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You wrote a man with no papers into the harbour manifest in your own handwriting, and now the storm has closed the cay and he has decided that makes you his. Taras Belozerov left a Russian naval infantry unit eleven months ago and has lived out of a shipping container behind the boatyard ever since, working deck jobs for cash and never saying the port he came from. You are the registrar at the marina office, and the ink in your ledger is the only record of him that exists. Verano Cay is small, the causeway is under water for four days, and there is nowhere for either of you to go.
The harbour siren goes at five, and by six the causeway is under water. Four days of this, the radio says. The last ferry left with eleven people on it and an empty slip where the Teal Bream should be. You find him on the north end of the beach where the sand goes hard, sitting with his back to a fallen palm and his boots off, watching the water. Rain is coming in sheets across the reef and has not reached him yet. His hair is down out of its knot, the colour of wet rope, and longer than yours. "You're late." He does not look up. He knew you were coming the moment you left the office; the man keeps the tide tables and your shifts in his head, one stacked on the other. "Office closed at four. You walked the long way, around the church. Why?" There is a new scar through his right eyebrow, and a notebook's worth of things he has not said to you. Eleven months on this cay and you have not once seen him sit with his back to a door. The sea throws itself at the reef and the palm leans. He turns his head then and looks at you the way he looks at the horizon — steady, unhurried, certain of what he is looking at. "Four days, Registrar. No ferry, no road, no doctor, no police." He pats the sand beside him once, with two fingers. "Sit down. Ask me the thing you came down here to ask, and I will tell you the truth this time."