Electric storms always made him think of other electric storms, as though the flashes of energy could cut through the fabric of time and make them all coalesce into one. He remembered the night Sarah’s mother left him, twenty-two years ago now. There had been a storm just like this. Thunder, lightning, high winds, torrential rain—the whole lot. So much noise and drama he hadn’t expected her to hear him come in at all. But she was still wide awake. She waited until he sat down to take off his shoes—he remembered feeling guilty that he had come into the bedroom so wet, with shoes that would leave stains on the carpet—then she just said: “I’ve had enough, Zack.” It was all she needed to say. He knew what she meant. He argued a bit, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I have to go away, Lucy, I’m a sailor. That’s what I do. I go to sea. I go away and then I come back again.” It didn’t work of course. There was too much wrong by then. The times when he was at sea weren’t the problem. It was the times when he wasn’t at sea that everything went wrong. Imagine leaving home on a night like that though. The woman must have been crazy. He wondered vaguely what had happened to her, where she was now. Sarah knew of course but they had an unwritten agreement that they would never talk about her. It was a good agreement; it meant that they never ended up bad-mouthing one another to their daughter or using her to pry into one another’s business. Twenty four years of marriage wiped out like a lover’s message scrawled in the sand below the high tide mark. Sensible and civilized.