Page 14 of Pull Me Under

Tilly’s just looking at me, waiting.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Miles away. What were you saying?’

‘I was saying your father’s going to blow a gasket.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘He really is.’

I stay until closing. Watch the locals drift out in ones and twos – Frankie weaving slightly, Bill steady as a rock despite the pints, Cal ducking in briefly for a half before heading home to Cassie. The harbour through the pub window is dark now, just the navigation lights on the moored boats and the sweep of the breakwater lamp.

And one light in the old Trelawney shed. Steady. Working late.

I watch it longer than I should.

Then I pull on my coat, step into the cold, and walk home to a house where my father’s already asleep and doesn’t know yet that the past has just parked in his harbour.

Tomorrow I’ll tell him.

Probably.

Chapter Five

BRYNN

Four in the morning on a Thursday and I’m considering minor vandalism.

The Mary Jane sits pretty in her berth, all gleaming efficiency and Harding pride. Newer than the other boats in the harbour, or maybe just polished more – it’s a boat that says, We’re doing just fine, thanks. The name’s painted in gold leaf that catches even the pre-dawn light. Showy. Like putting chrome spinners on a tractor.

I drop onto the dock beside her, boots silent on wet concrete. My fingers find the engine housing by feel – twenty years since I last touched a Harding boat and my hands still know the layout, muscle memory from years of watching Grandad work on anything with a propeller. The fuel line’s right there. Thirty seconds, that’s all it would take. Loosen the connector just enough that she’d cough but wouldn’t catch. Salt corrosion as cover. Plausible deniability.

That’s for parking your shit in my shed for twenty years.

My fingers are on the connector before I’ve made a conscious decision. Muscle and rage working faster than reason.

Then I stop.

Because I’m a mechanic, not a vandal. And you don’t mess with fuel systems. Not ever. Not as a joke, not as revenge, not as petty satisfaction at four in the morning when nobody’s watching. Fuel lines are where boats stop being inconvenient and start being coffins. Grandad drilled that into me before I could spell diesel: you can play stupid games with the electrics, with the bilge pump, with the radio – but you never, ever compromise the fuel system. That’s not sabotage. That’s attempted murder by negligence.

I pull my hands back like the connector’s hot.

Instead, I climb into the wheelhouse – door’s unlocked, because Reuben Harding’s clearly never met a security measure he didn’t consider beneath him – and retune the radio from the shipping forecast to Radio Cornwall. Then I draw a small, but precise penis in the condensation on the window. No initials. Just the penis. Let them wonder.

Petty? Yes. Satisfying? Mildly. Better than a prison sentence.

‘Vandalism downgrade noted,’ I mutter to the boat, then feel immediately stupid for talking to fibreglass and wood. But boats have personalities – any fisher will tell you that. And this one’s definitely a Harding. Showy on the surface, probably solid underneath, definitely annoying.

I hop down from the wheelhouse and head towards the south end of the harbour.

The Trelawney shed looms against the lightening sky, and I’m braced for the worst. I should have come here first. But the cottage, or what should be renamed The Disaster Zone, took more of my time than I’d have liked. Chasing mice and cleaning up droppings for an entire day doesn’t put me in the best frame of mind, and now I’m about to face the shed. Twenty years of neglect. Rats the size of cats. Possibly actual cats, gone feral and organising into gangs. Definitely spiders – the kind that have had two decades to evolve into mutants requiring a cricket bat and a formal apology to kill.

My grandfather built this shed in 1962. I know because he carved the date into the cornerstone, along with ‘BT & Sons’. The building itself is stone and corrugated iron, proper workshop scale – big enough to hold a boat on blocks, a decent workbench, storage for a whole operation. Not a glorified cupboard. A place where things got built.

Should have been mine. The thought arrives fully formed, no warning, and it sits in my stomach like a stone. All of it. The workshop, the trade, the routine of nets and engines and dawn starts. Not because I romanticise it – I know exactly how cold and unglamorous and bone-grinding commercial fishing is, I’ve done the unglamorous versions of it in every port town that would have me – but because I’m good at it. Because my hands know this work the way other people’s hands know piano keys or steering wheels. Because this was supposed to be my inheritance, and instead it’s been someone else’s workspace for twenty years.

The door opens on hinges that someone’s been oiling. Recently.

‘What the fuck?’

It’s … clean. No, more than clean – it’s maintained. Cared for. There’s electricity that actually works, proper industrial shelving lined with labelled parts (labelled!), and a workbench that’s seen better days but is solid oak underneath the scratches and oil stains. Someone’s been using this as a proper workshop. Not storage, not abandonment – actual daily use.