At twenty to six, the rope was still dry.
Maëlle uncoiled it across the rubber mat, meter by meter, letting her palm run along the sheath. The room’s lights were off. The open doorway framed a strip of almost-gray sea, the dark outline of Arabia’s mountains across the gulf, and, just below, Dahab’s promenade, where a man was stacking plastic chairs outside a café. Each time the rope slid over the floor, it made a faint sound like crumpling paper.
Rami crouched by the weight.
“What are you looking for?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re looking very precisely for nothing.”
She raised the rope to examine a flattened patch.
“There.”
Rami ran two fingers over the sheath.
“That’s the mark from the rope clamp. It was there yesterday.”
Maëlle let the rope go. He was twenty-six, with shoulders too broad for the club’s T-shirts and a way of smiling that turned every objection into an invitation to play. In the water, he became methodical. On land, he was still trying to make her say what she did not want to say.
On her wrist, the dive computer read 05:42. She had forgotten to take it off overnight. The band had left a circular mark on her skin.
“Are we anchoring in the same place?” Rami asked.
The sea filled the entire opening before her.
The day before, Youssef had wanted to move the line some thirty meters north. The forecast wind was due to shift at nine, and that area would be easier to evacuate. Maëlle had refused. Not because she knew better than he did. She had simply pointed to a notch in the reef, a kind of black V visible from the promenade, and asserted that the bottom dropped away more cleanly there.
She had never checked.
She knew that notch from a dream.
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