Page 7 of Pull Me Under

We head towards The Ship, but I can’t help looking back one more time. The Land Rover sits in that space like it never left, like twenty years was just a pause between breaths.

Brynn Trelawney is back.

Christ, we’re all fucked.

Chapter Three

BRYNN

The key sits in my palm with a crushing judgement I don’t normally like to receive from inanimate objects. Heavy, rusted at the edges, accusatory in its weight. Three months it’s been sitting in that solicitor’s envelope, sealed up with the rest of Grandad’s estate – if you can call a neglected cottage and the bones of a dead fishing business an inheritance.

But it’s mine. He left it to me, not to anyone else. Not to Uncle Alan who only visited at Christmas, not to the highest buyer, not to some developer who’d knock it flat and build holiday lets. To me.

The last Trelawney standing.

The only Trelawney.

A family of one.

You’ll go back one day, my bird. His voice is in my head, rough as rope burn, soft underneath. Along with the way he always sounded when he talked about Sea Salt Bay – like he was describing a woman who’d broken his heart but he loved her anyway. When you’re ready. When it’s time.

I wasn’t ready. But then he died, and the solicitor called, and the key arrived, and so here I am.

This isn’t about inheritance though.

Not really.

We never had money. I’m not, say, on a deathbed payout that needs taxing.

It’s something else. A ‘thing’ that I can’t explain or articulate. When I handed my notice in at the last garage and told them my plans.

Get back the boat shed.

Put a boat on the water.

Have a home.

They’d practically laughed me out of the building.

A single woman fishing business.

Yeah, well. Ha. Ha.

Here I am.

The lane up to the old Trelawney place is steeper than my memory has suggested, overgrown with brambles that are catching at my jeans like they’re trying to hold me back from making a monumental error of judgement. The cottage squats at the top of the cliff like it’s grown out of it rather than being built on it. The stone walls have gone green with moss, the windows clouded with salt and decades of neglect.

It’s further from the Harding place than I remember. Not that I remember much. Just heat, bare feet on warm asphalt, the sting of oxygen exhaling from my lungs as we ran up and down the hill.

Damn it.

Why am I even thinking about them? About him? One car park run-in and suddenly I’m seven again – mud on my knees, heart too big for my ribs, watching Jude Harding from behind my grandfather’s legs and hoping he’d look back.

He got tall. That’s all. Filled out like fishing men do, with broad shoulders, and hands that look like they’ve held onto rough rope too tight for too long. Sandy waves pushed back off his face, still damp – from the sea or a shower, who knows – and freckles across his nose and cheekbones even though it’s barely March. Who has freckles in March? Someone who’s been outside every day of his life, that’s who. The limp’s new. Probably some heroic act involving a boat and terrible decision-making. Definitely nothing to do with me.

And that bloody hoodie. A faded surf brand, hood poking out from the collar of his weatherproof coat like a uniform. He couldn’t have looked more beach bum if he’d tried. I bet the flip-flops come out the second it hits Easter. I bet he surfs before dawn and thinks that makes him deep. I bet he’s never lived anywhere that wasn’t within spitting distance of the Atlantic and has absolutely no idea how lucky that makes him.

I bet he’s never had to miss it.