They were on the shoulder of the Blackhead Road. To the left, the drop to the ocean. To the right, scrub and rock and the thin, wind-battered trees that grew on the edge of the island like they were holding on. The fog was coming in. Not the city fog, the polite kind that softened edges. The coastal fog, the kind that erased the world, the kind that came from the Atlantic like a curtain drawn across everything.

Mollie got out of the car. He got out of the car. Theodore stayed in the back seat because Theodore recognized a human situation that did not require his involvement.

She walked to the guardrail. Stood there. The fog rolled in around them, thick, white, alive. He could hear the ocean below... not see it, hear it, the deep, heavy sound of waves hitting rock, the sound of a continent ending.

He stood beside her. Not close. Not far. The distance they always maintained, the booth distance, the coffee-to-tea distance, the space between two people who had learned that proximity was a language and they were still learning the grammar.

"I went to the folk show," she said, "because Noor asked me and nobody asks me anything. Nobody has asked me to go anywhere in two years. You ask me to breakfast. That's it. Dottie asks me if I want a refill. That's the extent of my social calendar. A woman walked up to me in a diner and said do you want to hear music with me and I said yes because I'm a person, Fayiz. I'm a person who used to do things. I used to go to shows and bars and I used to talk to people who weren't dead or about to be dead and I used to..."

She stopped. Pressed her palms against the guardrail. The fog was on her hair.

"I used to have a life," she said. "Before Charlie. Before Dana. Before the flat and the ceiling and the contract. I used to be someone who went places."

"I know."

"So you don't get to... when I go somewhere, when I do something that isn't the booth, you don't get to go white-knuckled and pretend it's the road. You don't get to feel things about it that you won't...define."

"You're right."

"I'm right."

"You're right and I'm..." He stopped. The fog was thick now. He could barely see the road behind them. They were standing at the edge of the continent in a fog bank and he could hear the ocean and he could hear her breathing and he could not find the word. The word for the thing he was. The word for a man who said because it's Thursday and didn't go to Toronto and painted a woman's face in secret and felt his hands go white when she mentioned someone else's name.

"You're what," she said.

"I don't know."

"That's not good enough."

"I know it's not good enough. I know. But I don't, Mollie, I don't have the word. I don't have the word for the thing I feel when you say her name. I don't have the word for the thing I feel when you're in the booth and I don't have the word for the thing I feel when you're not in the booth and I don't have the word for..." He turned to face her. "I've never felt this for someone I can't... for someone who isn't..."

"Say it."

"For someone who doesn't want me."

The fog moved between them. The ocean hit the rock below. Somewhere behind them, in a silver Toyota Camry, Theodore shifted positions.

Mollie's face did something he'd never seen. Something that looked like it hurt... a flinch that started in her eyes and moved through her whole face and didn't stop.

"You think I don't want you," she said.

She turned the words over the way you turned a key to see if it fit.

"You're gay," he said. Simply. Not as an accusation. Not as a wall. As a fact. The way she'd said it in the diner: I'm gay, Fayiz. Three words. A fact. A border. A country he didn't have a visa for.

"I am gay," she said. "Yes. I am. I have been since I was fourteen and I will be until I'm dead, which is in twenty-three days, so that's not a long commitment." She paused. "And I also called you from a bathroom at 2:30 on a Thursday because you're the person I call. I also carried your painting home against my chest like it was a part of my own body. I also said I'm losing something I don't even have in a diner while you sat across from me and I also..."

She stopped. The fog was in her hair and on her scarf and on her eyelashes and she was looking at him with an expression that was not the wall and was not the unguarded thing and was something between them, something that existed only in the space where the armour was cracking and the honesty was bleeding through.

"I don't know what I am," she said. "I don't know what this is. I know I'm gay. I know what I've always been. I also know what your voice sounds like on the phone when I'm standing in a bathroom trying to remember how to breathe. I also know what the light looks like in a painting when someone paints it warmer because of you. Those things are both true. I don't know how they're both true but they are and I'm tired, Fayiz, I'm so tired of pretending one of them isn't."

The fog. The waves. The sound of the continent ending.

He took a step toward her. Half a step. The distance between coffee and tea, closed by half.

"Mollie."

"Don't," she said. But she didn't step back. Her hands were still on the guardrail. Her eyes were still on his. The ring was catching what was left of the light, turning it silver.

"I wasn't going to say anything," he said.

"You were going to say something."

"I was going to say that I don't have the word either. I don't know what this is. I've loved one person. One. I loved her the way I was taught to love... with everything, all of it, the whole canvas. And she..." He stopped. Not because of Rifa. Because of the truth that came after Rifa, the one he'd been circling for months. "She told me I painted too much of her. She was right. I was making her the whole painting. I'm not doing that with you. I'm not. But you're..."

He was close enough now to see the fog on her eyelashes. Individual drops. Tiny. Perfect. The dangerous distance. The painter's distance.

"You're the colour I reach for first," he said. "Every time. The ochre. The warm one. I pick up a brush, and my hand goes there before I think about it, and the colour is you. I don't know what that makes me. I don't know what that word is. But I know the colour."

She was looking at him. Close. The closest they'd ever been outside of the ice, outside of her arm and his arm walking three blocks. This was different. This was facing. This was two people standing at the edge of a continent in a fog that had erased the world and left only them and the sound of waves that had come all the way from Ireland.

Her hand left the guardrail. Lifted. For a second... one second, less... it moved toward his face, and he saw it happen in slow motion the way he saw brushstrokes happen, the trajectory, the intention, the almost, and he thought: she's going to touch my face and if she touches my face I will never recover from it, I will carry the shape of her hand on my jaw for the rest of my life, however long that is, twenty-three days or a lifetime...

The foghorn.

It came from the harbour. Low, deep, the sound of a ship navigating blind. It cut through the fog like a blade through canvas, and Mollie's hand stopped. Hung in the air between them. A painting of a gesture. An almost. The space between the brush and the canvas, the space where everything was possible, and nothing had been committed.

She let her hand drop.

He didn't move.

She stepped back. One step. The fog filled the space between them instantly, the way water filled a hole, and the distance was back, the booth distance, the coffee-to-tea distance, the careful, calibrated, killing distance they maintained because maintaining it was the only thing keeping both of them from something neither of them could name.

"We should go," she said.

Her voice was different. The voice of a woman who had almost done something and had decided not to, and was carrying the almost like a weight she hadn't expected.

"Yeah," he said. "We should go."

They didn't get to Cape Spear. They drove back.

• • •