Chapter Thirty-Two

The investigation into what had happened on Fair Wind’s deck closed itself quietly, a week into his recovery, in a conversation with a Fiscal’s officer that lasted eleven minutes and left Callum with the specific, unsettled sense of a question that had been filed away rather than actually answered. No charges, the officer had told him — insufficient evidence to establish, beyond the account he’d himself given, whether Callum Spencer had acted in self-defence, in panic, or in something else entirely, and Tam Wallace’s own statement, given from a hospital bed with his arm freshly stitched, that he’d seen nothing of what happened on the boat itself, only a shape already in the water by the time he reached the pontoon. Callum understood, hearing it, that he had been granted not innocence but simply the absence of proof to the contrary, and that he was going to have to learn to live inside that particular, ungenerous kind of mercy for a good while yet, the same way his father had once learned to live inside not-knowing a name.