Page 11 of Fierce Highland Longing

The wind came along the wall and whipped around me.

“Is that—do people here still say things like that?”

“I’ve said it.”

I understood that was the most she was going to say. She hadn’t argued, hadn’t smiled, hadn’t given me a single edge to hang on to. My fingers went to the strap at my throat and stayed there.

She worked something out of the mesh and held it up between two knuckles.

Silver. Small as a coin, pressed into the shape of a thistle, black in the crevices.

“That’s been in three times this month. I keep putting it back.”

There was something at the corner of her mouth when she said it—not a smile. The nearest thing to one she had. She offered me the thistle.

My hand went out and took it. It had gone out the same way in the boathouse, and I’d had no more reason then than I did now.

She’d already returned to the net.

“There’s a pool out past the point where the first promise was kept.” She said it to the water, not to me. “The sea remembers a fair trade, even when folk don’t.”

That remark I understood. Local color—every coast has a pool or a stone or a chapel with a story stuck to it, and I’ve photographed forty of them. I filed it under community legends.

Her hands went on through the mesh. I stood there a beat too long and walked up the terraces with the thistle clasped in my fist.

Isla was washing glasses at three in the afternoon with the bar empty.

“I wanted to thank the man who helped me up the path. Brodie.”

“Callum.” She kept washing. “He’d not want thanking.”

“He was out in the weather at eleven at night.”

“He’s like that. He brought me a fish in August and mended the pump handle while he was standing there. Wouldn’t take anything for either.” She lifted a glass to the light. “Half the village has a story like that and none of us can pay him for any of it.”

“So what’s his story?”

She set the glass on the towel and didn’t pick up another one.

“He lost his brother in the caves.” She wiped her hands down her cardigan. “Came out of it wrong.”

“How long ago?”

“Nineteen years this month.”

I thought about that, but it meant nothing to me. A number in a village full of numbers.

“Wrong how?”

“He keeps the tides.” She started another glass. “Writes them down. Has done ever since.” She turned it in the cloth. “It’s sad, pet. Everyone finds it sad.”

I walked away, shrugging off the story.

Upstairs I sat on the edge of the bed and placed the thistle in the dish where I keep my camera batteries.

My laptop was open on the chair. The email sat where it had been for three days—permanent staff, no more airports, an answer wanted inside nine days. I shut the lid on it.

I made the list. I make lists when I’m frightened. It’s the only thing I do.