She steps out of the car and pulls her jacket close. She feels something fall on her cheek. He gets out on the other side. They walk toward the water together.

“It’s cold.”

The waves watch them as they approach. They spread a towel.

“It’s going to rain,” she says.

“We have a couple of minutes.”

“We don’t have to leave.”

She yawns. She hasn’t slept much in the past few days. But she doesn’t close her eyes because she’s afraid that if she does she’ll fall asleep. And if she falls asleep she’ll miss it. Even without the sun, there’s still the sea and the strands of grass sticking out of the sand.

She sits with her hands in her pockets. A strand of her hair catches in her mouth. Her hood comes loose.

She walks toward the sea and stops just short of the water. It washes over the sand and over her shoes and recedes, leaving strips of foam, like tongues of seaweed, on the sand.

She pulls the watch out of her pocket. There’s rust between the links. She thinks that maybe it counts the fifty-ninth second twice.

The sea washes over her shoes again. She feels the water seeping in, suffusing her toes like a cloud of tea in a mug. It crawls up the sand and falls away.

A wind drifts in from the ocean.