Turn 5 of 7

Tell her honestly that you don't know anything about her brother yet

You shake your head, and the honesty of it feels cruel and necessary at once.

"I don't know," you say. "I don't know anything about your brother yet. I don't know your name, or how you came to be here, or what the water did. I came down to measure how far the reservoir has dropped. That's all. I'm not — I'm not the person who would know those things."

She looks at you, and for a moment her face is absolutely still, the way a lake is still before a storm. Then something in it shifts, not collapse but a kind of settling, like a house deciding whether it will stand or fall. She presses her hand flat against the parapet stone, fingers spread, as if checking that it is still real.

"Marget," she says. "My name is Marget Aule. My brother is Jon — Jonathan Aule. He worked the upper mill after our father passed, and the mill burned, but the foundations stood, and he was rebuilding. He said to meet him on the bridge at the shift change because he had something to tell me. He was particular about it." She repeats this as if the particularity is what matters, as if being specific about a plan can hold the world together.

"He wouldn't have just not come. He was particular."

Behind her, the last light catches the wet face of the church tower and turns it the colour of bone. The reservoir is utterly still, and somewhere far out on the water a bird calls — a long, descending note that sounds like a question asked in a language neither of you speaks. The exposed road behind you glistens with silt, and the survey rods lean where you left them against the wall, useless now, instruments for a different kind of problem entirely.

You think of the parish records, the census returns, the water authority's archive. Somewhere in a drawer or a basement or a cardboard box there may be a list of names — the people who lived here before the valley was drowned, the people who were moved, the people who were not moved in time. You do not say this to Marget, because right now the idea of her brother reduced to ink in a ledger would be worse than not knowing. Instead you stand on the wet bridge with her, and the dark comes down, and the water does not answer either of you.