Bunmi Adeyemi-Roth was frying plantain when they came in, which meant she had been expecting them.

The fourth barge in was her home and had been for forty years. The cargo well had been decked over and roofed with corrugated iron, and the sides pierced for windows of mismatched glass, so that the light inside was a patchwork of green and amber and ordinary clear. A stove burned in one corner. A narrow bunk, a wall of paperbacks swollen with damp, a framed photograph of a brine boat with a woman standing at its wheel in a captain's cap. A radio on the shelf played a news bulletin so quietly that it was only a sort of murmur. The whole place smelled of palm oil and tea and the sharp clean sting of salt.

"Sit," said Bunmi, without turning. "Both of you. Lamb, wash your hands. There's soap, and it's the yellow, so it'll hurt."

Pico washed his hands. Sefa did not sit.

She stood by the doorway with the biscuit tin held against her chest, and watched the old woman's back. It was a broad back in a blue boiler suit, and it moved at the stove with absolute economy. Turn. Flip. Lift. Lay on the paper. Not one gesture too many. She had stood behind that back through every fever, every exam, every sulk of her life, and it had never once, until this morning, seemed like a door.

"I want to ask you a question," said Sefa.

"I know."

"I don't think you do."

"I'm seventy-one, lamb. I know most of them." Bunmi lifted the last plantain from the oil, laid it on the paper, and turned off the flame. Then she took her time wiping her hands on a dishcloth, and when she did look round, it was with a face that had decided, a long time ago, how it would look when this moment came. "Pico. Take that plate across to the Dunmore children on Barge Two. Tell them it's from me and that they're not to say thank you, because it embarrasses us both. Then stay there till I send for you."

"But I'm Deputy—"

"You are a boy with a hot plate, and in my experience the hot plate wins."

Pico took the plate. He looked at Sefa. She nodded, once. The door banged shut behind him, and for a moment there was only the radio.

Sefa put the tin down on the table and opened the lid.

She took out the blue twist and laid it in front of Bunmi. It looked like nothing. A pea of paper. A drop of red wax.

"Do you know what that is?"

Bunmi's eyes dropped to it. They stayed there for a time. She sat down in the chair at the head of the table, very slowly, as though sitting were a thing that had to be negotiated with a hull.

"I've seen the label," she said. "It's your hand. I know the way you write when you mean to be taken seriously. I have a drawer full of your letters from when you were nine. I kept the ones where you wrote to say you were leaving home." Her voice was perfectly level. "Sit down, child."

"No."

"Then stand, and be uncomfortable. See if I care."

"I lost it," said Sefa. "Didn't I? A night. You told me something about my mother. Something big. I wrote it into a label, 'the truth', and I put it in a tin under a bus with a warning not to breathe it alone, and you have let me walk around for—for however long it has been without saying a word. I want to know why."

The radio murmured. A man was talking about the water table.

"Two years ago in October," said Bunmi.

Sefa's mouth went dry.

"A Thursday. You'd had a bad week. You'd written four in nine days for the gate, for the Aunties' funeral fund, and for that Szabo woman's husband when he wanted to go and visit his sister. You came down the Quay at midnight. You were grey. Your arm was bad." She spoke very simply, a pilot reading a log. "You asked me what you were. What the thing in your arm was. Where it came from. You said if I had ever loved you, I would tell you the truth about your mother. And I told you."

"What did I do?"

"You sat there," said Bunmi. "Exactly where you're not sitting. You listened to every word. You didn't cry. You said, thank you. And you went away, and I thought you'd gone to bed. And in the morning you came back, and you looked at me across the table, and you said, 'I think there's something you meant to tell me.'"

The fire ticked in the stove.

"You'd written a writ," said Bunmi. "You'd used it to pay for that night. You'd chosen it. You looked me in the eye and said, 'Don't ever tell me again. Not if I beg. Not if I ask. Not if I'm dying. I wasn't ready. I can't be ready. Swear on the keel.'"

She lifted her head.

"And I swore," she said. "On the keel of the Marigold, which is the only thing I have ever sworn on in my life. I don't break it. I've kept it two years. If you want me to be the kind of woman who breaks it for a little ink on a tin lid, you've mistaken me for somebody who raised you badly."

Sefa's eyes burned, and for once she did not make a joke.

"Then why did I save it?"

"I don't know."

"Why would I save it, if I never wanted it back?"

"I don't know, lamb." The old woman's voice cracked for the first time. "Maybe you wanted the choice. Maybe you were frightened to throw it away. Maybe, God help us both, you didn't think I'd stay silent. People are like that. They set a lock and keep a key."

They sat in the green light and the smell of palm oil. The plantain went cold on its paper. Sefa found her hand had closed around the blue twist, and she opened it again.

"The letter I found on Ruben," she said, "says there is a first. It says he knows where I put them. It says do not trust Haldis. Is it something to do with that?"

Bunmi said nothing.

"Is it a thing I need to know to stay alive?"

"Is that your question?"

"It's my question."

Bunmi put both hands flat on the table. They were big hands, spotted, scarred across the knuckles from fifty years of rope. She looked at them, and then at the twist, and then she spoke slowly, picking every word the way a man picks his way across a dry pan, testing for the skin of crust over the brine.

"I swore not to tell you what I said. I did not swear not to tell you what is true." She took a breath. "That is a distinction I have spent two years being ashamed of, and I'll be ashamed of it a little longer, because I'm going to use it."

"Bunmi."

"Your mother did not die of a fever."

The room went absolutely still.

"I told you that when you were seven," Bunmi said. "I told you she was ill, and it was quick, and she wasn't afraid. I said it on the Quay and I said it in the chapel and I said it every year at the stone. It was a lie. It was the first and the worst lie I ever told in my life, and I told it because I loved you, and I'd tell it again, and I am sorry."

Sefa's mouth moved. Nothing came out.

"That is all I will say about how," said Bunmi. "The rest is yours to take back, if you can. But I will tell you where. Because it's your right, and because someone left a man dying on my quay this morning, and I will not have you finding it out from the wrong mouth."

She lifted her eyes. They were wet.

"Anwen died on a barge," said Bunmi. "In the cargo hold, at dawn, under the mast, with the sun coming over the pan. She was thirty-one years old and I held her hand."

Sefa did not need to ask which barge.

She stood very still while the numbers in her head went round like a machine. She heard again a dry cool voice in the dawn saying *none, I looked, I turned his pockets*. She saw the tarp. She saw the pale hand folded on the man's chest, and the long slow arc of the empty hold, and the mast stump over his head.

"Barge Nine," Sefa said.

"Barge Nine."

"He was lying where she died."

"Someone put him there." The old woman's jaw was set like a rock. "Someone picked that spot out of forty barges, and I do not believe in coincidence, child. I believe in tides."