How to outline a novel, one card at a time.

The tide had gone out further than Nell had ever seen it, as if the whole channel had drawn a breath and was holding it.

Her father’s dinghy lay on the slipway with its bow turned to the town. Someone had hauled it up past the weed line and chocked it with two bricks, neatly, the way you’d leave a thing you meant to come back for. The oars were gone. So was the name.

She crouched by the transom. Where Margaret had been, in her father’s careful white capitals, there was a square of fresh grey paint, still tacky under her thumb.

‘You’ll leave a print,’ said a voice behind her.

Nell didn’t turn round. She knew the voice, and she knew that Ruth Calloway had been standing there long enough to watch her decide whether to cry.

‘Who painted it?’

‘Not me.’ Ruth’s boots came down the ramp, slow on the green boards. ‘Found her drifting off Bruny on Thursday. Oars shipped. Nobody aboard.’ A pause. ‘I’m sorry, love.’

The water, a long way off, made a small sound against the rocks, the sound of something being put down carefully.

Nell pressed her thumb into the grey paint until it came away clean, and under it, faint as a vein, a letter that wasn’t an M.

#

Ruth kept the harbour office the way other people kept a diary: every boat in, every boat out, the weather in the margin. Nell had grown up reading it upside down across the desk.

Thursday’s page said only Margaret, found adrift, 7.40 a.m., towed in. The handwriting was steady. The ink was not quite the same blue as the rest.

‘You wrote this later,’ Nell said.

Ruth closed the book. ‘I wrote it when I had time.’

#

It took the whole afternoon and most of a tin of stripper. The grey came off in soft curls, then her father’s white, then a blue she’d never seen on any boat of his.

The second name was shorter. Four letters, done by someone in a hurry, the last one trailing off the edge of the plank.

She sat back on her heels and read it twice, and then she went to find a phone.

#

Tom came off the last ferry with one bag and the look he’d worn since he was nine, the look that said whatever this was, it had started without him.

‘Two days,’ Nell said.

‘The roads were shut.’ He looked past her at the slipway. ‘Is that her?’

‘That’s her.’

He didn’t go down. He lit a cigarette instead, cupping it against a wind that wasn’t there, and Nell understood that he had already decided not to be sorry about anything until he’d been told what it was.

#

They made the list on the back of a tide table, because it was the only paper in the shed.

One oar, the left. One oilskin coat, the old yellow one. The good torch. Their father’s reading glasses, which he never took out on the water.

‘That’s not missing,’ Tom said, when she wrote the last line. ‘That’s just something you think.’

She left it on the list anyway: one lie.