What-The-Tide-Takes-Back
They talked until the lamp had turned a hundred times. Mara told him about the kingdoms she'd flattened onto vellum, the rivers she'd argued with, the one mountain she'd drawn slightly kinder than it was because a town she loved sat in its shadow. Oren told her almost nothing about himself and everything about the ships — the lovers separated by the gap, the dead who hadn't finished their travelling, the ones who sailed through and never looked back and the rarer ones who did. He poured her something warm from a kettle that had no fire under it, and when their hands touched passing the cup, neither of them moved away as fast as politeness asked.
"How long," she said, when the sky in the east began to thin, "have you done this alone?"
"Long enough to stop counting. Counting only makes the gaps between visits longer." He smiled, and it cost him. "You count. I saw it on the beach. Ninety-one paces."
"Ninety-one." She found she could not look at him. "If I came back next autumn. To the same shingle. Would the door open again? Would you—" She stopped, because she was a woman who measured things, and there was no unit for what she wanted to ask.
"It would open," Oren said. "I would be here. I am always here." He set the cup down. "But hear the whole shape of it before you decide to love it, mapmaker, because you of all people should know a coast before you sail it. I cannot leave