Chapter 1: Normandy Tides
The sea wasn’t just something you saw here; it was something you breathed. Salt hung in the air, a thick, damp blanket that settled on the skin and seeped into the wooden beams of the cottage. Juliette Tallon leaned against the sagging veranda railing, her fingers tracing the cool, rough wood where tiny pinpricks of bioluminescent algae clung, emitting a soft, otherworldly blue glow as the last of the daylight bled away.
Inside, through the open door, the tiny radio sputtered a crackling French news bulletin. Mykie’s laughter bubbled over the top of it, a bright, counterpoint to the rhythmic crash of waves on the cliff face below.
“Maman! Regarde!” He toddled out, his chubby fist clenched around a clumsily glued seashell mosaic. Titian curls, so like her own, bounced with each step. His dark grey eyes, so serious and so deeply, painfully familiar, were alight with triumph.
“C’est magnifique, mon coeur,” she said, her voice softer than the evening breeze. She scooped him up, brushing sand from the apple of his cheek. He smelled of salt, childhood, and the clear, bright scent of a nascent Alpha—a scent that still, sometimes, made her heart clench with a grief so vast it was almost physical. She buried her nose in his hair, anchoring herself. This was her life now. This peace, carved out with Sherlock’s cold, brilliant help and paid for with a ghost’s identity, was everything.
Then the world tilted.
Not metaphorically. It was a sudden, visceral lurch in her gut, a primal shift in the atmospheric pressure of her own biology. The hairs on her nape stood up. An Alpha was approaching. Not just any Alpha. This scent—old leather, Earl Grey tea, and the distinct, crisp ozone of a London rain—it was a ghost from a buried past. It was the scent that had sometimes clung to Mycroft’s wool coats when he returned to Musgrave for the weekend, a scent she’d caught as a child peeking from the upstairs landing, a scent she was never supposed to know.
He came into view, limping badly up the crushed-shell path that led only to her cottage. A man, solidly built, muscles straining against a simple shirt gone dark and sticky with blood at the shoulder. His greying hair was dishevelled, his face etched with pain and a dogged determination. He held a wad of makeshift bandage—a torn shirt—clamped to his upper arm, but it was soaked through.
His head was down, watching his footing on the uneven path. He hadn’t seen her yet.
Juliette’s body locked. Doctor’s instinct warred with Omega terror, which screamed at a pitch only her soul could hear. Run. Hide. He knows. But the doctor won, cold and clinical, slamming down over the panic. She set Mykie down gently, pushing him toward the open door.
“Inside, chéri. Go play with your train. Maman has to help a man who’s hurt.”
Mykie pouted but obeyed, his small feet padding across the wooden floor. She turned back, every movement deliberate, and by the time the man reached the bottom of the veranda steps, Juliette Tallon was present, and Jill Holmes was buried six feet deep.
“Monsieur? Vous êtes blessé.” Her French was flawless, her tone professionally detached, the tone of a country doctor confronted with an unexpected emergency.
Gregory Lestrade looked up.
His soulful brown eyes met her light grey ones.
Time did not stop. It did the opposite; it accelerated, condensing a lifetime of unseen memories into a single, crackling moment. She saw the flicker of surprise in his gaze—a lone Omega, here, on this desolate stretch of coast. She saw the pain, clouding his assessment. And she saw, for a terrifying second, a deeper confusion, a niggle of something his conscious mind couldn’t place.
“I… I had a bit of a fall. Down by the cove. Sharp rocks.” His English was strained, his voice gravelly with hurt. He didn’t question her switch to his language, her voice still held a French accent though. “Lost my phone in the scramble. Saw your light. I’m sorry to intrude.”
“You are not intruding. Come up. Let me see.” She moved forward, offering a steadying hand he didn’t take. The air between them vibrated with his Alpha distress signal and her own forcibly suppressed Omega response. Her skin prickled, the old, greyed-out bond mark on her wrist—a dormant, intricate swirl of gold beneath her skin—feeling inexplicably cold.
He hauled himself onto the veranda, the wood groaning under his weight. The smell of blood—iron and life—overwhelmed the sea salt. Up close, he was older than Mycroft, lines of stress and kindness worn into his face. He was also more powerfully built than his elegant former lover, a physical, grounded presence that seemed to suck all the space from her weathered porch.
“Inside, please. The light is better.” She held the door.
He hesitated, his gaze sweeping past her into the cozy, book-strewn living room, where Mykie’s toy train circled a track. His eyes lingered on the flash of titian curls behind the sofa. “Your son?”
“Oui.” The word was a brick wall. “This way. The bathroom.”
He followed, leaving a faint, bloody smear on her floorboards. In the small, white-tiled bathroom, the light was brutally clear. She washed her hands with surgical precision. “Sit on the lid. The shirt has to go.”
He obliged, gritting his teeth as he tried to peel the soaked cotton from the wound. It was stuck, the fabric matted into the clotted blood and fresh seepage. Without a word, she took a pair of sharp sewing scissors from the cabinet and stepped in. Her fingers, so small against his broad shoulder, were utterly steady as she cut the fabric away.
The wound was a nasty, jagged gash, about four inches long, deep enough to show glistening fat and muscle. It was still bleeding, but not pumping; no major artery hit. Clean, stitch, antibiotic. Straightforward.
“You were lucky. It missed the important pathways. This will need irrigation and sutures. I have lidocaine.”
“Just get on with it, Doctor,” he grunted, jaw tight.
As she worked, swabbing the angry edges with antiseptic, the silence became a third presence in the room. His scent filled the small space, unmasked now by the removal of the bloodied shirt. It was unmistakable. It was the scent of Mycroft’s secret in the city, the scent of his other life, the scent of a love he had given up for her. A old, dormant jealousy, childish and absurd, stirred in her gut alongside a sharper, more profound grief.
“You are English,” she stated, concentrating on drawing the clear liquid into the syringe.
“London. On holiday. Well, supposed to be. Not exactly a relaxing start.” He tried for a wry smile, but it faltered as he watched her hands. “Your English is perfect.”
“I trained in London for a time.” A carefully curated half-truth. “You will feel a pinch.” She injected the local anaesthetic around the wound with practised efficiency. He didn’t flinch.
“What’s your name?” he asked, his eyes on the top of her head as she bent over his arm.
“Juliette. Juliette Tallon.”
“Greg Lestrade. I’m in your debt, Juliette.”
The sound of her chosen name on his tongue, with his London accent, felt like a violation. She didn’t reply, focusing instead on threading the curved needle with fine, dissolvable suture. The first pinch of the needle through his numb flesh made him suck in a quiet breath.
“So you live out here alone? With your boy?” The question was casual, conversational, but she heard the detective in it. The natural, probing curiosity.
“It is quiet. It suits us.” She pulled the suture tight, the skin knitting together under her fingers. “And you? You are here with family?”
A pause. She could feel his gaze heavy on her.
“With my partner,” he said finally, the word deliberate. “He… prefers the countryside. For breaks.”
The needle almost slipped. He. The confirmation was a physical blow. Mycroft. Of course. Sherlock had said nothing, communicated nothing in their scant, cryptic exchanges. Why would he? The world had moved on. It was supposed to have moved on.
“That is nice,” she forced out, her voice hollow. She tied off a stitch, clipped the thread. The rhythmic, medical action was the only thing holding her together.
“Yeah. It is.” His voice had softened, thinking of this partner. “He’s not far, actually. Just up at the big rental house on the cliff. The modern one. He’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.” He gave another short, pained laugh. “Might have sent out a search party by now.”
The modern house on the cliff. A twenty-minute walk. Mycroft was twenty minutes away. Mycroft, who thought she was dead. Mycroft, who was here, in Normandy, with Greg. With Greg.
Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs, a counter-beat to the slow, precise pull-tie-clip of her suturing. The last stitch was placed. She trimmed the final thread and straightened up, her professional mask intact but brittle.
“All done. You must keep it clean and dry. I will give you antibiotics.” She busied herself with the packet, her fingers trembling now the focused task was over. “No swimming. Limited movement for a few days.”
“Thank you.” He flexed his arm cautiously, inspecting her work. “You’re very good.”
“It is my job.” She handed him the pills and turned to the sink, rinsing her tools, needing to break the intensity of his scrutiny. The bioluminescent algae on the veranda seemed to pulse brighter through the small window, a silent, eerie witness.
“Juliette.”
The way he said it stopped her. There was a strange, considering weight to it.
She turned, slowly, meeting his eyes again. In their brown depths, the confusion was back, sharper now, cutting through the pain haze. His nostrils flared, almost imperceptibly. He was scenting the air, scenting her, trying to place the unplaceable. An Omega’s scent was unique, but a bonded Omega’s scent carried an echo of their Alpha. And the Alpha she was bonded to was the man this man loved.
Did he smell it? The faintest, ghostly trace of Mycroft Holmes on her? Was it etched into her very cells, into Mykie’s curls, into the walls of this cottage?
For a horrifying, endless second, they simply stared at each other. The thump of the sea against the cliffs was the only sound. She saw the detective’s mind working behind his eyes, sifting through the incongruities: a beautifully skilled French Omega doctor with a young Alpha son, hiding away on a desolate coast, who smelled like a half-remembered dream.
Then, from the living room, Mykie let out a frustrated wail as his train derailed. The spell shattered.
Greg’s expression cleared, smoothing back into grateful politeness. “I’ve taken too much of your time. Thank you, again. Really.”
He stood, towering in the small bathroom. He moved to the door, then paused, looking back at her. “If you’re ever in London…”
“I am not,” she said, too quickly, too finally.
He nodded, accepting the boundary. He gave her one last, lingering look—a look that saw too much and not enough—and turned, walking stiffly back through her living room. She followed, a silent shadow, watching as he nodded a farewell to a now-silent Mykie, who peeked from behind the sofa with those familiar dark grey eyes.
Greg Lestrade stepped out into the navy-blue night. The bioluminescent algae on her railing flared as he passed, as if stirred by his wake. He didn’t look back, disappearing down the path, a wounded Alpha returning to his Bonded.
Juliette closed the door softly. She locked it. She slid down the wood until she was sitting on the floor, the cool tiles beneath her. She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.
Mykie came over, his small face worried. “Maman?”
She reached out, pulling him into the shelter of her arms, holding him so tightly he squirmed. She buried her face in his hair, breathing in the scent of her child, her secret, her life.
Out on the veranda, the alien blue light pulsed softly, rhythmically, like a phantom heartbeat. It was a beacon in the dark. And he had seen it.
The blue pulse outside the window seemed to sync with the frantic rhythm behind her ribs.It was a heartbeat.His heartbeat. Mycroft was here, on this cliff, his proximity making the dormant gold mark on her wrist ache with a phantom, hollow thrum.Mykie wriggled in her arms. “Maman, trop serré.”
She loosened her grip, but didn’t let go. The smell of London rain and old books still hung in the air, mixing with the antiseptic.Greg Lestrade. The Detective Inspector.Mycroft’s… partner.The word was a stone in her throat.
Three years.She had carved out three years of silence, of sand and solitude and hard, healing work. She had built a life where the only echoes of Mycroft were in the grey of her son’s eyes and the occasional, debilitating scent of bergamot on a stranger’s cuff that would send her reeling into a pharmacy bathroom, choking on silent tears.
She had made peace with her ghosthood.But he was here.They were here.
“Maman?” Mykie’s small hand patted her cheek. His brows, so like his father’s, were drawn together in a miniature frown.She forced a breath, then another. The clinical part of her brain, the doctor, kicked in.Symptoms: tachycardia, hyperventilation, acute psychological distress. Treatment: remove stimulus, establish safety, regulate breathing.The stimulus was a twenty-minute walk up the cliff path.
“Come on, mon chou,” she said, her voice eerily calm even to her own ears. She stood, lifting him with her.“Bath time.”
The routine was a lifeline. The warm water, the familiar rubber duck, the way Mykie slapped the surface, giggling as droplets caught in his lashes. She focused on the tactile: the slipperiness of soap, the warmth of the water, the rough texture of the towel. But her mind kept skidding back to the rawness in Greg’s brown eyes, the way he’d looked at her—not with recognition, but with a detective’s nagging sense of something off.
Had she slipped?Her accent was perfect, her story airtight.But scent… scent was the uncontrollable variable. Omegas in proximity to their bonded Alpha carried a trace, a subtle watermark on their pheromones.It faded with distance and time, but did it ever truly vanish? And Greg… Greg knew Mycroft’s scent as intimately as she once did. Did some part of him, some ancient, Alpha part, sense a familiar claim on the air in this tiny bathroom?
She dressed Mykie in his pyjamas, the ones with little sailing ships, and carried him to the small bedroom under the eaves. She read Le Petit Prince, her voice a steady monotone over the words about taming and ties and responsibility. Mykie’s eyelids grew heavy, his breath evening out into the soft puffs of sleep.
She sat there, in the dark, watching the rise and fall of his chest.Her hand crept to her own abdomen, flat beneath her sweater.
Three years ago, in the silent, gilded tomb of Mycroft’s London flat, she had been vibrantly, terrifyingly alive with a secret. The soulbond mark on her wrist had burned, a constant, golden reminder of a claim she had never asked for but cherished with every fiber of her being. She had just come from the doctor, the digital stick with its two blue lines tucked in her pocket like a live wire.
She had floated home, a bubble of joy so fragile she dared not breathe on it.She would tell him that evening. He was at the Diogenes Club, a meeting with Lady Smallwood. She’d gone to find him, to surprise him, her heart a drum solo against her ribs.The club was a maze of hushed corridors and leather armchairs. She’d heard their voices from a shadowed alcove near the library door.
“A child, Mycroft? Really, it’s not on the agenda.” Lady Smallwood’s tone was cool, administrative.
“It is not,” Mycroft’s voice replied, precise and absolute as a guillotine blade. “The continuation of the Holmes lineage is a matter of strategic consideration, not personal sentiment.I have the Omega, the bond is stable. A pregnancy, at this juncture, would be an untenable disruption.I would not tolerate it.”
The words weren’t shouted. They were calm, clean, surgical. They cut the fragile bubble of her future open and left it deflated on the Persian rug.I would not tolerate it.
She had stood there, frozen, the secret in her pocket now a dead weight. The golden mark on her wrist felt like a brand, a ownership stamp for a creature whose existence would be an ‘untenable disruption.’
She had backed away silently.That night, she had contacted Sherlock. The plan, the desperate, terrible plan, had been his.A fire.A body from the morgue, dental records swapped. Enough evidence for even Mycroft Holmes to believe his Omega was ash and bone.
She had run, not just from him, but from the terrifying clarity in his voice. She had taken his heir, his ‘strategic consideration,’ and vanished, to protect her child from the cold calculus of a father who would not tolerate him.A soft, blue glow from the veranda spilled into the hallway. She stood, knees cracking, and walked back to the living room.She didn’t turn on the lights. The algae-lit darkness was safer.She went to the window.The path was empty. The Channel was a vast black murmur.
Then she saw it—a single, bobbing light, weaving its way up the cliff path toward the modern house.A torch.Greg, heading home.
Home to Mycroft.The pulse in the algae quickened, a sympathetic rhythm. She watched until the light was swallowed by the distance. Her cottage felt suddenly insubstantial, a paper lantern on the edge of the vast, dark sea.Greg had seen the light.He had been inside. He had smelled the air.He had looked at Mykie.He would go back. He would walk into that house on the cliff. He would tell Mycroft about the kind, efficient, French Omega doctor with the curious child and the familiar, haunting scent.
And Mycroft, who missed nothing, would listen.
And Mycroft, who missed nothing, would listen.
In the stark, minimalist living room of the cliff house, Mycroft Holmes stood perfectly still before a floor-to-ceiling window. The Channel was a black expanse below, punctuated by the occasional white flash of a wave catching the moonlight. His hands were clasped behind his back, a sculpture of tailored composure. But the index finger of his right hand tapped a slow, restless rhythm against his left wrist. Greg was late.
The rational part of his mind, which constituted approximately 98.7% of it, presented facts. Gregory was an experienced detective, physically capable, and familiar with the terrain. The probability of a serious misadventure was low. The emotional calculus, that fragile, inconvenient 1.3%, whispered other scenarios. It conjured images of slick rocks, a misplaced step, the cold suck of the water.
He despised the 1.3%. It was messy. It was why he had excised sentiment from his life’s equation, or had believed so until Gregory Lestrade had stubbornly reintroduced it.
A key turned in the lock. The tension in Mycroft’s shoulders dissolved, replaced by a different kind of alertness. He heard the stumble, the muffled curse. He turned.
Greg filled the doorway, pale, supporting himself on the frame. The shoulder of his jacket was a dark, ruined stain. The smell hit Mycroft first: iron, salt, and antiseptic. And underneath, something else. Something that made the air in his lungs solidify.
“Don’t start,” Greg grunted, shuffling inside. “Took a tumble down by the cove. Lost my phone. It’s just a scratch.”
“The forensic evidence on your clothing suggests a ‘scratch’ of significant depth and hemorrhage,” Mycroft said, his voice clipped. He was already moving, guiding Greg to the white sofa. “Sit.”
“I’ve had worse. Got it seen to.” Greg sank down with a groan of relief.
“By whom? The local sheep?” Mycroft’s fingers were already deftly unbuttoning Greg’s shirt, pushing the fabric aside to reveal the neat, professional sutures.
“By a doctor. A local. Lives in that little cottage down on the point, the one with the weird blue algae on the porch. Juliette, her name was. Juliette Tallon. She was… kind. Efficient.”
Mycroft’s hands stilled. The name meant nothing. A French civilian. And yet. The 1.3% began a low, persistent hum. He leaned closer, ostensibly to examine the wound. His nostrils flared.
Beneath the overwhelming scents of blood and iodine, he caught it. A phantom note. A blend of sea spray, chamomile, and a particular, delicate skin-scent he had not encountered in three years. It was faint, clinging to Greg’s clothes, but unmistakable. It was the scent of his Omega.
The world did not slow. It sharpened. Every detail in the room became hyper-focused: the grain of the wooden floor, the faint buzz of the refrigerator, the slow, painful throb of Greg’s pulse under his fingertips. His own bond mark, a complex, dormant spiral of gold on his inner forearm, flared with a sudden, icy heat.
“She did excellent work,” he said, his tone flat, devoid of all inflection. He continued his examination, a model of clinical care. “You were fortunate.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. She had a kid, too. Cute little boy. Mykie, she called him. Chatty little thing, hiding behind the sofa. An Alpha, I could tell, even that young. Must be tough, raising one alone out here.”
Mykie.
A contraction. A familiar, familial diminutive. Mycroft’s mind, a vast and ruthless machine, processed the data.
Juliette Tallon. French. Medical training. Isolated coastal residence. Off-grid. A perfect constructed identity. Child: Male, approximately 2-3 years old. Titian hair observed in one quick glance Greg had from the door. Alpha presentation. Name: Mykie.
Probability assessments shattered and re-formed. The hypothesis was absurd. It was impossible. It was the only possible conclusion.
Jill was alive.
She had run. She had hidden. She had borne a child. His child. And she was living twenty minutes down a cliff path.
A raw, primal sound, almost a growl, built in his chest. He throttled it. The visceral, Alpha urge to storm into the night and claim what was his was immense, a tectonic pressure behind his ribs. But the Holmesian intellect, cold and strategic, imposed order. She had fled him. She had made him believe she was dead. The ‘why’ was a gaping chasm, but the ‘how’ pointed squarely at Sherlock. That particular reckoning would come later.
“You’re quiet,” Greg murmured, his head leaning back against the sofa, eyes closed. “Worse than I thought?”
“The injury is superficial. You will require antibiotics and rest.” Mycroft stood, walking back to the window. His reflection was a pale, controlled mask. The black water outside seemed to seep into the room. “Describe her. The doctor.”
Greg gave a tired chuckle. “Pretty. Petite. Red hair. Grey eyes. Real steady hands. Why? You thinking of sending a thank-you basket?”
Grey eyes. Steady hands.
“Merely assessing the local medical resources,” Mycroft lied smoothly. “The algae you mentioned. Bioluminescent, you say?”
“Yeah. Eerie stuff. Glowed brighter when I walked past it, like it knew I was there. This place is full of weird little details.”
It knew.
The magical realism of the coast was not lost on Mycroft. The pulsating algae was a testament to it. It reacted to life, to emotion. It had reacted to Gregory, an injured Alpha carrying the scent of a lost Omega back to her bonded. The entire landscape felt complicit in her secrecy, and now, in its undoing.
He watched as, far down the cliff, a single pinpoint of cool blue light winked against the darkness. Her cottage. The algae was glowing. Was it reacting to her distress? To his own raging silence?
“You should shower. You smell of the sea and unsanitary rock,” Mycroft said, turning. His voice was a dismissal. He needed to think. To plan.
Greg heaved himself up, clutching his shoulder. “Right. Cheers for the sympathy.” He paused, looking at Mycroft with a detective’s suddenly sharp eye. “You okay? You’ve gone all… still.”
“I am perfectly adequate. Attend to your wound.”
Once the bathroom door closed and the shower started, Mycroft’s composure cracked. Just a fissure. He walked to the liquor cabinet, poured a whisky he didn’t want, and downed it. The fire in his throat was nothing compared to the ice and fire warring in his veins.
Alive.
The word was a bomb detonating in the silent vault of his grief. All that carefully cultivated acceptance, that bleak resignation, was ash. In its place was a fury so profound it was crystalline, and beneath it, a hope so terrifying it felt like a new kind of death.
He looked at the phone. He could have a security detail there in ten minutes. He could have the cottage surrounded, could walk in and…
And what? She had chosen this. She had chosen oblivion over him. Over their bond. The child—his son—was a living monument to her deception.
The shower stopped. Mycroft replaced the glass, his face once again a placid mask.
Greg emerged, rubbing a towel through his hair. “Feel human again. That doctor, Juliette… there was something about her. Can’t put my finger on it. Felt like I should know her, but that’s daft. Maybe she just had one of those faces.”
Mycroft stood again at the window, his back to the room. “The brain often seeks familiar patterns in strangers, especially under stress. It is a common cognitive glitch.”
“A glitch,” Greg echoed, not sounding convinced. He came to stand beside Mycroft, following his gaze down to the solitary blue pinprick of light. “Pretty lonely spot for a young woman and a kid.”
“Indeed.”
The two men stood in silence, watching the distant, pulsing glow. It seemed to quicken, like a heartbeat.
Inside his sleeve, the gold mark on Mycroft’s arm burned with a cold, insistent pressure. It was no longer dormant. It was a compass needle. And it pointed unerringly down the cliff.
He knew, with absolute certainty, that he would go to her tonight. Not with force. Not with a cadre of agents. Alone.
The 1.3% had seized control of the system. The equation was no longer about strategy or reason. It was about a cottage by the sea, a ghost made flesh, and a question that demanded an answer.
He waited until Greg’s breathing deepened into sleep on the sofa. Then, without a sound, Mycroft Holmes took his coat and stepped out into the salt-heavy night.
The path was familiar. He had walked it earlier, surveying the perimeter. Now, it felt like a pilgrimage. The bioluminescent algae on the rocks alongside the path brightened as he passed, casting his shadow in long, shifting streaks of blue. It was as if the coast itself was acknowledging his claim, illuminating his path to her door.
He saw the dark shape of her cottage. The veranda algae was a constellation now, throbbing with an anxious, cerulean light. He stopped at the edge of the property, his Alpha senses stretching out.
He could smell her. Chamomile and salt and Jill. It was a scent that had haunted his empty rooms for years. It was here, real, and tangled with the scent of a sleeping child.
He could see a faint, golden light from a single window at the back. A kitchen, perhaps. She was awake.
His feet moved forward of their own volition. The wooden steps of the veranda did not creak under his weight. He was a shadow moving through a dream of blue light.
He raised his hand. The impulse to knock, to demand, was overpowering.
But he paused. For the first time in his adult life, Mycroft Holmes hesitated. He looked through the gauzy curtain of the window.
She was there. A silhouette against the sink, her titian hair a dull fire in the low light. Her head was bowed, her shoulders tense. She was washing a single teacup, the movements slow, deliberate, as if clinging to routine.
He watched. The mighty British government, the man who orchestrated the fates of nations, stood unseen in the dark, terrified of the sound his knuckles would make on his own Omega’s door.
Inside, Jill’s hands shook. The teacup clattered softly in the sink. She felt it—a presence in the dark, a pressure in the silence between the waves. The gold mark on her wrist, so long a faded scar, suddenly blazed with a physical heat that made her gasp. It wasn't the grey, hollow ache of loss. It was a live wire, a searing signal.
Her eyes lifted slowly, dread and a wild, impossible hope twisting together in her chest.
She looked toward the window.
Toward the darkness where he stood.
Two shapes, separated by glass and three years of lies, connected by a thread of gold that now pulsed with a light no algae could mimic. The Channel roared its endless question against the cliffs.
He raised his hand again, not to knock, but to touch the cold pane of glass that separated them.