Page 105 of The Wild Beneath

He opens the cabinet under the sink. “No more bucket.”

“One less water problem.” She puts down the wrench and weaves her hands around his torso, under his T-shirt.

Annie knows he has nightmares; she’s held him against her when he wakes with the burning pain in his ribs, the sensation of nearly drowning. It feels so real every time: Walker hauling him back to the surface—­it replays in every version. He wakes up in a cold sweat at the same point in the story, when Walker didn’t come back up. The flash of his white shirt under the surface. His face-down body.

He never tells Annie what happens in the dream.

“Shiro’s?” She turns to peek into the bag.

He ordered all her favourites: agedashi tofu, tuna tataki in a ginger vinaigrette, an avocado roll. Salmon sashimi. A bunch of plastic trays and cardboard boxes, packages of soy sauce, wooden chopsticks in paper sleeves.

“Have some tuna,” he says. “Protein.”

He does not say: My dad died. Hale Timber is mine. Walker should be alive and not me. Why can’t he say it?

“Remember all the albacore we used to catch near Tofino?” Annie asks.

“Of course.” It’s not so much the fishing he remembers but watching her for hours: the way her face scrunched while she was pulling in the lines. The strength in her biceps. How her cheeks got so red, but she hardly broke a sweat. “I was no help.”

“Not true.”

“You caught them all,” he says. “You were a magnet for them. The albacore whisperer.”

She smiles.

He wonders if there’s another solution to all of this. Maybe going back to Hale’s could make it right for Annie, too. Shewouldn’t want him logging—she wouldn’t allow it. But Evan’s mind turns to some alternate reality where she’s sitting in the cockpit of her own sailboat moored on their dock. Endless ocean the way she used to have. He pushes it further. Maybe they could finally start a family in Hale’s? Their kids would run barefoot, through tide pools, and swim in the sparkling water.

Annie takes off her hoodie.

“What’s this?” Evan touches a taped cotton ball on the inside of her elbow.

“Oh. I forgot to take it off.” She peels it back, revealing a burgeoning bruise. “The med students were practising, is all. Don’t worry.”

Chapter 40

On the weekend, Evan departs for another coast guard rescue.

“I’ll only be gone for two days.” He swipes his phone and puts it in his back pocket. “Promise.”

She’s still wearing her pyjamas. When he pulls her against him, the cotton feels flimsy against his stiff uniform. He kisses her deeply in the doorway—­more hungrily than she was expecting. There’s a pause in it afterward and the lull of something left unsaid. But Annie leaves it alone, for now. He slings his bag over his shoulder and leaves.

The next day, she stays late at work, installed at the computer in the back hall. As she types, the AI tool keeps suggesting alternate versions of her sentences, versions she doesn’t want. She can’t figure out how to turn it off, and has to keep backspacing. Her lab inbox and diagnostic imaging reports accumulate as quickly as she can clear them. She checks her work email for the tenth time and finds what she found earlier. Nothing important at all.

Walker’s sound arrives again in the same way as before: intermittently. There-and-gone. Confusing.

Shemustget out of the hospital—­she’s reached the crazy-making point. At the same time, she’s struck by a new idea. As she finishes up her notes, the idea expands in her mind.

Outside, daylight fades into the winter darkness. The skyis streaked with airplane contrails. As she bikes home through evening traffic, she decides on it.

She hasn’t done it in years.

But it feels like it’s time. It feels likeyes.

She stops off at the apartment, changes clothes, and stuffs a sleeping bag into a backpack. Then she’s back on her bike for another half an hour coasting downhill toward the ocean.

Close to shore, she inhales deeply: the smell of seawater. She climbs over slippery driftwood on an empty beach. Stars pop in the sky. She unrolls the sleeping bag, takes off her boots, and sinks into it. The sand holds her there, soft and familiar, almost like it doesn’t mind that she’s been away. As if no time has passed.

She lies still and listens.