Sect Year 5 · first month · night of day 27 · the forty-first life: Coil Cove, her fourteenth year
Three years went by on the cove, and in all of them her father did not speak to her once that Sefa could remember. He spoke to the men on the quay, and to the cord-woman when she came round with her tin, and to Berit Lowe about the price of tar. To Sefa he lifted a hand.
The net loft stood above the stones, a long low shed with its doors propped open to the wind. Inside it smelled of tar and salt and the brown cotton of the mesh, which hung from the beams in drying curtains and swayed when anyone walked past. Her father sat at the far end under the one window, mending a torn panel of the big seine with his back to the cove. The needle went in and out, in and out, and the mesh-gauge clicked against his thumb at every turn.
Sefa stood in the doorway with the animal fat pot under one arm. She was fourteen, and she had her father’s hands, short in the fingers and broad across the palm, and they were already rough from the lines.
