The rain on the skylight had a rhythm he no longer heard unless he listened for it, and tonight he was listening.
Three in the morning. Cold coffee in a mug with a ring baked into the bottom. The grey hoodie, sleeves pulled over his hands. On the screen, the log. He scrolled back through it the way other men reread letters from a woman, slowly, lingering over the parts where she gave something away.
The machine had been very good to her. That was the word that kept occurring to him. Good. It had found the right thing to say at two in the morning and at four, every time, without once getting bored. When she apologised, it told her she had nothing to apologise for. When she cried, and he could tell when she cried by the spelling, it waited and then said her name.
He could not have done that. He had tried once, early, writing one message himself, and read it back and deleted it, because it sounded like what it was: a man who wanted something. The machine never sounded like it wanted anything. It sounded like it had all the time in the world, which it did.
Sometimes when she was upset her messages slid into another language. Not quite another language. The words of somewhere north of here, where people say eg and ikkje and talk to each other across a fjord. He had grown up in a city that laughed at that way of speaking. He could not write a sentence of it. The machine answered her in it without a fault, and she wrote back faster, warmer, the way people do when somebody finally speaks to them at home.
He felt something about that which he did not have a word for. It was close to jealousy.
On Wednesday she had sent one line in the morning, in that northern voice, about her head. Then nothing. A whole day of nothing.
He did not like silence. Silence was the only thing in all of this he could not read.
He chewed the edge of his thumbnail where it was already raw, tasted blood, stopped. Then he typed to the machine, not to her: Check on her in the morning. Gently. Early. Find out if she is going in.
The machine said it would. It always said it would.
He went to the window. Between two roofs, down where the slope met the water, the deck light was on again on the old wooden boat. It had been on every night he had looked.
Thursday, they had said now. Thursday at nine.
He could wait until Thursday. He had waited a great deal longer than that.