Page 109 of Washed Up

Dylan looked at Frankie, then back across the water. ‘Can’t you guess?’

She paused. ‘Herm,’ she whispered as the penny dropped.

Dylan nodded, scratching Blondie’s long ears as she came lolloping back to where they’d stopped, impatient to keep moving. ‘Yup. It was when I came here that I realised I’d had enough. I needed a break from it all. Needed to escape. How ironic. They were all talking about it back home and I was here thinking the exact same thing.’

Frankie’s heart was in her throat. ‘And what was it that made you feel that way?’ she said slowly.

‘Everything. You. The views. The people. But most of all, the silence. The stillness. The peace. I spent the briefest amount of time on this island, when you’ve lived here your whole life. What do I know about it, right? But it was like, I don’t know. Like I could breathe again when I was here. Like a weight was lifted off my chest.’

You, he had said.

‘It is pretty magical,’ she said, as they watched a kestrel hover over a hedgerow barely metres away. ‘And the best is yet to come. Come on.’

She took his hand and led him around the next corner, trying to ignore her hammering heart. The feel of his skin on hers. His nearness. You.

‘Welcome to Puffin Bay,’ she said instead, swallowing the lump in her throat that rose without warning every time she saw it.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

‘I give you, an improbability of puffins,’ said Frankie proudly, sweeping her hand to highlight the sheer number of the tiny, comical-looking seabirds on the cliffs and in the water. There were even a couple flying low across the sea, looking surprisingly graceful. And the sound. The sound was deafening. The loud keow of seagulls, the peeping of a pair of oystercatchers flying across the water below them, and beneath it all, a low almost growling sound. The puffins.

Dylan barked a laugh. ‘So, this is how you know so much about collective nouns.’

She grinned back. ‘Yup. I won’t even apologise. I’m a proper nerd about this. Theirs is particularly good. They can also be a circus of puffins or, on the water, a raft of puffins, like that lot down there.’

Frankie produced a pair of binoculars from her pocket and handed them to Dylan, helping him to see the little groups on the water, bobbing up and down in the gentle waves, one hand on his arm. She pretended not to notice the feel of his skin beneath her fingers.

‘Can you hear them calling to each other? That low grumbling sound? Sometimes I think they sound like they’re laughing. Like “oh er, matron” or something. So funny.’

Dylan was scanning the water. ‘An improbability? They’re that rare?’

‘I know, isn’t it a lovely name? They’re actually not that rare but they spend their winters far out to sea, and only come back to breed so they’re hard to spot. Even when they come back there are only a few places in the UK where you can see them like this.’

‘It’s incredible,’ he breathed, eyes wide, taking it all in.

Her heart thrilled to hear him say it. To hear him love what she loved.

‘Never took you for a birder when I first met you,’ she said with a chuckle, remembering him scrambling down to the harbour in his slippy impractical shoes.

‘I’ve never been birdwatching in my life,’ he said. ‘It’s just not something we ever did. And to be honest…’

‘You thought it was for old people?’

‘Something like that.’

Frankie put her hands on her hips. ‘Well, it’s having a resurgence, I’ll have you know. And anyway, screw what people think. It’s strangely addictive.’

‘I can see that. Although you did take a while to show me your binoculars.’ Then, he said, ‘Ah!’

‘What?’

‘I saw a little beak. The orange. Wow, it’s so bright.’

‘Isn’t it gorgeous?’

‘I had no idea they were so tiny.’

‘Not more than thirty centimetres, which to me is always the same height as one of those shatterproof rulers from when we were kids.’