Chapter 2: The Harbor of Names

The moth folded itself inside Calder’s coat like a wet scrap of paper. It trembled against his ribs whenever the seams in the world shifted; he had learned to follow that tremor the way other men follow music. A coin-shaped pool in the gutter held the seam that night. He slid his heel into it and felt the street tilt as if someone had pressed a thumb into glass.

He came out on a narrow quay under a low, washed sky. Wooden houses leaned toward the water as if they were listening for gossip. A wind bell at the pier’s end ticked like a reprimand. Jars bobbed in the Name-Harbor, their glass necks catching the light; people carried them like bread, lids clipped with the careful hands of those who had learned how to keep secrets from drowning. Notices were nailed in neat script to the posts: NO KISSING; CONFESS ONLY IN LIGHT; DO NOT SPEAK A NAME AFTER SUNSET. The rules read like remedies; someone, long ago, had learned them the way you learn to avoid a burn.

Calder’s pockets were full of little talismans: a matchbox with a bird scratched on its lid, a coin that had never found a hand to exchange it with, a ribbon knotted tight. He watched the market without meaning to, the way you watch a wave arrive and then decide if you will step in. Two children passed a jar between them like contraband; an old man cupped a jar to his chest and closed his eyes, as if holding someone’s warmth. The town’s restraint made Calder’s appetite sharper—rules always did.

She was under an awning that smelled of old paper and brine, a small glass jar balanced on her palm. Driftwood hair, a mouth practiced into neutral, and a scar on her wrist that split the skin like a river. When their eyes met, she did not smile. She fitted the jar’s lid with a care that read less like ceremony and more like habit.

She kissed him because she could not kiss him.

It was sudden and courteous, the sort of kiss you give to remember how hands meet. Her finger brushed his sleeve and left a trace of salt on his wrist. The kiss tasted faintly of apples and copper. When they broke apart, she looked at him as if reading a ledger. “Do you know the cost?” she asked, voice small as a coin slid across wood.

Calder laughed, the same polite sound he carried like a badge from other crossings. “I always know the cost,” he said, and told himself the truth in a way that was half-confidence, half-denial.

That night he slept on a bench by the harbor with the moth nesting in his collar. In his dreams, jars drifted like planets; slips of paper with neat handwriting bobbed underwater: AUNT MARISSA; FIRST DOG; THE JOKE ABOUT A PIG. He woke with a hollow where a joke had been. He reached into his pocket for a card his mother had once pressed into his hand, and could not remember why the card mattered. The family laugh, the one that had made sauce sputter and chairs scrape back, had thinned into a polite echo. He could shape the sound in its place, but the knot that had made it his—its history, its warmth—was gone.

He walked the quay until the tide ran out of the harbor and the jars listed at odd angles. In one a child’s handwriting leaned like reed strokes; in another a name blurred under a cloud of seaweed. He thought of taking a jar, of opening one for examination, but the town’s hush made theft feel obscene rather than possible.

A man with a ledger bound in leather the color of

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