Page 9 of Carry on Wayward Son

I’d made choices. The work had required a particular kind of life, and I’d chosen the work, which meant I’d chosen the life. I didn’t have any legitimate grounds for complaint about where that left me now. I knew that. I believed it.

I took my beer and worked my way toward the door.

Nobody saw me go. Rios was deep in conversation. Sawyer had his arm around Willa. Ford laughed at something Bree had said, and his expression in that moment wasn’t something I needed to examine on his behalf.

Outside, the November cold arrived with a slap.

The beach access between the Brewhouse and the marina was a narrow path that opened onto the sound side sand. Off-season meant nobody was out here, just the dark water and the lights of the village reflecting off it. I pulled my jacket tighter and walked south along the waterline, the sand firm under my boots where the tide had been.

I walked until the lights behind me were small enough to be any lights. Then I stood at the edge of the water for a while, looking up.

Same sky as it always was out here. Bigger than it had any right to be, the stars more present than anywhere with real light pollution, the Milky Way faint but there if you looked for it.

I looked.

Gwen would have been thirty today. Somewhere, under this same sky, if things had gone differently. Laughing at something, embarrassed by the sound of her own laugh. Rolling her eyes at country music she secretly loved.

I stood at the edge of the water for a while longer.

Then I turned around and walked back toward the lights.

Four

LAYLA

The Airbnb was a small rental cottage two blocks from the sound side waterfront. It was clean and anonymous in the way of places that existed to house strangers. Predictably, they’d gone with lots of blue, gray, and white mixed with a beach theme. Lots of cookie-cutter prints of beachscapes and seashells. A basket of local honey and hot sauce sat on the counter, which was a nice touch. I unpacked the groceries into the refrigerator, got Koa’s bowls set up in the kitchen corner, and gave him water while I changed clothes.

The braid took longer than the rest of it. I worked it tight against my skull, flat sections folded close, nothing loose enough to grab. Old habit. The kind you developed once and never lost. I tucked the tail under and pinned it, checked it in the bathroom mirror, and moved on.

The knife sheaths were already on, accommodated beneath whatever I was wearing the way they always were. I swapped the jeans for running tights and rebuckled everything over them, checking the draw on both, before pulling a fleece over the top. Pepper spray went on the left side of the waistband. I slung one of my camera bags crossbody, taking only the small-body Canon with a wide lens, more out of reflex than intention. If something was worth seeing, I wanted to be able to document it. That instinct was older than the sheaths and had never required a reason.

Koa was already at the door by the time I reached for his lead, his body vibrating with a need to move.

“Okay,” I told him. “Let’s go.”

The sound side beach was a five-minute walk through quiet streets. Late November meant the village was stripped back to its working bones. A few restaurants with lights on, the dim glow of the island market’s sign in the opposite direction, a bakery dark for the night. I noted the layout automatically, the way I always did somewhere new—exits, blind spots, the geography of a place at night versus how it would change in daylight.

The beach access opened between two buildings and deposited us onto sand.

I stopped.

Pamlico Sound moved in the dark, a low, patient lapping of waves that reached deep and unlocked my shoulders a fraction. All my life, I’d been pulled by the ocean, by water. I never quite relaxed away from it. Lights from the houses and businesses along the waterfront laid amber strips on the beach that didn’t fully reach the water. Nobody was out. Not when out equaled the penetrating damp and chill, and warm meals beckoned inside tidy houses. I’d get to that. But Koa and I both needed to move first.

I stepped onto the beach, automatically registering how different the fine, pale sand felt beneath my feet compared to the dark, rocky expanses of home. For a moment it seemed as if the island would suck me in entirely. My heart skipped a beat before I told myself it was nonsense and kept going.

Koa hit the sand, and his whole body changed. Nose down, quartering back and forth, tail working, cataloguing the array of scents the beach offered. He’d been cooped up in the car for three days, and he moved like an animal reclaiming something owed to him. The scents, sounds, and sights of a new place.

I gave him the lead and let him work.

Even in the dark, I saw the waterfront held buildings where I didn’t remember buildings. A restaurant with a lit sign I didn’t recognize, a stretch of newer construction further along the shore that hadn’t been there before. More developed than it used to be, the village pushed further along the waterfront in both directions. It made sense in the wake of the hurricanes that regularly battered these shores. I’d studied maps and Google Street View before embarking on this trip. But seeing the changes on a screen didn’t capture the weight of knowing a place had kept moving while you weren’t looking.

I’d explore the village properly another day. Tonight I just needed to be here. To get through whatever the first night was going to be without anyone watching me do it.

I tipped my head back.

The sky was enormous out here. No mountains to wall it in, no fir canopy, just the full dome of it from horizon to horizon, the stars dense and close in a way they never were at home. Different sky. Same sky. I’d thought about that on the ferry, and I thought about it again now—how the same stars arranged themselves differently depending on where you stood underneath them, and how that was either comforting or the opposite, depending on the night.

Tonight I hadn’t decided which.