Page 10 of Fierce Highland Longing

I pushed the cross flat to the boards, the way it was. I set the plank back against the wall in the same place, at the same angle, then stepped away and checked it from the door like a man tidying a room he’d no business in.

Which is what I was doing, even though I stopped here every trip up and down the coast.

Outside, under the lee of the wall, the rain hadn’t reached the ground.

There was a strip of wet sand over the shale, and prints in it.

Hers going in and hers coming out, small, the toes deep where she’d run.

And under hers, a bigger set. Boots. In and out, walking both ways, no hurry in them at all. Sand had run into the edges and started to close them.

They were there before she was.

I straightened and looked out at the water.

The tide was turning. The storm was easing. And for the first time in nineteen years, I had a plan.

Chapter Five

Superstitions and Salt — Mara

Thecameradiedsomewherebetween the boathouse and the beach, and I carried it around the village anyway.

Salt gets into everything. I’ve lost a body of work to a monsoon in Kerala and another to a sandstorm, and I understood what the shutter sounded like the first time I pressed it in the morning light—nothing. A dead click. Nine years of dead click on a strap around my neck.

I went out with it regardless and framed the terraces in my head the way I’ve framed everything since I was twenty-three.

Isla asked how I’d slept, five hours after I’d shut a door on a man standing in the dark.

“Fine.”

He wasn’t in the front room when I went past it.

Three unpaved terraces climb from the harbor, and I walked the middle one twice. Stone cottages, deep-set windows, slate still running from the night. A shop with a hand-lettered card in the window about eggs.

Four doors on that terrace had iron fixed above them. Small black shapes, nailed into the lintels, painted around rather thantaken down. Not one of them was a cross. I’d walked under them in the rain on the first night.

The woman was already on the harbor wall when I got there.

I came along it past a slate slab set into the stonework, names cut into it, no dates and no order. She sat at the far end by the moss-covered bollard with a net across her knees. Her hands moved through it the whole time. She had no bag with her, nothing but the net, and boots older than most of the village, and the wind coming down that wall did nothing to her hair.

I stopped ten feet away.

She raised her eyes to me and went on working. Neither of us bothered with hello.

“I owe you an apology.”

Her hands kept going.

“The camera’s dead, if that helps.” I lifted it and put it down. “Salt. So nothing came of it.”

She worked on.

“Seals carry the souls of people.” She pulled a strand tight. “The sea takes what’s stolen out of it.”

Her hands stopped. She raised her head, turned, and fixed me with eyes the color of deep water, flat and patient and entirely without mercy.

“A man without his skin dies slow, and he dies bad.”