Page 7 of Fierce Highland Longing

I stood in the hall with my coat buttoned to the throat and tried to work out why I’d lied twice to a man who’d carried a stranger up a cliff for me.

I couldn’t.

Upstairs, I put the bundle in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, under my spare jumper, and pushed the drawer shut with my knee.

I came down again. I’m not going to pretend it was for tea.

Isla had made up the small room off the back hall for him, and he wasn’t in it. He was awake in the chair with the blanket over his knees. His eyes came up and stayed on me from the door to the hearth, and there was nothing polite in it, and I didn’t drop mine either.

He shifted his chair while he was reaching for the cup—a few inches, nothing, the sort of adjustment anyone makes. It put him farther from the poker.

He was gray at the corners of his mouth. Scars, pale, along both forearms. No coat, in October.

“Where were you coming from?” I asked.

“North.”

“North where?”

“Up the coast.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No.”

“Is there anyone I should call?”

“No.”

“Anyone who’ll be looking for you?”

He turned the cup around in his hands. “No.”

When he spoke again it was small talk.

“Did you find anything in the boathouse?”

“No.”

The fire cracked. He drank his tea.

I sat there with my hands on my knees and worked through it, twice, and got the same answer both times: I hadn’t told anybody about the boathouse.

I was keeping it now. On purpose.

Nobody in this village had said a certain word out loud. Not the old woman in the wet oilskin. Not the sign hanging over the door of the inn I was sitting in. Certainly not Isla, though her hands had paused on the counter when I first described what I thought I’d seen: a human figure on the rocks, too far from the tide for sense, and the seals vanishing in a slick-whiskered panic before it.

I hadn’t said it either. Not to Tavish, not to Isla, not even to myself except in the interior monologue that ran all night and all morning and any time I put my head down to a pillow.Selkie.

I resented the myth for gluing itself to my thoughts, for refusing to be displaced by the rational explanation I kept rehearsing—exposure, hallucination, some rare breed of coastal hermit whose pulse ran to the tides and who lived off the storm’s leftovers.

I went up the painted stairs at a slow, deliberate pace, forcing myself to think only of how the wood flexed under my heel and the way the draft found every loose board in the hallway. In my room, I lay on top of the blanket in my clothes and stopped moving for a while.

I left the lamp on and the window cracked an inch, the way my father had taught me when I was small and the power went out in storms: always leave one way to hear the world outside, in case you needed to gauge the distance to danger.

Just before three, the house sounded wrong.

With a deliberate slowness, I crossed the room, the floor creaking under my weight, and leaned my ear to the door.Someone was breathing out there, close enough that I could hear the airflow catch at the back of their throat, a dry and human sound.