All debts paid. “She’s doing all right.” He added, impulsively—a little wistfully—“Watch out for her, Ray, all right? Do that for me.”

Keller nodded.

He faced the mainland resolutely, but turned back a step later to take in Keller—Keller with his eyes full of old pain, Keller braced against a chain-link fence with one knee bent and the Floats rolling away behind him. He said, “You live here now.”

And maybe it was true.

Keller walked back along the margin of the canal. He felt again this curious lightness. His Angel wires, he thought, severed from their socket, withering and dying inside him. But more than that.

You live here now.

He climbed a chain-link riser and saw the ocean out beyond the tidal dam. The ocean was implacable, dark, vaster than he could compass; and memory was like that, he thought, not video memory but his own memory, of Meg, of Teresa, of Byron, of his life: wide and deep and mysterious beyond saying. It contained him more than he contained it, and it would not brook betrayal; but there were days, he thought, like this one, when the ocean stood calm and seemed to augur in its tides some bright millennium.

He went down the boardwalk to the ancient float shanty, Teresa in the doorway waiting for him, calm in the sunlight. A breeze from the seawall made him shiver; she held the door wider. “Better come in,” she said. “It’s cold out there.”