The day before the funeral, the roof began to leak. One cold drop struck the table, then another, each one landing with enough time between them that Maren could set a bowl beneath it and pretend the leak was handled. 

This was only another complaint. The house always made small complaints in weather. A shutter came loose, or the chimney coughed smoke back into the room whenever the wind came in wrong off the Sound.

By morning, the bowl was full, the table felt spongy at one corner, and a second drip had started near the wall where the roof sagged lowest. The rag Maren wedged into the seam darkened, fattened, and began to leak faster than the roof had done on its own.

Their father lay wrapped in the next room.

Maren stood beneath the dripping ceiling with rainwater running down her wrist and laughed once, with no one in the room who could mistake it for joy.

“Rude.”

Her first lesson was how to dig a grave six feet deep. No one told her it would take so long. No one told her the earth would change by layers, soft at the top and stubborn beneath, then wet where the water held its breath underground. Her father’s shovel had been too large for her hands and too familiar to put down. She dug until her shoulders burned, rested until the silence drove her upright again, then dug more.

Her sibling was somewhere beyond the weather by then. The ground did not care. Their father still needed lowering, the stone still needed placing. All the while, the house waited behind her with its leaking roof and its full bowl on the table, patient as a debt.

Maren did not curse while she dug.

The roof came next.

She waited for a dry morning, climbed the ladder with pitch, spare shakes, and a hammer in a belt that had belonged to their father, and found the place where the water must have entered. It was obvious once she saw it. A lifted seam near the sagging corner. One split shake. A dark line where rain had worked its way beneath the overlap.

Maren pulled the broken piece free, set another in its place, and used too much pitch because too much seemed better than not enough. She hammered the new shake down until it sat crooked, ugly, and firmly attached.

Then she climbed back inside and waited for the next rain.

The first drip stopped, and three more started.

For a while, Maren only stared at them. One over the table, one by the wall, one close enough to the hearth that she had to move the woodpile with both arms. She had let out a string of words her father would have cuffed her for.

That was how she learned that water traveled before it fell. A leak wasn’t always where the water landed. A roof could look solid from below and turn treacherous under a hand. She learned that pitch stuck to skin, hair, sleeves, tools, and every surface except the one she needed sealed.

Her second patch was worse than the first. The third was better. The fourth was only a smear of pitch and stubbornness beneath a stone wedged in place because the shake would not sit flat and the rain had already begun to mist in from the ironwoods.

It was ugly, but it held.

After that, there were nets.

Empty set-nets were lies. Folded over one arm, with their stones knocking softly together and their stakes tucked under the other, they went out light enough that Maren could pretend three were still reasonable. She could still drive the stakes into the mud, check the knots, and tell herself the work had not changed just because there was one less body moving through it.

Full nets told the truth. Full nets came back with fish, weed, silt, and the cold drag of the Wolfsmaw itself. Full nets pulled at the shoulders and numbed the fingers. Full nets had opinions about being lifted into a skiff that already sat low in the water.

She could manage two full nets. Two full nets left her tired, wet, and angry, but fed. The third net belonged to missing hands.

Maren tried three anyway.

By the time she reached the last stakes, the tide had turned hard around her knees. The skiff was heavy. Her hands had gone clumsy from cold, and the net bellied dark beneath the chop, silver flashing inside it. She stood there longer than she should have, measuring the water, the basket space, the distance home, and her pride.

“I’ll come back at dawn,” she told the net. 

By dawn, a Barl had beaten her to it.

It had taken the fish, fouled the stakes, and worried the mesh until half the net hung in long, useless ribbons. A slick trail curved through the mud toward deeper water, and one of the floats bobbed loose beyond the shallows as if waving goodbye.

Maren stood over the wreck with numb fingers and no one to blame who could hear her.

Months later, that same net lay in her lap when the door opened.

The hearth was low, banked to make the wood last. Rain tapped softly at the patched places above, but none of it came through. A pot of stew sat near the coals, thickened past what was polite and stretched farther than it had any right to go. Maren had been working the torn mesh by lamplight, tying new cord into old knots, when the wind shifted under the door.

She heard the scrape of a boot on the step. A pause. The soft, dull sound of a pack being set down outside.

Maren kept the net in her hands.

The latch lifted.

Her sibling stood in the doorway with the rain behind them and the Sound on their coat. They looked thinner than she remembered. One hand stayed on the doorframe. Their weight favored one leg, not badly, but enough that Maren saw it before she saw their face.

They looked at the room first. The hearth. The table. The patched corner of the ceiling. The pot near the coals. The net in her lap. Finally, they looked at her.

Maren pulled the cord through the mesh and tightened the knot with her teeth.

“You’re back,” she said.

The door remained open behind them. Rain freckled the threshold, darkening the boards one drop at a time. Maren looked at the pack behind them, slumped in the weather as if it had walked farther than they had. She set the mending needle into the torn mesh.

“You eaten?”

They blinked, once, as if the question had reached them from a great distance. “Not hungry yet.”

“There’s stew.”

They gave a small nod and stepped inside, though not far. The room seemed to take their measure. So did Maren. Their boots were worn at the edges, and their hands looked older than the rest of them. They stood like someone waiting for a blow and not sure whether they wanted it to land.

Maren went back to the net. The cord slid through her fingers. Over, under, pull. Over, under, pull. The old rhythm made space. Across the room, her sibling closed the door at last. The latch settled.

They did not take the stew. Not yet. They lowered themselves onto the bench near the hearth with care, one hand braced on the table’s swollen corner. Their eyes found the patched roof again.

“It held,” they said.

Maren tied another knot.

“Mostly.”

That answer sat between them, plain and crooked and sealed with too much pitch.

After a while, her sibling leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped loosely between them. Their breathing changed before sleep took them. First shallow, then uneven, then slow.

Maren finished the row she was working on. Just enough that it would not unravel when she set it aside. She rose, crossed the room, and opened the door. The pack waited on the step, dark with rain. She lifted it by a strap and brought it inside.

Not far. Just over the threshold, where the water could not reach it.