He fell into step beside her without fully deciding to, and she didn't argue the point. The night was cold and getting colder, the kind of cold that made the streetlights look distant and blue and sharpened the smell of the wet pavement. She had gotten taller in his memory, somehow - or maybe steadier. She walked with her chin up, and she didn't hold her arm as gingerly as she probably should have.

"You seem like the kind of person things keep happening to," he said.

"Just the last few months." She glanced at him sideways, and there was something tentative in her expression - the very beginning of a smile that hadn't quite committed. "I think before that I was pretty unremarkable."

"How are you holding up?"

"Some days are okay." She thought about it for another step. "Some days I forget for a few hours, and that's almost worse. Because then I remember and it's like falling all over again, from the same height, and you'd think it would get easier once you knew what hitting the ground felt like, but it doesn't." She said this matter-of-factly, not looking for comfort, just describing the mechanics of it, the same way she'd described the camera and her father's research. "I'm getting better at landing, though."

They reached her building. The lobby light cast a warm rectangle onto the wet sidewalk.

"Thank you for the help," she said. She reached for her bag.

He gave it to her, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the spare hand warmer he always carried through winter - an old habit from too many cold-weather shoots, too many hours waiting for light on frozen hillsides in insufficient gloves - and pressed it into her uninjured hand.

"For the walk upstairs," he said.

She held it in both palms, and something in her face went soft in a way that had nothing to do with the warmth of the little packet. It was the look of someone receiving something small and being ambushed by it.

"Shannon Hayes," she said. "In case you wanted to know."

"Derek Weston."

"I know." She glanced briefly at his jacket pocket. "Frank at the camera shop. He told me your name when I went back in the day I was standing in the rain." She met his eyes for a moment. "I wanted to say thank you properly. I thought I'd missed the chance."

He watched her push through the lobby door. She turned once, briefly, in the elevator, and the doors closed on her before he could determine whether she was looking at him or at nothing at all.

He stood on the sidewalk for a moment in the cold, which he told himself was because he was deciding whether to go back to the bodega for something he'd forgotten.

Then he went home.

He saw her a third time in October, almost eleven months later, and the circumstances were significantly worse than either of the first two.

He had driven up to the Cape Cod coast for a weekend shoot - late autumn, the off-season emptiness he'd been wanting to capture for a project about Atlantic coastlines, the particular gray and silver quality of the light when the summer people were gone and it was just the ocean and the dunes and the wind working on each other. He'd rented a room at a small inn outside Chatham, one of those old New England places with low ceilings and working fireplaces and the permanent smell of woodsmoke and braided wool, and he'd spent the first day doing exactly what he'd come for: walking the beach at dawn and dusk, working the long shadows, the way the light fell differently at that latitude in late fall.

On the second day, the National Weather Service issued a coastal storm warning. A nor'easter had developed faster than predicted off the Carolina coast and was tracking north along the seaboard. By four in the afternoon the sky had gone the color of pewter, the wind was coming off the water hard enough to push a person sideways, and the inn's owner - a compact, practical woman named Mrs. Dowd who ran the place with the efficiency of someone who had survived many nor'easters and had no time for people who hadn't - had strongly suggested that anyone thinking about walking the beach in the next few hours might want to reconsider their decision-making.

Derek had gone out anyway. He'd shot in worse.

He was working along the waterline, maybe a mile from the inn, when he saw her.

She was standing at the very edge of the water - not on the dry sand, not at the high-tide line, but at the place where the foam was reaching, where the cold Atlantic came up and ran over her bare feet and retreated. She was wearing a coat, but it was open, unbuttoned against a wind that had to be gusting above forty miles an hour. Her hair streamed out to one side. She had her arms loose at her sides, her face turned toward the horizon, and she wasn't moving.

He stopped.

He watched her for several minutes. He could see her clearly enough at this distance - saw that she was standing deliberately, not struggling, not confused; saw that she was aware of her surroundings. He watched a wave reach her and foam over her feet and she didn't step back. He watched her put her hands in her coat pockets.

He thought: this is none of your business.