The rain came off the Atlantic in sheets, and I stood in it with my hand over the flowerpot and my fingers numb, because I had spent the last six hours driving from Dublin and I was not ready to be dry yet. The pot was terracotta, cracked along one side, and I had lifted it a thousand times as a girl to get the spare key my mother kept there. My sister had kept the same pot. My sister had kept the same habit. The key was underneath, cold and slick with rain, and when I turned it in the lock the door swung in like it had been waiting for me. I stood on the step a while longer, listening to water drum the gutter. A seagull screamed somewhere over the harbor. In the corner of the yard, the old buoy my father had painted blue in 1974 was still leaning against the wall, and the paint had peeled down to grey. I stepped inside and closed the door on the weather. The cottage smelled of woodsmoke and salt and something else, something under it, a smell like wet animal and pine that I could not place. The kitchen lamp was on over the table, the little brass thing with the green shade that Siobhan had bought at a car boot sale in Galway the year she decided she was going to stay here forever. The lamp was on. The rain was coming down hard, the whole coast grey as a wet slate, and someone had left the lamp on in my dead sister's kitchen. I put my bag down and my hand found the back of a chair before the rest of me did. The table was scrubbed clean except for two things. A note, torn from a notebook and weighted down. And the weight itself, iron, grey with rust at the edges, stamped with a curling fish and a number. A fishing weight, the kind the co-op handed out at the start of every season so the counts could be tracked. My sister had a hundred of these in her shed. She had left this one on the table. I picked up the note first, because you save the hard thing for last, that is what a year of interview rooms teaches you. The handwriting was Siobhan's, sloped and hurried and pressing too hard on the paper, the way it always got when her hands were shaking. Two words. You're home. I put the note down. Outside the window the harbor lights were just coming on, three of them, smeared yellow in the rain, and the boats were all tied up and knocking against the wall. I counted them without meaning to. Detective's habit. Twenty boats in the harbor and every one of them in. On a Tuesday in the middle of the season, with the mackerel running. Then I heard the step behind me and every hair on my arms stood up. "You left the key under the pot," a man said. I turned slow. The door to the back hall was open, and he was standing in it with his shoulders filling most of the frame, dark auburn hair plastered flat from the rain, a jacket dripping onto the flagstones. Grey eyes, watchful, set deep in a face that had spent a lot of years squinting into weather. The smell in the cottage was stronger now, that animal and pine, and I knew without knowing how I knew that it came from him. "Most people knock," I said. "I did knock. Twice. You were standing in the yard staring at the buoy." He nodded at the table. "Don't touch the weight." I looked down. My fingers were a few inches from it, close enough that I had not noticed my own hand moving. I pulled them back and put them in my coat pockets. "You are Declan," I said. "The harbormaster." "Aye." "My sister mentioned you." I did not say how. Siobhan had mentioned him the way you mention weather that might turn. "I am sorry about Siobhan." He said it plainly, no softness laid over it, and I respected that more than a whole wake's worth of condolences. He stepped out of the doorway and I got the full measure of him. He was tall and built like a man who worked with his hands, not a man who went to a gym. There was a small white scar through one eyebrow, old and faded, and his collar was turned up badly on one side, as if he had dressed in a hurry. "Where did you find her?" I asked. "Off the headland. Under the rocks." He crossed to the table and stopped on the far side of it, and there was nothing between us but the note and the weight and the smell of the sea coming off his coat. "The coroner said the water. She had been in it a night." "And no one thought to call me." "We did call you. Four times. You did not answer." The shame came up hot in my throat. Four times. There had been a bad stretch of months, a bad stretch of bottles, and I had a memory of a phone lighting up face down on a counter and me not turning it over. I looked at the weight so I would not have to look at him. The fish on it was worn nearly smooth. "The co-op hands these out," I said. "Why would she leave it out?" "Siobhan did a lot of things I did not understand." He was watching me the way a man watches a dog he is not sure of. "What did she tell you, before?" "Nothing. She told me nothing. I have not spoken to my sister in a year." I heard how that sounded. "Not properly. She wrote letters. Birthdays. I never wrote back." Declan said nothing. His silence had a weight to it that made me want to fill it, and I clamped my mouth shut and did not. "The funeral is Thursday," he said at last. "Father Byrne will do the mass. She would have wanted the small one." "She would have wanted the one with the singing." My voice came out thinner than I expected. "She used to say the small funerals were for people with no friends." "Then it is a good thing she had half the village." He reached across the table and, before I could stop him, closed his fingers around the fishing weight. His hand was broad and there was a callus on the side of his thumb, and I watched him do it and felt something in my chest pull tight, a tug behind the ribs like a line going taut. He noticed. His eyes came up fast and fixed on mine and he went very still, the way a hare goes still in a field. "What," I said. "Nothing." He put the weight in his jacket pocket and his voice had changed. "I will take this. You have enough to be getting on with." "Put it back." "No." "It is not yours to take." I stepped around the table. The floorboards were cold under my socks and I was aware of my own heartbeat, of the rain, of the small space between us narrowing. "This is my sister's house. That is my sister's table. Put the weight back and get out of my kitchen, or I will walk down to the barracks and tell them the harbormaster is robbing a dead woman." His jaw worked. For a moment he looked like he wanted to laugh, and then he did not look like that at all. "You will not go to the barracks." "Try me." "When Siobhan died," he said, slowly, picking his way, "there were things found on the rocks that the coroner did not put in his report. The sergeant in this town is a good man. He is also a man who has lived here his whole life, and there are questions he knows better than to ask." He took a breath. "I am asking you to trust me for one night. Keep the door locked. Do not go out to the headland. And do not ask anyone in this village about the weight." The lamplight sat on his cheekbone. Rain ran off his jacket onto the flagstones. I could smell him, pine and wet wool, and under that the sea, and I had the sudden, ridiculous notion that I could smell whether he was lying. I did not know how. I knew the thought had come from somewhere very old in me and that it was not the drink talking, because I had not had a drink since Galway. "I am not going to do what you tell me," I said. "I have had a year of people telling me what to do and it went badly for everyone." "That I believe." The corner of his mouth moved. Then he looked at me properly, and his grey eyes were not cold at all, they were tired, and there was something behind the tiredness that I could not name. "You have her eyes. Siobhan's. I did not expect that." "Everyone says I have her eyes." "They are wrong." He said it quietly. "She had the sea in hers. You have the sky." The line landed in a room that was too quiet, and I felt my face heat, and I hated that. He was a stranger. He was a stranger in my sister's kitchen taking my sister's things. "Get out," I said. He went. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at me, and the rain behind him was a grey curtain and the smell of the sea came in. "The lock on the back door is broken," he said. "Use the bolt. It is stiff, so put your shoulder behind it." Then he was gone down the path and I heard the harbor gate click, and I stood in the kitchen with the lamp hissing and my hands shaking, and I could not tell whether it was the grief or the man or the fact that I had counted twenty boats and every one of them had been in the harbor on a Tuesday in the season. I turned the key in the door and threw the bolt, which was stiff, and I put my shoulder behind it. Then I went through the cottage. I told myself it was to find clean sheets. It was a lie. I opened the dresser drawers and looked at my sister's jumpers folded in a way I had never been tidy enough to manage. I checked the windows one by one, and at the last one, the little one that faced the yard, I stopped. The yard was dark and the buoy was a black shape against the wall. Above it the rain had thinned and the moon was coming through, nearly full, and I could see the harbor beyond the gate and the boats knocking in the swell. There was a wolf standing on the headland. It was far off, up on the rocks where the land fell away into the Atlantic, and it was enormous, grey and silver in the moonlight, and it was not moving. It was looking down at the village. At the cottages, at the harbor, at the one square of yellow light in Siobhan's kitchen window where I stood with my hand on the glass. I did not move either. I watched it the way you watch a thing that has no business being there and knows it. There were no wolves in this part of Ireland. There had never been wolves in this part of Ireland. My father had trapped rabbits and mended nets and told me there were no wolves left in the whole country, and I had believed him the way children believe. The wolf lifted its head. The moon was behind it and I saw the shape of its jaw and the length of its legs and the way it stood on the rock like a man stands on a quay looking at his own boats. Then it turned and it was gone into the dark, and the headland was only rocks and grass and the wind, and my heartbeat was loud in my ears. I let go of the window. I went to the kitchen and I took the note off the table and I read the two words again, the sloped handwriting pressing through the paper. You're home. And under my fear, under the grief, something in me had answered the wolf the way you answer your own name. I stood in my sister's kitchen with the note in my hand and I was certain of exactly one thing, and it was not a thing I could explain to the sergeant or the coroner or the harbormaster with his grey eyes and his stiff lock. The wolf had been looking for me.

I did not sleep. I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea that went cold in my hands and watched the window for the wolf until the grey light came up over the harbor and the gulls started arguing on the pier. By morning I had decided two things. The first was that I had seen what I had seen. The second was that I was going to be very careful about who I told. The weight was not on the table. Declan had taken it, and the empty spot where it had sat was a clean circle in the dust, and I sat looking at that circle and drinking cold tea and thinking about a man who would pocket a dead woman's things and then tell me not to ask questions. I had interviewed men like him. That was the trouble. I had sat across from men like him in grey rooms with bad coffee and watched them be reasonable and helpful and steady, and half of them had been exactly what they seemed and the other half had been something else entirely, and the tell was always small. A man who gave you too much detail. A man who knew the shape of a question before you finished it. Declan had told me about the coroner and the sergeant before I had asked. At eight I washed the cup, put on my coat and walked down to the harbor. The rain had stopped but the wind had not, and it came across the water sharp enough to make my eyes stream. The village was smaller in daylight than it had been in my memory. A row of cottages along the road, whitewashed and slate roofed, nets drying on the walls. The co-op hall with its green door and its noticeboard full of tide tables. O'Rourke's shop, which had been O'Rourke's shop when I was a girl and was still O'Rourke's shop, though the O'Rourke was dead and his daughter ran it now. The pier, the twenty boats, the smell of diesel and salt and old rope. People nodded to me. That was all. A nod and a look away. In Dublin a wake drew neighbors out of their houses like wasps to jam, but here the village had the look of a place holding its breath. Declan was on the pier with a clipboard, checking something off against the boats, and he saw me coming from a long way off. He did not look surprised. He handed the clipboard to a thin young man in a yellow oilskin and walked to meet me at the top of the steps. "You slept," he said. "I sat up. There is a difference." I put my hands in my pockets. "I want the weight back." "You are not getting it back." "Then tell me why." He looked past me at the village, at the cottages and the hall and the shop, and something went across his face that I had seen once before on a man in an interview room, a man who had decided how much of the truth he was going to give and was now putting the rest away in a box. "Come up to the harbor office," he said. The office was one room over the old net store, with a stove in the corner and a window that looked straight down the pier. There was a chart on the wall with the soundings marked in pencil, and a kettle, and a mug with a chip out of the rim that he filled for me without asking. His desk had a photograph on it, a boy of about twenty with a narrow face and his father's grey eyes, standing on a boat with a rope in his hands and a look in his face like he was about to say something and had thought better of it. "Your son," I said. "Cormac." He did not offer more. "Where is he this morning?" "Out. He is always out." Declan sat down behind the desk and folded his hands on the blotter. "The weight. You want to know why I took it." "I want to know why you told me not to touch it." "Because it is not a fishing weight." He said it flat, like a man reading out a tide. "It is a token. A challenge token." I waited. When he did not go on, I said, "A challenge for what?" "For the co-op." He paused. "For the village." "That is a weight with a fish on it. The co-op hands them out at the start of the season so the catch can be counted." "That is what we tell the county council." He turned his mug a quarter turn on the blotter. "The weight on your sister's table was not the sort we hand out. It was older. It had a number stamped on the side of the fish, did you see it?" "Forty one." "Forty one is a charter number. Every family in this village has one. O'Rourke is seventeen. The healer's family is nine. Mine is twenty two." He looked at me. "Forty one was your mother's number. It has not been used in twenty years." The stove ticked. Down on the pier someone laughed and a gull answered it. "My mother was a fisherman's wife," I said. "She kept hens and she sang at mass and she died when I was nineteen." "She was more than that." Declan stood up and went to the window, and the light came grey around him. "Niamh, I am going to say a thing to you and then I am going to ask you to sit down and hear the rest of it before you walk out of this office. Your sister was not drowned. She was killed. And the weight on the table was the legal notice of the killing, set there by the person who did it, because that is how it is done under the charter." I sat down. My knees had made the decision for me. "Go on," I said. "Siobhan claimed something she had no right to claim. The Alpha's seat." "The what?" "The co-op has a leader. The county council calls it a chairman. The village calls it something else." He turned around. "We are not like other villages, Niamh. We are a pack. We have been a pack on this coast for four hundred years. There are rules, and the rules are written in the charter, and the charter says a claim on the Alpha's seat is answered by the one who holds it, and the answering is done in the old way. Siobhan made the claim in front of the whole hall in March. She was answered. She lost." I heard my own breathing. "You are telling me my sister was killed in a fight and no one called the guards." "The guards have no part in it. The sergeant knows what we are. He has known his whole life. His grandfather was one of us." Declan came back to the desk and sat on the edge of it, close enough that I could see the grey in his stubble. "You think I am mad." "I think I am sitting in a room with a man who is telling me a story." My voice came out level, which surprised me. "I have heard a lot of stories. I have told a few myself. There was a wolf on the headland last night, a big grey one, and I watched it from my sister's window and it watched me back. So do not tell me I think you are mad. I am asking you what it makes me." He did not blink. "It makes you one of us." "Say it plainly." "You are a wolf, Niamh. You have always been one. It did not wake in you because your mother died before she could take you to the healer, and your sister did not know how, and you went to Dublin and lived among people who do not know what we are, and it slept in you like a fire in wet wood." He said it without any gentleness, which was how I knew he believed it. "Last night the wolf on the headland was my son. He was watching for you. He could smell what you are from the far side of the village and he wanted to know if you were going to shift." I stood up. The chair went back and caught the wall. "I am going to my sister's house," I said, "and I am going to sit in it, and tomorrow I am going to bury her, and then I am going to drive back to Dublin and put this village behind me like a bad year." "The weight was not on the table when I left last night," Declan said. I stopped with my hand on the door. "I took it. I put it in my pocket and I walked home and I put it in a drawer in this office and I locked the drawer." He had not moved from the edge of the desk. "This morning the drawer was open. The weight was gone. The lock had not been forced." "Then someone in this village has a key to your office." "Three people have a key. Myself, the healer, and the Alpha." He looked at me then, and his grey eyes had gone hard and unhappy. "If the weight is back on the table in your sister's kitchen, then the Alpha is telling you something. She is telling you that the claim is still open. That there is still a challenger in this village worth answering." I walked out. I went down the stairs and along the pier with the wind cutting at my face, and I did not go back to the cottage. I went the long way, along the shore road, so that I could see the headland in daylight. There was nothing up there but grass and rock and the white wash of the sea on the black stones. When I got to the cottage the back door was open. I stood in the yard a moment with my hand on the gate. The bolt had been thrown from the inside. The bolt had been thrown by me. I went in through the back and through the hall, and the kitchen was exactly as I had left it, the cup washed and on the rack, the chair I had sat in still pulled out from the table. The weight was on the table. The fish faced the door this time. Someone had turned it. And beside it, where the note had been, there was a new piece of paper with three words on it in handwriting I had never seen before, thin and elegant and sloping to the right. Bring her to me. I stood there for a long time. Then I picked up the weight and put it in my coat pocket, and it was heavier than it had any right to be, and I went out the back door and left it standing open behind me.

The wake was held in the co-op hall because Siobhan's cottage was too small and the church was too cold, and because in this village a wake was not a private thing. The whole of Dún Aonghasa came through the green door that evening. They brought soda bread and cold ham and a barrel of stout that Padraig from the shop rolled in on a hand cart, and they stood in clusters along the walls with their plates and their pints and their voices low, and every one of them looked at me. I stood by the coffin at the top of the hall and shook hands until my fingers ached. Father Byrne came first, in his good coat with the collar turned up, and he held my hand in both of his and said Siobhan had been a good woman and a great singer, and then he said, quietly, so that only I could hear, "She came to me in February and asked me questions I could not answer. I have thought about it every night since." He let go of my hand before I could ask him what questions. That was the first thing. The second thing was the way the village arranged itself. The older men stood by the door with their backs to the wall and their eyes on the room. The women moved among the tables with plates and teapots and their faces soft and kind, and every one of them found a moment to come up to me and take my arm and say a thing that was not quite a condolence. "Your sister was brave," said the woman who ran the post office. "Braver than was good for her." "She had a temper on her, mind," said the woman from the shop. "There were those who did not like it." "If you need anything at all," said a third, a tall thin woman with grey plaited hair and a face like a kind horse, "you come to me and not to the hall. Do you hear me? Not to the hall." Declan was there with the young man from the pier, Cormac, who had the narrow face from the photograph and his father's grey eyes and would not look at me at all. He stood by the tea table with a cup in his hands and his shoulders up around his ears, and when I passed close to him the smell of pine and wet wool came off him so strongly that I stopped in the middle of the floor. He felt me stop. He turned his head a fraction, met my eyes for less than a breath, and then put his cup down and walked out of the hall. The room went quiet for a moment when the door closed behind him. Then the talk came back up like water over a stone. I found a corner and stayed in it. Grief in a room full of people is a strange kind of work. You are supposed to be sad and grateful at once, and the sadness has nowhere to go because everyone is watching to see how you carry it. I ate nothing. I drank tea. And I watched them back, because that is what I know how to do. The man by the window was the third thing. He was old, white-haired, with a face that had gone soft and pink with age, and he wore a brown cardigan with a button missing and he had come in without a plate and without a drink and taken up a position by the window where he could see the whole room and the door and the coffin. He watched me for a long time. When I finally looked straight back at him he did not look away, he lifted one hand and touched two fingers to his own chest, over his heart, and then let the hand drop. It was a strange gesture, old fashioned, like something out of a story. I meant to go over to him. Before I could, the door opened and the hall changed. I felt it before I understood it. The talk did not stop, exactly. It thinned. The men by the door moved aside, and the women at the tables put down their plates, and into the hall came a woman in a black coat with silver hair pinned up at the back of her neck and a face that was not young but was not old either, the skin smooth over good bones, the eyes a pale green that caught the lamplight and held it. She walked up the hall like the floor belonged to her. She stopped at the coffin and stood there with her hands folded and her head bowed, and everyone in the room watched her do it. Then she turned and came to me. "Niamh," she said. "I am Mairéad. I am sorry we are meeting like this." Her voice was low and warm and it had a little music in it, the accent of the west coast polished smooth. She took my hand. Her fingers were cool and dry, and I felt nothing at all when she touched me, which was a relief after the heat of Declan's hand, and which I noticed and filed away. "You knew my sister," I said. "Everyone knew your sister. She was the heart of this village for a long time." Mairéad released my hand. "I am sorry to say a practical thing at a wake, but it is better said now than in a month. Siobhan's boat. The Mary Rose. She kept it on the co-op's mooring, and the co-op's mooring is not a private thing." "She is not cold yet," I said. "She is in the ground tomorrow, and the tide does not wait for grief." Mairéad's mouth curved, and it was a kind mouth, and it stayed curved while she said the next thing. "The Mary Rose will sail on Saturday. I will be taking her out. I wanted you to hear it from me and not from the pier." "I do not remember agreeing to that." "You are not a member of the co-op, Niamh. You have not been for twenty years." She said it without heat, as a fact. "The boat is co-op property. The boat goes to the person the co-op chooses. The co-op has chosen me." Behind her, the room had gone very still. Nobody was eating. The old man by the window had turned his head and was watching Mairéad with a look I could not read, and his fingers were wrapped around the windowsill. "Who chose you?" I asked. "The co-op chose me." She said it again, slower, and I understood that she was telling me something under the words, and I did not yet know what. "Your sister's role in this village passes to the person the co-op chooses. That is how it has always been. You have been away a long time. I do not expect you to understand the way things are done here." "I understand a great deal," I said. "I spent fifteen years asking questions for a living." "Then ask them kindly." She smiled at me and touched my arm, and the touch was light and brief and left a cold spot behind. "Come to the hall on Friday. I keep an open table in the evening for anyone who wants to talk. You will be welcome. And Niamh," she added, already turning, "the Mary Rose had a locker in the boathouse. It was emptied before I took the mooring. If you were expecting to find something of your sister's in it, I am sorry." She walked back down the hall and out into the night, and the room let out its breath, and the talk came up again. I found Declan by the door and took his sleeve and pulled him out onto the step. The wind had dropped. The moon was up over the harbor and the boats were black shapes on the silver water. "She took the boat," I said. "She announced it at my sister's wake. In front of the whole village." "That is how it is done." He was looking at the door, not at me, and there was something tight in his jaw. "The co-op chooses. She had the votes before the funeral, Niamh. She has had the votes for a month." "You knew." "I knew." "And you did not think to tell me before she stood over my sister's coffin and did it in front of me." "I thought," he said, and stopped, and looked at me properly, and his eyes were grey and tired, "that if I told you before the wake you would have gone to the pier with a lawyer's letter and burned every bridge in this village before you had walked across one. And I thought that tomorrow you might want a priest and a hole in the ground and a few people who remember your sister kindly, and that the boat was not worth losing that." He was quiet a moment. "I was wrong. I am sorry." I looked out at the water. The moon had a ring around it, a pale circle in the cloud, and the sea was flat and shining, and I was so tired that the pier lights seemed to double themselves and swim. "The old man in the brown cardigan," I said. "Who is he?" "That is Ronan. The healer." "He touched his chest when he looked at me. Like this." I did it for him, two fingers over the heart. "What does that mean?" Declan did not answer at once. When he did, his voice had gone careful. "It is an old gesture. Old people use it. It means he recognizes you." "Recognizes me from what? I have been here since yesterday. I have never met the man." "Ronan has been in this village longer than the hall has had a roof. He knew your mother." Declan looked down the pier, and his hands were at his sides, and the wind moved his auburn hair. "He probably knew her better than you did." "Then I will ask him about her tomorrow, after the funeral." "You do that." He turned to go back inside, and then he stopped. "Niamh. The locker on the Mary Rose. Did you know your sister kept a locker in the boathouse?" "No." "Neither did I." He held my eyes a moment longer than he needed to. "Mairéad knew. Nobody told her. She knew it before it was emptied." He went back into the hall. The door swung shut and the noise of the wake came through it muffled by the wood. I stood on the step with the moon on the water and the harbor lights and the twenty boats. And I did what I have always done when a room does not add up, which is to stop listening to what people say and start looking at the small things. The weight in my pocket was cold against my leg. The old man by the window had recognized me across a crowded hall before I had said a word. The boy had walked out rather than stand near me. And the whole village had come to my sister's wake and not one person had said the words I was waiting for, the plain ones, the ones that came out of every mouth at a Dublin funeral. Not one of them had said how she died. I went back inside. The old man was gone from the window. In his place on the sill there was a small round stone, grey and wet from the shore, and beside it a single sprig of something that looked like rosemary but was not rosemary, and I put both in my pocket with the weight and said nothing to anyone. It was nearly eleven when the hall emptied and I walked back along the shore road to the cottage. The moon was high now and the tide was coming in and there was a smell on the wind that I had thought was only the sea and now was not sure of. At the top of the road, where the track turns down to the boathouse, I saw Cormac. He was sitting on the low stone wall with his arms wrapped around himself, and he was watching the cottage, and when he saw me he stood up. "You are not supposed to be here," he said. His voice was a raw thing. "He told you to lock the door and not come out." "I went to a wake, Cormac. People go to wakes." "The boat," he said. "The Mary Rose. She took the boat. Do you know what she will do with it?" He took a step toward me, and then another, and his face in the moonlight was a boy's face and not a boy's face at all, and his eyes had a light in them I had only seen once before, through a window, up on the headland. "She will take it out on the full moon. She always takes a boat out on the full moon. And once she has taken it out in front of the whole co-op, there is nothing anyone can do about anything." I looked at him for a long moment. The wind came up off the water and carried a smell I knew from the farm at the back of my grandmother's house, the warm animal smell of a dog's coat after it has been out in the rain. "Go home, Cormac," I said. "Get some sleep." "It is not the boat I am worried about," he said. "It is the weight. Whose weight did she give you?"