Page 12 of Fierce Highland Longing

Iron over four doors on the middle terrace. An iron cross on a boathouse wall, and an old woman telling me not to touch what was behind it. A man dragged out of the North Sea in October whose hand was not cold. A man who wouldn’t see a doctor and wouldn’t say why. A man who moved his chair three inches from a poker while he reached for a cup. A man who asked me what I’d found in the boathouse when I had told nobody I’d been inside one.

And a thing in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, four feet from my knee, warm as skin, with something under the surface keeping time.

A shape came together out of the list and it fit. It fit the way a lens seats—a quarter turn and a click and there’s no arguing with it after.

I tucked my thoughts into the private space that was all mine. I didn’t tell anyone.

I sat there with the reasons lining up. They were good ones. Not one of them was the true one.

I went down for the light. With a camera that didn’t work.

From partway down the cliff path you can see the whole of that beach.

He was at the tideline with his trousers wet to the knee and his sleeves shoved up over the scars on his forearms, with both hands in the water past the wrist.

He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t watching anything.

For six feet around him the sea lay flat as a table.

Past the six feet it did what the North Sea does in October—gray water shouldering in, breaking white on the stones, the whole coast of it going at once.

Inside the six feet, nothing. Not a ripple. His hands in it to the wrist, and the water not moving.

I stood there on the cliff path. My pulse kicked up in my throat.

Something was wrong with him. Something was wrong with this place. And I was standing in the middle of it with a sealskin in my wardrobe and no idea how to get out.

I didn’t sleep that night. Not really. I lay on top of the blanket with my coat still on and listened to the house settle around me, to the wind finding new gaps in the frames, to the sea breathing against the harbor wall two streets down.

Just before dawn, I gave up and went downstairs.

The fire had burned down to a low, orange glow. Outside, the wind had finally lost interest in the village and moved on, leaving the harbor quiet enough that I could hear the water lapping against the stones.

I sat on the edge of the chair, a cup of coffee warm in my hands, and watched the flames. Tavish was in the window seat,the coat Isla had given him hanging off one shoulder, the gray at the corners of his mouth less obvious in this light.

“You’re staring,” he said without looking at me.

I made a noise in my throat that was meant to sound casual but came out rawer than I wanted. “You’re brooding,” I said, staring into my cup. “Someone’s got to keep you from becoming one of those folk legends where a man dissolves into peat, chair and all.”

Tavish didn’t answer at first. I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye—a cough, or a tension at the jaw, maybe the beginnings of one of his cramped little smiles. It hardly registered on his face, but the room felt it, the air going less brittle.

His gaze was fixed on the window, where the first blue of morning bled over the breakwater. The sea had relapsed into its ordinary pulse, but my mind played over the image from yesterday: Tavish at the tideline, both hands submerged, the ocean flat for six feet in every direction. He’d stood as if waiting on a word only the water could give him.

Now, here, he seemed smaller than the man who’d hauled me off a ledge in the rain or faced down a gale for the sake of a stranger’s safety. If I squinted, I could see how the village had let itself believe him just another unlucky fisherman with a story he wouldn’t tell. But I’d seen him up close. The scars on his arms were as patterned as markings on a bird, deliberate and healed a long time ago.

And I didn’t quite understand them.

He made a show of sipping his drink, tea perhaps, unlike my coffee. “I’m not brooding,” he said finally. “I’m working up the will to move.”

“Oh, is that what they call it these days?” I tried to sound like myself, but the banter felt like a borrowed shirt—ill-fitting,sleeves too long, the collar tugging at my throat. “Isla says you walk the beach in storms. That you keep the tides.”

“She says too much, that one,” Tavish muttered. But he didn’t sound angry. More like the words had a soft edge, rounded by years of hearing them and letting them matter.

I set my cup down, hands empty and restless. “I’m not good with quiet. It’s one of my many defects.”

Tavish stared at me, then at the cooling embers. “It’s not a defect,” he said. “Some folks fear what’s in the quiet. Some just don’t like the company.”

I almost laughed then—a startled little thing—but choked it off. “And you?”