Page 34 of Fierce Highland Longing

I turned once and put my head up.

She was still sitting on that rock, small and alone in the storm, her hand pressed to her mouth like she was trying to hold the moment inside her.

And I left her there.

Chapter Fifteen

The Sea Only Keeps — Mara

TheWebsters’boyfoundme on the shelf at half six in the morning, going along the shore for his father’s creels, and he got a rope down, and then he got two men. I was on that rock about five hours. They put the shoulder into a strap at the hospital in Fraserburgh and told me not to use the arm for six weeks, and I have found out since how many things need two hands.

Three days later, I stared out the window with my coat draped over my shoulders, wondering about Tavish.

The village says Callum Brodie went into the caves on the lowest tide anybody could remember, and the water came in behind him. Which was true, and explained nothing, and nobody had asked a single question about it. They dragged twice and came up empty. There’ll be no stone for him either, and I heard three separate people say it was the same as Rory. They shook their heads and went on with what they were doing.

Nobody suspects anything. There is nothing to suspect. A man drowned in a cave.

Isla put a cushion under my elbow at the table without being asked and took the cup off me to fill it, because I could not do that one-handed either.

“You’ll not lift anything for a while.”

“Six weeks.”

“Aye.” She went to the glasses and started on them. She washed three before she said the next part, and she said it more to the glasses. “The storms have stopped.”

“It’s been calm.”

“It has not been calm here in years, pet.” She turned a glass in the cloth. “Not one autumn. Ask anybody. And now there’s boats out four days running, and Kenny’s up on his gable in his shirtsleeves.”

I sat there thinking.

I have the answer to a thing this village has lived under for nineteen years, and there is not one person on this coast I can tell.

“Mm.”

I went down to the shore Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Nothing. Gray water, weed, the boathouse at the far end with that iron cross still hanging on its nails.

On the Wednesday night, I opened the laptop. The bottom drawer of the wardrobe was standing open across the room with nothing in it except my spare clothes, and the little silver thistle was in the dish by the lamp where it had been since the harbor wall.

The email was two weeks old. The deadline was today. Staff photographer. A desk, a contract, a salary that made me do the math twice. It meant no more airports and no more invoices and no more wondering about February.

It was a good job. Any sensible person would take that job.

I typed the reply with one hand. It took me twenty minutes.

I did not do it for him. He was three days gone. I had no reason on this earth to think he was alive, and I had not once let myself finish that thought.

I did it because I have spent six years saying yes to whatever was nearest and calling it a life. I’d sat in a car outside a wedding venue and understood what that had cost me, and here was the same thing again in a different font.

I said no. I thanked them. I sent it with my thumb on the trackpad.

Then I went down and ate a bowl of Isla’s soup and could not tell you one thing about how it tasted.

Thursday, before light, I went down to the beach where I had found him.

The sea had changed. I had not properly taken it in until I stood there in the dark and waited for the sun. There was a swell coming in on about a nine count, and it broke clean along the stones and hauled out and came again. It had been doing that for four days.

The light came up.