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Prologue

THE COAST OF MAINE, 1882

He was an old, old ht he'd seen it all For seventy-one years he had fished these icy waters of the Atlantic, as had his father and his father before hi his beloved coast, gone out in his siant when the fog was so thick he couldn't see his own hands But he'd never been afraid out here until today

The woman scared him

He glanced at her fro to hide his interest He needn't have bothered She seeotten his existence

He tried to think of soe, fey beauty who sat like a silent Madonna in his rocking, scarred little boat, a dozen old lobster traps in need of paint clustered around her

She sat sluainst the rough broool of her cloak, her sad gaze fixed on the sharp line of the horizon

Blue water slapped the dory, sprayed over the high sides, and puddled on the floor at her feet, but she didn't bother to move her scuffed boots out of the wet-

ness

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He waited for her to say or do so, wavy strands of reddish brown hair whipped along her pale cheeks, caught on the fullness of her lower lip The odd, nearly transparent white bonnet that hid her chignon fluttered with the breath of the wind

"That's Purgatory," he said at last, pointing at the craggy, lonely crown of granite that pushed up fro surf