Page 71 of Pull Me Under

‘The orgasmic expression you make when you taste mine. Dead giveaway.’

We sit in silence for a moment. Ghost appears from somewhere in the shadows and drapes himself across Nina’s lap like she’s his rightful owner, which she sort of is. She scratches behind his ear, making him arch his scrawny back.

‘I found some letters,’ I hear myself say. ‘In the cottage. My father’s.’

Nina doesn’t push. Just waits.

‘Love letters. Unsent. To someone called H. Apparently he spent his whole life pining for a woman who chose her sons over him.’ I take a sip of coffee. It’s good. ‘I never knew. I thought he was just – sad. Broken. That it was the drinking, or the moving, or just who he was. But it wasn’t. He was in love with someone he couldn’t have, and it ate him alive, and the rest of us got caught in the wreckage.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I think my grandad knew. Helped cover it up. Took us away from Sea Salt Bay to protect – I don’t know. The families. The children. Whatever was going to explode if we stayed.’

I stare at the hull of the trawler above us. My boat. My grandfather’s legacy. The only thing the Trelawneys have left.

‘Peter kept a journal,’ Nina says quietly. ‘Did I tell you that?’

I shake my head.

‘Found it after. Hidden in his desk drawer.’ She stares at Ghost, not at me. ‘He wrote about us. About how scared he was that he wasn’t good enough for me. That I’d wake up one day and realise I’d made a mistake.’

‘That doesn’t sound like the Peter everyone describes.’

‘It wasn’t. Or it was – just the part he kept hidden. We all have those parts, don’t we? The fears we don’t say out loud.’ She glances at me. ‘Maybe your father was the same. Maybe the letters were his hidden place.’

Maybe.

‘Friday,’ Nina says, changing subjects with the abruptness of someone who knows when a topic has been mined enough. ‘You’re coming to the pub.’

‘Bill already recruited me.’

‘Good. I’ll save you a seat.’ She stands, brushes off her jeans, dislodging Ghost, who gives her a look of pure feline betrayal. ‘And Brynn? Whatever’s in those letters – it’s about him. Not about you. His choices. His regrets. You didn’t cause them.’

I want to believe that. I’m not sure I can.

‘I’ll see you Friday,’ I say instead.

She smiles and heads out into the grey morning, leaving me alone with my ruined boat and my father’s ghost and the unanswered questions piling up like storm clouds on the horizon.

H.

Who is H?

Chapter Seventeen

JUDE

Kit calls on Friday afternoon, just as I’m finishing up on the Mary Jane. The March wind is whipping through the harbour, and my fingers are even more useless than normal. Corroded fuel injector – took me three hours with the manual open on the deck because Kit would’ve diagnosed it by sound and I need diagrams. Marine engines are just marine biology I can touch – the same systems, the same principles of pressure and flow and corrosion. I understand them perfectly in theory. Kit understands them in his hands.

Story of our lives, really.

I wipe the grease off my hands and prop the phone against a crate, his face filling the screen. He’s somewhere sunny – Isla’s Brooklyn apartment, light streaming through windows that look like they’ve been designed for aesthetics rather than keeping out weather.

‘All right?’ he says, grinning. ‘You look like shit.’

‘Cheers. You look like a man who’s forgotten what real work feels like.’ I blow on my hands and stamp my feet.

‘I have. It’s glorious.’ He leans back, and I can see Isla moving around in the background, her hair piled on top of her head, wearing what looks like one of Kit’s jumpers. Domestic. Settled. Happy in a way I’ve never thought I’d see my brother again. The weather-beaten lines on his face are smoother, eyes bright, and nothing to do with expensive windows and natural lighting.