Sam Scully woke in a panic and threw back the sheet. He strode across the short distance to his daughter’s crib and laid a finger on the downy softness of her cheek, listening for the rise and fall of her breath. He exhaled with relief.

I’ve had a nightmare, he thought, his pulse steadying again.

Not an uncommon syndrome among first-time parents, or so he’d been warned. He straightened the baby’s blanket and sat on the edge of the spare bed in the nursery, where he’d slept each night since offering to take on the midnight and four a.m. bottle-feeding shifts. He rested his arms on his knees and dropped his head in his hands, still uneasy.

A man who earned his living at the mercy of the sea, he knew to trust his instincts, so he rose quietly and padded down the hallway of Kate’s house, avoiding the squeaky floorboard he’d discovered when he and Kate, his ex— the mother of his child— still shared the same bed. Very carefully, he nudged open Kate’s door.

He sensed stillness. ‘Kate?’ he whispered. No answer, so he repeated her name, loudly now. He fumbled for the light switch. Stood at the foot of a bed that had been stripped bare and was unoccupied. Quickly, he checked the kitchen, the veranda. Spun around, groping to make sense of Kate’s absence. A note, he thought, there must be a note. He slapped his cheeks to bring himself back to his senses and checked his phone.

Four a.m. The witching hour, Kate had told him back in the days when they’d thought they might have a future together. ‘ “The very witching time of night”? From Hamlet,’ she’d said, adding ‘Shakespeare’ in an emphatic tone that was tart with condescension.

Sam had asked if she knew what a grown knee meant in boat building, hoping she’d get the point: one person’s measure of intelligence did not necessarily indicate another person’s ignorance.

Later, he’d looked up the meaning of witching hour and found a very murky history about devils, witches and full moons, all predating Shakespeare, but he’d kept his mouth shut. The woman he’d chosen to love above all others, for reasons he’d never be able to explain, could rip out his heart merely by pulling her lips into a thin straight line and turning her head slightly away, her dark hair half falling over her face to conceal her disapproval.

4.01 a.m. No message.

Sam returned to the nursery, took another moment to look in on his peacefully sleeping daughter and then went back to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Kate had done a runner. He was sure of it. She had a history of disappearing without the common sense or good manners to explain where she was going. After her mother, Emily, died, Kate vanished for a day or two. Soon after, without saying a word, she made a secret trip to England to chase down the truth of her mother’s deathbed revelation that she had a halfbrother.

At the time, he’d excused her behaviour as the result of grief and shock. It was the lack of communication, though, that left everyone confused and rushing to fill in holes. The question was: how long would she be gone this time? He filled the kettle, turned it on. Reached for the coffee. Instant. He needed a bigger hit than a cuppa, and anyway, Kate’s posh range of tea required too much finesse to brew in this hour of witches.

While the kettle hummed, he stepped outside and leaned on the veranda rails, trying to think through options. Smelled the briny tang of Oyster Bay at low tide, the rich fecundity of the mangroves on the far shore, and heard the swallowing sound of sea nudging sandbanks. Feeling cold in the early morning air, he rubbed his hands on his bare arms and went back inside. The first month of autumn, but if he’d read the signs right, winter would come early.

He found the only decently large mug in the back of a cupboard, where Kate must have shoved it after they’d gone their separate ways and before he’d returned to help care for their child.

He spooned in a serious amount of coffee granules and two sugars. Poured on boiling water and closed his eyes to inhale the aroma. Not bad for instant, he thought, but it would never replace the real deal. He added milk and returned to the open air where he did his best thinking. On the far side of the bay, the rough tops of the escarpment, rising and dipping, were dark cut-outs against the night sky. A shadowy grey gloom blanketed the smooth water.

In a couple of hours, the sun would strike the peak of the waterfall and in less time than an impatient sigh, the bay would catch fire, the sea pulse.

Sam thought about his situation. He was a single dad for the foreseeable future, with a six-month-old baby to care for. He was also a barge man who earned his living hauling cargo in the bays and waterways of Cook’s Basin, a quirky little offshore community where the only roads were waterways and if you didn’t have a boat, it was a long swim to get home. The job wasn’t an ideal fit for taking on child care as well, but he would make it work. Claire would be a barge baby. A kid who would learn to read the weather long before learning the ABC. A kid who would know how to spread her feet for balance when a stink boat passed at top speed, creating a head-high wake. A kid who would see the love in his eyes, sense the tenderness in his calloused seaman’s hands, understand she was cherished beyond all reason and that he, her father, would do everything in his power to keep her safe: lay down his life for her, if necessary…