A Comfortable Silence

You take Hayle's money and walk away without looking back. Within a fortnight, you have resigned your post, packed what little matters, and settled in a coastal town where the nearest telegraph office is three miles inland. The sea air was supposed to be a cure.

It isn't. Every night the waves find the pier pilings in the dark, and in their patient, rhythmic striking you hear it — dit-dit-dah, dit-dah-dit — your name, spelled out with the tireless precision of something that has been waiting twenty years and can wait twenty more. You press your palms to your ears. The sound moves inside.

By winter, you have stopped trying to distinguish the ocean from the wire. Thomas Greer is still burning, and you are still listening, and the silence you purchased was never really silence at all.