The ferry took forty minutes from the mainland and the last twenty were in open water, which is where Iris Chen stopped pretending the situation was manageable and accepted that she had made a decision she could not easily reverse.

She stood at the stern rail and watched the coastline of Sorrow Bay materialise out of the mist — not dramatically, not in the way of arriving places in films, but in the slow grey way of the Pacific Northwest in late June, where the sea and the sky share the same colour and the land arrives as a deepening of that colour rather than a separate thing. Spruce trees. Dark rock. A dock at the bottom of a steep path, and above the dock, visible now, a cluster of weather-grey buildings that looked like they had been built to withstand something.

Dr. Declan Hart's marine research station. The Sorrow Bay Marine Ecology Centre.

She had accepted the position in February, which was four months ago and a different version of her life. She had been in the last semester of her master's degree at Berkeley, sitting in a seminar on deep-sea thermal dynamics, and her advisor Dr. Ruiz had leaned over and put a folded piece of paper on her desk that read: This is yours if you want it. Six months, paid. Hart's the real thing.

She had looked up Hart's publication record that night. Forty-one peer-reviewed papers. Two landmark studies on kelp forest recovery systems that were still cited in every relevant paper published in the last decade. The station had operated continuously for twelve years and had produced, according to Dr. Ruiz, more quality data on Pacific Northwest coastal ecology than any other single-researcher operation on the West Coast.

She had also looked up why the position was available. The previous three research assistants had each left before their contracts ended. One had cited "communication challenges." One had offered no reason. One had, according to a graduate student in her department who'd heard it from someone else, cried on the ferry home.

She had emailed Dr. Hart to accept the position anyway, because she was twenty-two years old and she was not afraid of difficult men, and because the work was the kind of work she had come to graduate school to do, and because some part of her — the part that had always been drawn toward the harder thing, the less comfortable option, the place where you found out what you were made of — had read communication challenges and thought: good.

The ferry dock smelled like brine and diesel. She dragged her duffel and her equipment case down the gangway and stood on the dock and looked up the path.

A man was walking down it.

She had not been able to find a photograph of Dr. Hart. His faculty page at the University of Washington, where he held an adjunct position, listed his publications and research interests and had a grey box where a headshot should have been. She had prepared for this by constructing no mental image whatsoever, which had been, in her experience, the soundest approach to people whose work you admired.

He was fifty years old and looked like he had been built by the place he worked. Not tall but substantial — the kind of physical presence that came from years of work rather than effort. Dark hair going silver at the temples and through it, worn short, practical. A face that had taken weather and showed it without apology — the lines of someone who spent their days outside and had stopped managing that a long time ago. He wore canvas work trousers and a fleece and he was looking at her with the expression of a man performing an assessment.

She looked back.

"Dr. Hart," she said.

"Iris Chen." He said her name the way he might confirm a supply delivery. He took the equipment case from her with the efficiency of someone who was not offering help so much as redistributing weight. "You're light on gear."

"I shipped the rest ahead. It should be in the main lab."

"It is. I checked it in when it arrived." He started back up the path without ceremony. "The ferry comes twice a week. Tuesday and Friday. If you need something from the mainland you plan ahead."

"Understood."

"The station runs on a schedule. Survey at six, data entry by nine, analysis from ten to two, field work in the afternoon when conditions allow. Meals are communal because it's more efficient, not because I require company. Dinner at seven."

"Communal," she said. "How many people are here?"

He glanced back at her over his shoulder. "You and me."

She adjusted her grip on the duffel and followed him up the path and told herself that the tightening in her chest was the physical effort of the climb and not anything else.

The station was larger than it had appeared from the water. The main building held a laboratory, a data room, a kitchen and common room. A smaller building behind it housed two sleeping quarters and a bathroom. Behind that, a storage barn for equipment. All of it built for function, nothing wasted on form — but clean, and carefully maintained, and oriented to face the bay with a large window in the common room that framed the water like a deliberate composition.

He showed her the sleeping quarters. Hers was at the near end of the building, his at the far end, a bathroom between them with a clear operational rule about the lock.

"The wifi is for data upload only," he said, at her door. "Personal internet use runs off a separate router with a bandwidth cap. Research takes priority."

"That's fine."

"It's not a moral position," he said. "It's an infrastructure limitation. I'm not interested in managing what you do on your own time."

She looked at him. "I didn't think you were."

Something crossed his face that she couldn't read. "Dinner's at seven," he said again, and went back toward the main building, and left her standing in the doorway of her room with her duffel and the sound of the ocean twenty metres away and the very clear sense that the next six months were going to require something of her she hadn't entirely mapped yet.

She sat on the bed and texted her boyfriend Marcus in the city: Arrived. It's beautiful and strange. Miss you. Then she unpacked, because unpacking was the thing that made a place feel like somewhere you were staying rather than somewhere you'd ended up, and then she stood at her window and watched the water, and thought: I am exactly where I'm supposed to be.

She didn't know yet how true that was, or what it would cost.