The boats came back light three mornings running, and by the fourth the harbour had stopped pretending not to notice. Mara counted the hulls from the seawall the way her mother had taught her — twice, then once more for luck. Eleven had gone out at dawn. Seven were riding high on the swell, which meant empty holds, which meant another week of the same thin arithmetic in the ledger her father kept in the shed and thought she had never opened.

Salt keeps its own accounts. It takes the paint off a door first, then the name off the door, and in the end it comes for the people who painted it. Her grandmother had said that the winter the herring failed, and everyone on the point had nodded the way you nod at weather.

Her father had promised the season would turn. He said it the way he said most things that year — half to her and half to the water, as though the tide were the one that needed convincing. Mara had learned to hear the difference between the things he believed and the things he was holding up with both hands.

"Seven," she said, when he finally came up the steps with his hands raw and his coat gone black with wet.

He did not ask her to count again. That was how she knew.

He set the empty creel by the door instead, and stood for a while looking at the shelf where the good rope used to hang before he sold it. Then he asked whether there was bread, in the bright false voice he used for company, and Mara said there was, and there was, and neither of them said anything about what would happen when there wasn't.

By Friday the harbour master had nailed a notice to the shed door. Every family on the point read it standing up in the rain — the buyers from the mainland would take what was landed at half of last year's price, and take it only until the month was out. Nobody argued with him. You do not argue with a piece of paper.

Mara waited until the crowd thinned and the rain had softened the ink, and then she read it a second time, slowly, the way her mother had taught her to read anything that came from the mainland: once for what it said, and once for what it was for.