There are, she has often felt, no answers to inheritance, to the slick black suckered thing that at once shoves you up and drags you inward.

There was dry land, once, and also the concept of drowning as emergency, a thing to be thrashed against. Now there is simply inevitability, the narrowing gaps between floodplains, islands of viable space on which people build doggedly, insistently, upward, away from the mess below.

She stared at the finial tip from the window and thought of the shape things take in water, the way forms appear less certain when pushed beneath the surface, outlines growing lesser, growing loose.

It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention—exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.

think all this is my fault, she thinks to herself, looks down at her phone again, and finds it has locked. I think I was supposed to sort this out. Doesn’t know what she means by this. Pulls her map up again and squints at the route.

I feel embarrassed that his decisions are still governing the way I behave.”

Isla once told her, conversationally, that she often saw people in her practice who felt that if they stopped looking out into the world, stopped responding with what they perceived to be the proper degree of outrage, they’d die. Irene replied that she was most likely thinking of sharks.

Easy to remember the voices at night, the creaks on the stair, as universal aspects of a childhood rather than moments rooted in time. A night when two women came together in the dark.

She was trying to get to the end of a thought about souls, about the strange internal silence of something one might assume to be essential and yet which serves no tangible purpose.