Page 35 of Fierce Highland Longing

It came gray first, along the underside of the cloud out past the point, and for a while the water and the sky were the same thing. I could not say where one stopped. Then a seam opened low down in the east, and the gray went out of it.

The bay went pale gold. It came across the water toward me in a band, and the band widened, and where it crossed the swell, every rise of it lit along the top edge and went dark again on the way down, over and over, the whole way in.

Then the gold thinned off into silver. The wet stones took it and gave it up again, and the weed on the high line turned from black to brown, and the whole beach came out of the dark in about ninety seconds.

I have chased that light on four continents, and I have never had it handed to me like that.

My coat was open. I did not once put my hand to it.

There were seals out past the mooring. Six or seven of them, heads up in the gray, and I didn’t gaze on any one of them longer than another. I had stopped doing that.

I got the camera up.

Half a lifetime of this. Every funeral, every hospital corridor, every bad night of my adult life, I have put a rectangle around it and stood on the other side of the glass and been fine.

The seals, the light, the water going easy on the stones. It was a good frame.

I snapped the shots.

And I stood on that beach with my one good arm at my side and let all of it wash through me—three days, the cave, his hands closed around the thing I’d been keeping, a man on a rock going into the water—and I did not put a rectangle around any of it.

I have not done that since I was twenty-three years old.

My gaze flickered along the beach again.

He was standing on the stones about forty feet along.

Wet through, in a pair of trousers I have never seen, and whole. The weight was on him, and the color, and the gray at the corners of his mouth was gone as if it had never been there. I saw immediately what the water had returned to him. The density was back—he looked heavier, as if the sea had sealed a layer into his bones. He looked magnificent. Broad shoulders and chest, narrow waist. A swimmer’s body, I realized.

He nodded once—once—and I saw in the gesture a thank you, or a goodbye, or a promise. I didn’t know which.

I realized then I had no plan for what to do if he returned. I had not expected the return.

He walked closer.

“Your arm.”

“It will be good as new in six weeks.”

“Aye.” He put his hands in his pockets and took them out again. “The swell’s dropped two feet since Tuesday.”

“I noticed.”

“I know you did.”

We stood there. He looked out at the water and then at the stones and then at me.

“I’m not going to say sorry to you the way you’re owed it. I’ve been thinking of that for three days. I can’t get the words to come out right, so I’ll not give you a poor version of it.”

“Okay.”

“I’d rather do it slowly and get it right.”

“Okay.”

Nothing was fixed. He had lied to me for nine days. It was still sitting there between us on those stones, and neither of us knew how to address it.

He could go. That was what I kept thinking, standing there. He was not held by one single thing in this world. He could walk into that water in the next ten seconds and never come up this coast again. There was nothing I had that would stop him.