Sect Year 4 · third month · night of day 26 · the thirty-fifth life: Ketch Shoal, her thirty-second year
The tide came under the stilts twice in each day, and by her thirty-second year Tovra had stopped listening for it. She heard it as she heard her own pulse, as a thing that was always there until somebody asked.
Then, on the mornings when the water turned, she heard all of it at once. The slap against the piles, the long groan of the boards as the flood took the weight of the house, the cups knocking on their hooks in the cookhouse. Under everything the sucking pull of the channel as it went back out over the flats.
Her husband mended nets on the porch every morning the tide allowed. He sat on an upturned keg with a net across his knees, and the needle went in and out in a steady rhythm she had come to hear as a kind of company. He was a quiet man. He didn’t ask her about the births she had attended, because he knew most of them already, and he didn’t ask about the ones she hadn’t reached, because he knew those too.
