Skeletal hand holding a rose, dotwork design

Skipper Haldane was a hard man married to a harder woman, and it was her who gave him the rose. She'd grown it in a tin on the back step, a dark red bloom with the thorns left on, because she said a rose without thorns was just a lie wrapped in petals. He tucked it inside his oilskin like a letter. The sea came over the rail on the third night, the boy went over with a rope in his fist, and the skipper went after him without a word.

They found the Kittiwake keel up off the Isle of May with nothing aboard but gulls. Then in March a creel man hauling pots off the Bell Rock brought up a hand, bones bare as a chair leg, still closed round a stem with a dead rose at the top. Thorns ran through the knuckles like a wedding ring. Nobody would touch it, so the minister took it out in a sack and dropped it past the breakwater. That night the wife came down to the harbour in her nightgown and asked for her husband's hand back, and the tide, which keeps its own accounts, sent her a rose instead, fresh as the morning, and pricked her palm with it.

She wears the scar still. Some say she never once let go of that stem, and some say the rose is still growing in the tin on her back step, and that it has never once been watered.