She counted, in the end. From the 18th of May to the 29th of September: one hundred and four days without getting into the sea.
Paula is twenty-nine. She lives an eleven-minute walk from the water, in Xàbia, in a flat she shares with two people she barely saw between June and September because their shifts never lined up. She runs the terrace of a restaurant in the port — twenty-two tables, two sittings a night, and a view of the marina from every one of them.
That's the part people don't understand from the outside. It wasn't that she was far from the sea. It's that she looked at it for fourteen hours a day and served people who were in it.
She's good at the job. She knows which table the wind hits at seven. She can tell from a family's first thirty seconds whether they'll want the fish whole or filleted. In the second week of July two of the waiters left within four days of each other, and she covered both shifts for a month and a half without complaining once, because that's what the season is. You get through it. You take the money. You sleep in October.
By August she had stopped noticing the water at all.
That was the part that frightened her.
So she started an envelope. Ten euros a week out of her tips, in the drawer under the till receipts. There was no plan for it at first — it was just a small refusal, ten euros at a time, of the idea that all of it belonged to the season.
In the third week of August she counted what was in there and knew exactly what it was for.
The restaurant closed on the 28th of September. On the 29th, she rented a boat.
A small one. Six metres, with a skipper called Toni who has been taking people out to the coves since before she was born. Four hours. One passenger.
She paid in cash from the envelope, and she didn't tell anyone she was going — not her flatmates, not her mother, not the girls from work. Not because it was a secret. Because the moment she said it out loud, someone would have asked to come, and she would have said yes, and then it would have been a different day entirely.
They left the port at half nine. Toni cut the engine in a cove twenty minutes up the coast, and the silence arrived so suddenly it felt like something had broken.
For the first quarter of an hour she was useless at it.
She kept scanning. Sitting up, looking for the thing that needed doing. She straightened the towels. She checked her phone twice, for nothing. Five months of knowing what twenty-two tables needed before they knew it themselves, and her body had simply forgotten the other setting.
Then it went. She couldn't tell you when. At some point she noticed the light moving on the rock face and realised she'd been watching it for a while already without having decided to.
She swam at eleven, off the back of the boat. The sea on that coast is warmer in late September than it is in June — everyone who lives there knows it and every visitor gets it wrong. She stayed in for forty minutes. She floated on her back, looked up at the cliff, and thought about nothing useful at all.
And then she thought about herself, which she hadn't properly done since spring. What she wanted the next season to look like. Whether she wanted another one. Whether the answer was allowed to be no.
She didn't reach a conclusion. That wasn't the point either.
The bag she'd packed the night before. One towel, a book she never opened, sun cream, a bottle of water, and the envelope with what was left in it.
It came back heavier than it left — wet towel, damp swimsuit, the salt that gets into everything.
It's October now, and there's still sand in the seam along the bottom. She's seen it.
She hasn't shaken it out.
She isn't going to.
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