The Quiet Water
Pip & Dawn, Book 4
by A.J.Sharpe
© 2026 A.J.Sharpe. No licence is granted for any use beyond the terms. Terms: https://pip-and-dawn.com/terms

The mornings had a shape, and one morning she was not in it.
Pip sat on the stone until the light was high and ordinary.
The pool held still.

The sea was large; he had measured it.
She had business in it; she had said so, over the years, in passing.
He went up the steps at noon like somebody leaving a door open.

He gave the mornings a reed of their own.
One small mark each, low on the stem, the size of a grass seed.
Three marks. He kept them small on purpose.

He kept his promise.
He did not go past where his feet went dark.
He stood at that line twice a day with his arms folded, like a man keeping a promise.

He held the shell to his ear to check on the sea.
The sea was still going.
It said nothing about anybody in it, which is the way with seas.

Seven marks.
The weather turned, and he took the scarf out.
He built nothing at all, and the not-building took most of every day.

He practised what he would say when she came back.
Out loud. To nobody.
The words got shorter every morning.
By the ninth they were her name.

Eleven marks, then a storm that rearranged the beach and left the reed standing.
He thanked it out loud, and heard what his voice had become, and stopped thanking things.

She had said the sea was big, and he had measured it, and the numbers had agreed with her, and the numbers had always been his friends, and he went through them again at night, the sixes and the forties, and they agreed and agreed and agreed, and none of them said anything about her, and he counted the forty-one steps down in the dark and back up in the dark, and there were forty-one, and it did not help.

The first reed ran out of clean stem on the fourteenth morning.
He cut and stood a second reed.
It was the worst thing he had ever built, and he built it well.

Fifteen.
Sixteen.
Sixteen.

The sea went strange one evening, a long way out: a paleness that stood, and sank.
He watched until dark and told himself the word for it was weather.

The pool held still.

On the seventeenth morning the pool had her in it, risen on the deep side, which was not her side.
She looked at him a long time before she said anything at all.
He was too glad to count what the look was doing.

*Deep is not far,* she said, when at last he asked where she had been.
He decided that was most of an answer.
The marks on the second reed stopped at seventeen.

© 2026 A.J.Sharpe. Terms: https://pip-and-dawn.com/terms