She still had the key.
She had carried it the entire time — through Sereveth and Kharzun Vale and the rooftop and the roads between all of those places and the fifteen days of everything — in the small pocket of whatever she was wearing because she had put it there the morning she left and had not taken it out and had not examined too carefully why she had not taken it out.
She took it out now.
They stood at the door of the ocean house in the last light of the evening, the sky doing its slow negotiation between day and something else, the water behind the house moving with the patient continuity of something that had been doing this long before either of them existed and intended to continue long after. The path from the outer wall had taken them twenty minutes and they had walked it mostly in silence, the comfortable kind, the kind that did not ask anything of the people inside it.
She put the key in the lock.
The door opened.
