The Quiet Line

When a cartographer inherits her estranged father’s unfinished survey of the coast, she finds the shoreline in his notebooks no longer matches the one on any map — and neither does her memory of the summer he disappeared.

The tide had rewritten the inlet again, the way it did every spring, and Nell stood at the edge of it with her father’s theodolite in one hand and forty years of his handwriting in the other. Somewhere under the water was a line he had drawn and redrawn until it stopped making sense to anyone but him. She was beginning to understand why.