Page 18 of Pull Me Under

Then she’s gone. Absorbed back into the waiting crowd.

I bite into the pasty and it’s proper Cornish, heavy on the potato, perfect ratio of pastry to filling, you can’t get anywhere else, and God knows I’ve tried, and realise I’m being absorbed too. Fed. Claimed. Like Sea Salt Bay has already decided I’m staying before I have.

Maybe it knows something I don’t.

Or maybe it knows exactly what I do – that I’m not leaving. That I tried everywhere else and everywhere else felt like wearing someone else’s coat. Wrong in the shoulders. Never quite warm enough.

Back at the shed – my shed, and I need to start owning that – I make tea using Peter’s kettle, sit at the workbench he maintained, and start making lists on paper I find in a drawer. Block capitals. Grandad’s habit, not mine, except it is mine now.

WHAT’S BROKEN:

The cottage (roof, electrics, heating – not the structure, that’s sound)

The harbour (not enough crew, not enough hands)

Nina (grief with a hair trigger)

Whatever happened twenty years ago that drove my family out

Possibly me

WHAT’S WORKING:

The shed (thank you, Peter)

The coffee machine at the Lavender Café

The lifeboat (barely, and on a skeleton crew)

The community (holding on by its fingernails)

My hands (still know the work)

WHAT NEEDS DOING FIRST:

Move into the shed (camp bed > cottage floor, pride can wait)

Income – offer mechanical services at the harbour? Fill Peter’s gap?

Start on the cottage roof before the next big rain

Learn what happened to my family. The real story, not whatever Reuben Harding’s been telling people

Stop caring about things that aren’t mine to fix

I’m still writing when I hear the boat returning. The engine sound carries different when they’re coming home – lighter, maybe, or maybe that’s just projection, the way you hear what you need to.

I go to the window, watch them come in.

Count them. Same number that left. Everyone walks off under their own power.

Jude’s last off, and even from here I can see the exhaustion in how he moves. He stops on the dock, runs a hand through his hair, and for a moment looks exactly as wrecked as Nina did on the café floor.

Then someone calls his name and he straightens and puts on whatever face they need to see.

I know that reassembly. I’ve done it myself, in other harbours, other lives. The quick recalibration from human to functional. The mask that says, I’m fine when fine is the last thing you are.

I watch him until he’s out of sight. Then go back to my lists and add to WHAT NEEDS DOING: