Page 29 of Pull Me Under

The shed, when I reach it, feels less like exile and more like possibility. Peter’s notes are still spread across the workbench. His conservation plans, his solutions to problems other people didn’t even see as problems yet. And Grandad’s half-carved seal, waiting. The cat, who seems to live here fifty per cent of the time, like a ghost that steals in and out, is watching me from the top shelf of a storage unit.

I sit at the bench, pull the notebook towards me, and start making new lists. Not just what needs fixing, but what could be built. Not just survival, but growth.

Outside, the storm’s finally wearing itself out, rain gentling from assault to conversation. Through the window, the harbour lights waver like uncertain stars.

I pick up Peter’s pen – because it feels like his pen, even though pens don’t really belong to anyone – and start sketching out what a conservation zone might look like. How you could create corridors for fish migration. How you could balance commerce and preservation.

How you could honour a ghost by making his ideas breathe.

The cat jumps back up. Curls into my lap, all skin and bone. I should get him some food. I should also stop letting strays adopt me, but here we are.

Ghost, I think, pen in one hand, the other finding its way to the space behind his ears. Half here, half not. Slipping in and out like he’s made of harbour mist.

Ghost it is.

It’s past midnight when I finally stop writing. The storm’s moved on, leaving that clean-washed quiet that follows violence. And I’m still here, in a shed that’s mine, in a village that doesn’t want me but might need me, writing futures for a place where I’ve decided to stay.

Tonight, I checked on someone who needed checking on. And someone checked on me right back.

That’s not nothing.

That might even be something.

Chapter Eight

JUDE

Four thirty-seven Saturday morning and the harbour’s mine. Just me and the gulls, who haven’t started their daily screaming match yet. The world smells like low tide and diesel, that particular combination that means home whether you want it to or not.

I check the moorings automatically. It’s what Peter used to do, what someone has to do now he’s gone. The boats bob in their usual formation – Persistence, Celtic Pride, Second Chance – all present and accounted for.

Except.

The Mary Jane’s berth is empty.

Cold floods my skin like a spring tide.

For a second, I just stare at the space where she should be, my brain refusing to process the absence. She was here last night. I checked her myself, tightened the stern line, ran my hand over the hull the way I seem to have picked up from the old man.

‘Bloody Brynn Trelawney,’ I groan. She knows boats, she’s angry, and she’s been in the harbour for three days with a grudge older than she is. It’s not rational – I know it’s not rational even as I’m thinking it – but the Harding reflex is strong, and Harding reflex says: Trelawney did it.

I head for the shed first. That’s where she sleeps – the camp bed, the holdall, Peter’s space heater humming through the night. I can see from twenty paces that the light’s off. The door’s shut. I try the handle – locked. Cup my hands against the window. Empty. Sleeping bag neatly rolled on the camp bed, steel-toed boots gone.

Both the boat and Brynn are missing.

‘Fuck.’

I’m running before I finish the thought, but not towards the harbour master or the police or anywhere sensible. I’m heading up the cliff path, towards the cottage that’s been empty for twenty years, because there’s nowhere else she’d be unless she’s on the water, and if she’s on the water in the Mary Jane at four in the morning then⁠—

Don’t think about that. Just move.

The cottage looks worse in the grey pre-dawn light. Whatever softness the dark gave it is gone, replaced by the honest inventory of neglect – roof sagging on the left side where the lead flashing’s given up, windows clouded with twenty years of salt film, the whole place wearing its abandonment like a coat it can’t take off. But the walls are solid. The stone’s good. There’s a lamp glowing behind the front window.

I hammer on the door harder than necessary.

‘Brynn! Open up!’

Shuffling inside, then the door cracks open. She’s half-asleep, wearing someone’s old fisherman’s sweater that swallows her whole, feet bare on the cold flagstone floor. Her hair’s a disaster and there’s a pillow crease on her cheek and I absolutely do not notice how young she looks like this, how much like the girl who left.