Bear closed his eyes. Regret, he thought, was a currency with too many denominations—something to be traded in the nights when the sea turned black and indifferent. He thought of the men and women who refused to leave their corners of the world, who clung like barnacles to the memory of familiar pain. “Sometimes,” he admitted. “But the sea asks questions I can’t answer on land.”
“Keep it,” Tanju said. “So when the sea gets loud, you’ll know someone proved you existed.”
“There are many tubes,” Tanju said, sardonic and soft. “Some give courage, others give forgetting. This one gives both, when you need the forgetting enough and the courage to keep remembering.”