Format your interior for digital and print. No design software needed.

The first light reached the harbour before anyone was awake to see it. The boats sat low against the quay, their ropes slack in the water, and the gulls had not yet started their argument over the far pontoon.

She counted them twice, as her father had, and found the same number both times. Eleven hulls, four of them painted since the spring, and the small green one at the end that nobody had claimed in years.

By the time the bell rang the fog had lifted from the far shore and the town began the slow business of the morning. Shutters opened along

Ellis ran the chandlery and had done since his mother stopped, which was a longer time ago than either of them admitted in conversation.

He sold rope and paint and shackles and, increasingly, waterproof trousers to people who had driven down for the afternoon, and he was polite to all of them in a way she found faintly heroic.

They had known each other since school without ever having been friends at school, which is a particular kind of knowing, and one that does not require much maintenance.

The dredger came in March, twenty years late, and stayed for nine days.

It worked from the seaward end inwards, and the noise of it carried up Cross Street and into the shops, so that for a week and a half the whole town conducted its business slightly too loudly.

Children were brought down to watch it. Somebody from the county paper came and took a photograph of the harbourmaster pointing at nothing in particular, which ran on page eleven under a headline about a new chapter.

There was a drawer in the kitchen with forty-one keys in it and not one of them belonged to any door in the house.

We found it on the Saturday, second drawer down, under a roll of freezer bags and a church newsletter from 2011. Nobody wanted to be the one to say what we were all thinking, which was that they had to be for something.

My brother laid them out on the table in rows of ten. It took a while. Some were obviously old, the long thin sort with a hole in the end, and some were the flat brass kind that come with a padlock and get kept long after the padlock

To Ellis, who read it first and said nothing for two days, which I have decided to take as praise.

To the harbour office, for letting me sit in the corner with a notebook for most of one winter.