The last ferry left half-empty, and they ended up at the rail without discussing it, the way they used to end up anywhere together — less a decision than a kind of weather.
Ten years since the wedding they'd both stood through without once managing to look at each other, and here was the whole black width of the strait between two lit shores, and nothing to do about the cold but stand closer than either of them would have called necessary.
"You're freezing," he said. "I'm fine." "You're always fine." He didn't move his arm from the rail, an inch from her shoulder, and she didn't ask him to.
The crossing ran twenty minutes, and somewhere past the halfway mark the far shore's smear of light began separating into windows, into a specific dock, into an ending with an actual shape to it.
She watched that happen instead of watching him, which he noticed, because noticing her had never once stopped being a habit he kept up for free.
Neither said the thing that would have required naming what standing this close, after everything, was supposed to mean.
His hand found the small of her back — not asking, just arriving, the way it had always known where to go before the rest of him decided anything — and she let it stay, watching the lights sharpen into a countdown she hadn't agreed to start.
"I forgot how cold you run," he said, low, meant only for her, and she turned enough that his mouth ended up nearer her temple than the wind alone could explain.
The horn sounded once for the dock, and the deck lights came up under their feet, and she felt the whole boat begin the long lean of slowing down.
It nosed into the slip on a shudder of reversed engines, and a deckhand looped the rope over the bollard in one practiced motion, and up at the rail, in the sudden stillness of arrival, neither of them had moved toward the gangway yet.