Page 15 of Pull Me Under

I read the space like a schematic. Whoever worked here was methodical – tools hung on shadow boards, parts bins sorted by size and type, a system for tracking inventory that’s chalked on a blackboard by the door. There’s an engine manual open on the bench, spine cracked at the cooling systems chapter, a pencil marking a comment in the margin. Clean rags folded, not balled. Oil cans lined up by viscosity. And a cat bowl, clean but dusty.

A professional. Someone who loved the work.

There’s a kettle on a side table, box of Yorkshire Tea beside it – the good stuff, not the budget brand I’ve been drinking. A jar of instant coffee that’s actually in date. Sugar in a tin that says ‘Pete’s Sweet Stuff’ in faded permanent marker.

Pete.

A camp bed’s folded in the corner with an actual pillow that, when I push it with my fingers, gives with the softness of feather, not foam – and a wool blanket that looks military surplus but clean. A small fridge hums against the wall, covered in faded stickers. Kernow Fishing Supplies. Newlyn Harbour Authority. Save Our Seas. And one that makes the space behind my ribs tighten: Trelawney & Sons – Sea Salt Bay’s Finest Since 1962.

Our sticker. On his fridge. In our shed.

There’s a paint-splattered radio, still tuned to the shipping forecast. A space heater that’s newer than anything in the cottage. What looks like a makeshift shower rigged in the back corner behind a blue tarp – proper showerhead and everything, probably illegal as hell but ingenious. A small mirror above a basin that’s plumbed into God knows what.

This is better than my cottage. This is better than most of the flats I’ve lived in. This is better than the hostel in Portsmouth where I spent six months studying advanced marine engineering while working nights at a chandlery.

‘Bastards,’ I mutter, but there’s no heat in it. Whoever Pete was, he looked after this place. Kept it ready. Kept Grandad’s bones alive underneath his own additions, even kept that sticker on his fridge like an acknowledgement. I know whose this is. I’m just borrowing it.

I should resent that. I do resent it, somewhere underneath. But resentment’s a luxury I can’t afford right now, and besides – the camp bed doesn’t collapse when I sit on it, which already makes it superior to the cottage. The wool blanket smells like diesel and salt and the hint of a scent unknown. Safety, maybe. It’s a combination that says working harbour rather than tourist attraction.

I find the carved initials on the workbench, running my fingers along them like reading braille. KH. JH. Kit and Jude Harding, marking territory in my family’s space like boys pissing on trees. Harding initials carved into a Trelawney workbench. Twenty years of assuming what’s yours is theirs.

But there, in the corner where the light barely reaches, carved deeper than the rest: WT. Walter Trelawney. My grandfather. And underneath, in a child’s wonky letters: GT. My dad. And smaller still, so faint I almost miss it: bt. Lowercase. Uncertain. Mine.

I trace those tiny letters and I’m five years old, Grandad lifting me up so I could reach, his big hand over mine on the penknife. Make your mark, my bird. Trelawneys always leave a mark.

Well. I left. But the mark stayed.

The kettle works. The tea is fresh. I sit on the camp bed with my hands wrapped around a mug with a fresh brew, but no milk, and my eyes are stinging, but I’m pretty sure it’s the dust causing it, and absolutely nothing else.

I let myself feel it for exactly thirty seconds – the grief and the rage and the longing and the fierce, stubborn certainty that I’m not leaving again.

I didn’t come back to fix and sell. I came back because this is the only place that ever felt like mine, even when they took it away. Even when Grandad moved us to the other end of the country and spent twenty years pretending it didn’t break his heart. Even when Dad drank himself into a ghost and then a grave. Even when I scraped through every port town on the south coast, fixing other people’s boats, building other people’s businesses, learning a trade that should have been my birthright.

This shed. This harbour. This work.

Mine. Still mine.

Thirty seconds. Then I wipe my eyes, drink my tea, and start planning.

By seven, I need real coffee and food that isn’t the emergency biscuits I’ve been surviving on. The Lavender Café’s just opening, purple door propped wide to let in morning air that carries the smell of fresh bread from somewhere deeper in the building.

It’s exactly what you’d expect from a Cornish village café – mismatched chairs that somehow work together, walls covered in local art that ranges from brilliant to what someone’s grandmother painted after too much sherry. The menu is on a chalkboard, handwriting that loops and swirls like it tried to be fancy but gave up halfway through. Cinnamon and fresh bread and old coffee grounds all fighting it out in the air.

A woman with a mass of curly dark hair, caught in a wild ponytail, twisted and held in place with a pencil, is behind the counter, back to me. She’s arranging pastries with surgical precision, as if the croissants not being at exactly the right angle might cause the universe to stop spinning.

‘We’re not really open yet,’ she says without turning. Her voice is low and a little rough, like she’s either been crying or hasn’t been sleeping. Maybe both. ‘But I can do coffee if you’re desperate.’

‘Desperate is a strong word.’

‘It’s the only word before eight am.’

She turns, and Christ, she looks hollowed out. A ragged and destroyed version of tired that sleep doesn’t fix because the problem isn’t physical. Pretty, underneath the exhaustion – dark hair that needs cutting, caught up in a clip that’s losing the battle. Eyes that might be green or grey depending on the light, currently red-rimmed but trying. Hands that shake slightly as she reaches for a mug.

‘Tourist?’ she asks, pulling shots with mechanical efficiency that makes the stacked bangles on her wrist clink and clank. The machine’s proper Italian, the kind that’s the price of a small car, more temperamental than an Alfa Romeo, and runs on fury and prayer. ‘Bit early in the season.’

I should tell her. I’m Brynn Trelawney, I’ve come home, my grandad built the boat shed and my dad drank himself to death and I’ve been sleeping on a collapsed bed in a damp cottage and I think your dead someone used my shed and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, even though I don’t even know what I’m sorry for yet.

Instead, I say, ‘Something like that.’