The sea returns everything it takes, eventually, and everything it returns is a little wrong.

This is not a superstition on the island. It is a fact, like the ferry schedule, and like the ferry schedule it is unreliable in its particulars but dependable in its habit. Mrs. Aldana's reading glasses went over the rail of the Perpetua in a June squall and came back eleven months later in the wrack line, the prescription slightly changed, as though her eyes had kept aging somewhere underwater. The Costa boy's kite returned with a longer tail. A christening gown that went out sized for an infant washed up sized for a child of four, and nobody in the Vieira family would say anything about that, and nobody on the island would ask.

After every storm, the beach is a table set with returns. People walk it at first light with their hands behind their backs, the way they walk through the church rummage sale, claiming what is theirs and pretending not to notice what is anyone else's.

Ines walks it too. She has walked it after six storms now, which is every storm since October, when Tomas took the boat out ahead of the weather to pull his pots because the pots were owed money to the bank and the bank did not believe in weather.

The sea has been returning him in installments.

After the first storm it gave back nothing of his, and she stood at the tide line until noon while her neighbors made a wide, kind circle around her, the way you leave room for a wet dog to shake.

After the second storm it returned his left boot. Then, farther down the beach, his left boot again. The sea had returned it as a pair, which was one more boot than it had taken. She carried them home by their laces and set them by the door, toes pointed out, the way he'd never once set them in nineteen years.

After the third storm, his tobacco tin. His initials were still scratched into the lid, T.M.V., but in handwriting that was not his — neater, more patient, the handwriting of a man who had somewhere learned to sit still. She keeps the tin on the sill above the sink. She has not opened it. There are mornings she is certain she can hear it thinking.

After the fourth storm, a whelk shell the size of her fist. Held to her ear it gave back not the ocean but Tomas, humming. It was a song he had never known the words to in life, and he did not know them now, but he hummed it in a different key, lower, as though the water had settled his voice the way it settles sand.

That was the storm after which she began to feed it.

She had noticed a thing by then, walking the wrack line six mornings, and the thing was this: the sea returned the most of whoever it held the most of. The Aldanas got back a pair of glasses because the sea had only a pair of glasses. The Vieiras got back the gown. But the widow Serrano, whose husband had gone down with the Bom Sucesso and all his tools, received something of his after every blow — a plane, a level, a chalk line wound with new string — because the sea had so much of him to work from. The sea was not generous. The sea was proportional.

So Ines began making deposits.

The razor first. Then his good shirt, the one he was married in, weighted with a stone through the collar. She stood on the dock at dusk and let them go the way you mail a letter to an address you're no longer sure of. She told herself it was arithmetic: the more of him the water held, the more of him the water owed.

She told no one. When Ana Costa asked why the porch chairs were gone, she said water damage. When Father Reis asked after the kitchen table — he'd sat at it every Advent for a decade — she said woodworm, and watched him decide to believe her. The island forgives a widow anything except a plan.

The chairs, the table, the oars he'd carved the summer they were engaged. His pillow, which held the shape of his head the way the tin held his initials: recognizably, and wrong. The door he had painted blue against her objections; she took it off its hinges herself and floated it out on the tide like a small stubborn raft, and the house stood open all that night, and nothing came in but the smell of rain.

The house began to sound different without its objects. Bigger inside. She would lie in bed — she had kept the bed; she was not finished being practical — and listen to the rooms ring like a shell held to the ear of the street.

The first thing she had ever given the sea, though, was not strategy. It was the cup.

The morning he left, Tomas had poured his coffee and drunk half of it and set the cup on the porch rail, saying he'd finish it when he got back, which was a thing he said the way other men said God willing — not a promise, a password. When the boat was three days overdue she had taken the cup off the rail, coffee and all, gone skimmed and cold and awful, and thrown it as far off the dock as her arm would allow. Not an offering. A returned insult. If the sea wanted what was his, it could have the dregs too.

She has regretted it every day since. Of all his things, it is the one she'd take back first — before the boots, before the voice in the shell. The unfinished half of anything is the most of it.

In April the radio gives the seventh storm a name, an ordinary one, the kind of name you'd give a child you weren't afraid of losing, and Ines takes stock of the house and finds it nearly settled. What remains of Tomas is what she is wearing on her left hand.

She has held it back all winter the way you hold back the ace you are saving and the ace you are afraid of. It is only a thin gold band, worn to the shine of use. The sea has so little gold of his. The sea might mistake it for anyone's.

Or the sea might finally have enough of him to finish the job.

She walks out the night the storm arrives, when the rain is coming in sideways, fine as sifted flour, and the dock bucks under her like a thing trying to be a boat. She does not make a speech. She and the water are past speeches; they are like any two parties to a long negotiation, weary, respectful, each convinced the other is cheating. She works the ring over her knuckle and drops it, and does not hear it land, and goes home to her loud empty house and sleeps the way she imagines the drowned sleep, dreamlessly, in someone else's key.

The morning after is the kind of blue that follows storms like an apology. The whole island is on the beach by seven. There is plenty for everyone — shingles, buoys, the Costa boy's kite again, its tail longer still, growing somewhere down there like a fingernail.

For Ines the sea has left one thing.

The cup stands upright in the smooth sand below the wrack line, where the water still reaches. It is his cup, and it is wrong in the usual small ways — the chip has moved from the rim to the handle, the glaze a bluer white — and it is full. Full to a half inch below the brim, the level of a cup already half-drunk.

It is steaming.

She sits down in the wet sand in her wet coat, because her legs decide the matter before she does, and she lifts it with both hands the way you lift a thing at its christening. The rain has moved on but the wind still carries some of it, unfinished business, and the steam goes sideways off the coffee the way it used to go sideways off his. She drinks it slowly. It is warm the whole way down. It tastes the way he always claimed cold coffee tasted — like patience — and only at the very bottom, of salt.