Drowning, in Melinoë’s experience, was the loudest quiet a person could die inside.

The soul in front of her didn't know that yet. She stood barefoot in the dark grass at the edge of the forest, close enough to hear the water though she hadn’t gone near it, blinking up at the lighthouse beam as it swept over her and away, over and away. Sixty-some years old. A cardigan, soaked through, that would never actually dry, because none of this—the grass, the cold, the wool going heavy on her shoulders—was cloth or forest or anything with a name in the living world. It was just shaped like grief, because grief was the only shape most people could stand to arrive in.

“You’re not going to wake up.” Melinoë said. Not unkindly. She’d learned, across four years of this, that unkindness only ever bought her more time explaining, and dawn didn’t wait for anyone’s feelings, least of all hers.

The woman looked at her own hands like she was checking they were still attached to her. “I was making tea,” she said. “The kettle was on.” A pause, the particular pause of someone doing arithmetic they didn’t want the answer to. “Is that why—”

“No.” Melinoë stepped into the grass beside her. It stayed cold under her feet, everything here stayed exactly as cold as it needed to be to make a point. “It’s not the kettle’s fault. It’s just where the door is tonight.”

She held out her hand, out of habit, souls didn’t need much out here, not really, but because in four years Melinoë had learned that people crossing over needed something shaped like comfort, even a small lie of one.

The woman took it. Her fingers passed through Melinoë’s twice before they caught.

“Will it hurt?”

“No.” And this time it wasn’t a lie and that was the only kindness Melinoë had left to hand out most nights. “It already happened. This part is just walking you to the boat.”

They walked. Behind them, up the black rocks, near the forgotten forest, the lighthouse turned its slow endless circle, sweeping light across a shore that wasn’t on any map, guarding a door that shouldn’t have needed guarding at all, if the world worked the way it was supposed to.

They walked together down to the shore, where a small boat sat waiting on the black water, its lantern only warm light for miles. A man stood in it, still and patient, he never said anything to anyone Melinoë brought him.

“Do you have a coin?” Melinoë asked every soul this same question at this same moment.

The woman searched herself and found one all the same, small, and cold and certain in her palm. “Yes,” she said, surprised, as though she hadn’t expected to.

“Give it to him, He’ll take you the rest of the way.”

The woman nodded and let go of Melinoë's hand, walked on her own just like every soul when it was truly their time. Melinoë stood back and watched her walk the last steps to the boat, watching her press the coin into the man’s open palm, watched him close fingers around it without a word.

Then the boat began to move, slow and soundless, out across the black water and Melinoë stood on the shore and watched until there was nothing left to watch—only the dark, and the widening water, and the lantern shrinking to a point and then nothing at all.

Melinoë checked the sky. Still dark, but the east had begun to soften into that bruised grey which meant dawn was an hour off, perhaps less. Enough time for one more soul, if one more came.

She always hoped one more would not come.

One more came.

She felt it before she saw it, a soul on the cliff path, still far from the water, when it should not have been there at all, not this late, not with the sky already turning. Melinoë climbed back up and there standing among the dark grass exactly where the old lady had stood minutes before. There was a shape her chest recognized before her eyes had finished the work of confirming it.

Mary.