek, and strong, as if he were a single streamlined muscle undulating in the water. I’ve never been this close to a dolphin before, but I am not going to be afraid. It’s a dolphin. And it’s here somehow, impossibly, miraculously, magically. I grab on to its fin, and the dolphin takes off.

Cutting through the waves, I feel as if I’m flying. Water streams around me, and my feet trail in our wake. The dolphin turns, whipping me around with him, and he shoots through the ocean back toward shore. I see Peter closer, closer, closer, and I release.

I sink down. My feet touch the bottom and I stand up, my toes in the sand. I feel light-headed and giddy. The dolphin leaps out of the water and then swims away. Peter is looking at me with an unreadable expression. “What?” I ask.