Page 39 of Pull Me Under

The boat doesn’t touch the water. She settles onto timber blocks inside the shed instead, hull meeting wood with a dull, final thud. The smell of wet rope and diesel thickens in the air. Brynn steps forward immediately, palm flat against the hull like she’s checking a pulse.

I watch her. Can’t seem to stop doing that.

‘You sure about this?’ I ask.

She doesn’t look at me. ‘About what?’

‘About all of it.’

She runs her hand along the gunwale, fingers finding cracks I can’t see. ‘You helped lower her in. Bit late to ask now.’

‘Not that.’ I nod at the hull. ‘This one. Why this boat?’

That makes her pause. First time I’ve seen Brynn Trelawney pause for anything.

Rain rattles the roof. Somewhere outside a halyard slaps against a mast. The whole harbour feels like it’s holding its breath.

‘I remember Grandad having one like her,’ she says finally. ‘Not this exact one. Same make. Same lines.’ She knocks lightly against the hull – two sharp raps, like a doctor checking for response. ‘He used to pull the engine apart in here. Spread it across the floor like a puzzle. Hundreds of pieces, all laid out in order.’

I glance around the shed. Hard to picture that now.

‘I thought he was mad,’ she goes on. ‘Taking apart things that already worked. But he’d sit there for hours, explaining how every piece connected to every other piece. How if you understood how things were built, you could fix anything.’

‘That what this is?’ I ask. ‘A nostalgia project?’

Now she looks at me. And whatever’s in her face isn’t nostalgia.

‘No.’

The word lands like a door shutting.

‘This isn’t about fishing,’ she says. ‘I’m not trying to run a trawler. I don’t want quotas and buyers and your dad yelling at me about spurdog regulations.’

‘Then what?’

‘I want to rebuild her.’ Her voice drops – quieter, more certain. ‘Engine out. Wiring redone. Hull sealed properly. Every bolt and gasket. So I know I can do it. Properly. Not just patching things up the way I’ve been doing in every port town that would have me for the last ten years.’

The shed feels smaller suddenly. Or maybe she feels bigger in it.

‘And then what?’ I ask.

‘Then I bring in more. Refits. Repairs. Engines no one else wants to touch.’ She straightens up. ‘Trelawney Marine Services used to mean a lot in this harbour.’

Her jaw tightens. I recognise that set – it’s the same one I see on Dad when someone questions the business. The jaw of someone defending a thing they haven’t built yet but can already see whole.

‘I’m not here to squat in a cottage and disappear again,’ she says. ‘I’m here to find out if this place fits me. If I fit it. But I’m not staying because it’s pretty or because I owe anyone anything.’

‘You think this village is going to roll out the red carpet for a Trelawney?’

‘I don’t want a red carpet.’ She steps back from the hull, wipes resin from her fingers onto her jeans. ‘I want space. A shed. A boat. A chance to build a life that doesn’t get taken away.’

Not disappear. Taken away. That’s different. That’s specific. That’s twenty years of a wound I don’t fully understand.

I look at the boat again. At the shed. At her hands, still faintly mapped with resin.

It’s not scrappy anymore. It’s not reckless.

It’s a blueprint.