Page 31 of Pull Me Under

I shouldn’t tell her. This is family business, Harding business, none of hers. But the words come anyway, pulled out by exhaustion and fear and the strange safety of telling someone who already thinks the worst of us.

‘He’s not himself lately. Confused. Forgetful. Yesterday he called me Kit about seven times and didn’t notice. Last week I found him at Peter’s mooring at three in the morning, asking when Peter was coming back from Plymouth.’ I pause. Let that land. Peter’s dead and everyone knows it. Reuben was at the funeral. He carried the coffin. ‘And the week before that, he put the kettle on the hob – the electric kettle, on the gas hob. Stood there watching it melt.’

She’s quiet for a long moment, fiddling with tea bags and banging a spoon against a metal canister on the kitchen countertop. ‘And you think it might be⁠—’

‘Don’t say it.’

‘Jude—’

‘I said don’t.’

She doesn’t. The word sits between us anyway, enormous and unsaid, taking up all the air in the room. I haven’t let myself think it. Haven’t let it form into a shape with edges and a name. If I don’t say it, it’s not real. If I don’t say it, he’s just tired. Stressed. Getting older. Normal things. Things that happen to everyone.

‘Forget it.’ I back towards the door, retreat instinctive as breathing. ‘I should go look for him.’

‘Jude—’

‘This place needs a roofer, not a demolition crew, by the way.’ I gesture at the ceiling, deflecting so hard, my voice is straining with it. ‘Get the flashing done and half your problems go away. The damp’s coming from the roof, not the walls. The walls are good Cornish stone, they’ll outlast all of us.’

She blinks at the pivot. ‘Did you just give me building advice while having a panic attack?’

‘I’m not having a⁠—’

‘You are. And you’re also right about the flashing. Which is annoying.’ She holds out a mug of tea, tannin and sugar sweetening the air between us. I didn’t even see her make it, but her doing so makes me meet her gaze and pause, just a moment, a blink or two.

I take the tea. My hands are shaking and she sees it and says nothing, I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.

‘Go find your dad, Jude,’ she says. ‘I’d offer to help, but I think he’d rather stay missing if he knew I was part of the search and rescue.’ Her gaze shifts. ‘Sorry, that was⁠—’

But I’m already leaving, tea untouched on the counter, out the door before either of us can make this worse.

The walk back to the harbour feels longer than the run up. The sky’s lightening properly now, painting everything that particular grey-blue that only exists in Cornwall in March – not quite dawn, not quite night, the colour of held breath.

I end up at the end of the jetty, hood raised against the wind that’s picking up, boots dangling just above the tide that’s starting to turn. This is where Peter used to smoke his morning cigarette, back when he still smoked, before Nina made him quit. Before quitting mattered.

An oystercatcher picks its way along the tideline below me, long orange bill probing the mud. Then a turnstone, flipping shells. Two sanderlings skittering at the water’s edge like they’re playing chicken with the waves. I used to keep a notebook – species, behaviours, feeding times, tide patterns. Before notebooks became spreadsheets and the spreadsheets became the business.

I never used to worry like this. Not about Dad. He was granite – weathered maybe, but solid. Immovable. A father you rebel against because he’s strong enough to take it and then put you back on the right path. His path. Now I’m watching him come apart from the inside, and Kit’s in New York with Isla and Maisie and whatever their temporary life is now – miles away from mooring checks and melting kettles. While here I am, cataloguing the ways we’re falling apart as Kit posts photos of Maisie at the Statue of Liberty.

Six o’clock comes and goes. The harbour starts waking up around me – lights in windows, engines coughing to life, Frankie’s dog trotting down the slipway for its morning swim. The ordinary sounds that suggest everything’s normal when nothing is.

What if he’s hurt? What if the boat’s taking on water? What if his mind wandered out there and he forgot how to get home? What if the sea tried to take another Harding and I’m sitting on a jetty doing nothing?

What if, what if, what if.

Then – engine sound. Familiar, closer, and there she is. The Mary Jane rounding the breakwater like nothing’s wrong, like she hasn’t been missing for two hours, like I haven’t been sitting here imagining coffins and coastguard calls and being the one to tell Kit.

Reuben’s at the wheel, whistling. Actually whistling. Some old sea shanty I remember from childhood, from before everything went wrong.

He ties up with the easy efficiency of someone who’s done it ten thousand times, muscle memory stronger than whatever’s eating his mind. The boat’s low in the water – he’s had a good haul.

‘Morning, boy,’ he calls, cheerful as Christmas. ‘Hell of a catch out past Point Three. Barely any other boats out there this morning. Can’t imagine why.’

I breathe out for the first time in two hours.

He’s fine. He’s himself. I’ve been going mad, seeing problems where there aren’t any, turning into a paranoid person who panics over nothing. Relief so strong it makes my knees soft.

Then the words register properly.