Page 29 of Wateredge

“The Refuge is a strange place, it draws things out of you when you least expect it. Things like memories and sensations that aren’t always welcome, you know? I can’t comprehend what it feels like to be here out of need, or because of pain. And yet, I feel the importance of its existence. For a building that has only been standing for a couple of months, its bones just raised in January, it has quite an effect on people. Like it has been here forever.”

“Maybe it has? The island feels timeless.” Lark wondered where the words came from.

Sam nodded, her smile fond, easy affection written all over it.

“Dragons has always stood for those who need it the most and Crow’s Nest is the same. As is the school. These spaces live and breathe with the cliffs, with a purpose. You feel it the second you set foot on the island, it’s magic, it’s safety. So I believe the Refuge, for all its newness, has absorbed this. Maybe it’s in the earth here. Or in the water.”

Lark watched the ocean in the distance rise and fall like a human chest, breathing steadily, beating like a heart, and knew Sam had spoken nothing but the truth.

“So it’s been three months now. You’re settling in okay, songbird?”

Lark looked up from her book, about the island’s history that Prudence had loaned her. She had advised her to stop by the local library, but Lark thought that she had already made one stupid mistake since arriving on the island, and there was no need to make another. The fewer times she showed her driver’s license, the better. The library would ask for it.

And now she was getting a paycheck every two weeks, so she could afford books. Between what Ceridwen and Deryn paid her and what Victoria did? She was more than able to buy books. It was a surreal feeling.

The most surreal, however, was the moment she put money in the donation box at the Refuge. She felt whole. A whole, undented person who had money and who volunteered and who donated and who helped.

Granted, she had all but swallowed her tongue when she asked Victoria to pay her cash, on the pretext that she didn’t have a bank account yet but would get one sometime soon—that sometime that had still not come to pass despite the island boasting a good and proper bank branch right by the town hall.

Victoria, to her credit, did not bat an eye. Lark did not know if it was the fact that the restaurant industry operated in areas where others would be less willing to. Victoria never spoke about it, never once focused on it, and just handed everyone their pay-slips, checks, or envelopes with cash every other Friday.

Lark did not know what to think. It was a form of kindness—the not speaking of it—that her family would not extend to anyone. She had learned early on that words sometimes were worse than weapons. As were questions.

And so she stayed far away from the library and preferred to drop by the Book Nest, where Prudence asked none of the scary questions and the offerings were rich and varied.

Books that Lark finished, she left at the Refuge, where the few hours she spent manning the phones and managing data entry, and especially teaching her cooking skills classes, were growing into something she looked forward to.

There were seven women living there at the moment, two of them so young that Lark was fairly certain they weren’t even twenty yet. Helping them, not asking them anything, simply spending time cooking, explaining, dropping by, had been comforting. A strange feeling considering how much pain the Refuge held.

Still, between the Tavern, helping Ceridwen at Blossoms, Deryn at Cupcake, sometimes assisting Pru with restocking the shelves if she happened to be at the Book Nest at the right time—and Lark had learned how to time her presence there pretty well by now—Lark’s life on Dragons had taken on a rhythm and… a purpose. There was that word again.

Victoria, clearing her throat next to her, brought her back to the present. She closed her book, an old postcard marking her page.

“Yes, everyone has been very kind.”

Victoria tsked at the reply, and Lark wondered if she had said something wrong.

“I mean, you have been very kind?” Lark put it as a question, and Victoria’s gaze turned even more disapproving. Gratitude and Victoria were not a comfortable fit. Every time Lark tried to thank her, it always ended up in either jokes, or hand waving, or being sent off on some wild-goose chase of a task.

But today seemed different. Victoria was not teasing her. Nor sending her away, and for once, her hands—the long fingers, touched by life and arthritis—were still.

Lark hugged the book close to her chest and finally found the courage to look Victoria in the eye without blinking or running away.

“If this is about me moving out, I will!” Anxiety gripped her throat, but Lark powered through. She had been so stupid. Of course, it had been three months, Victoria would want her out now that she was making darn good money, why had she not considered⁠—

“Are you comfortable here?” Victoria’s question stopped Lark’s spiral in its tracks.

Comfortable? What?

“Ah, yes?”

“Are you asking me to answer for you, songbird? It’s not a complicated question. Moreover, it holds no strings.”

Yes, that was Victoria through and through. Three months she had shared a house with this woman, and it had never felt like any kind of strings were attached to their arrangement. Maybe that was why Lark didn’t ever feel that she was unwelcome.

“I love living here with you. I can pay you rent⁠—”

The look on Victoria’s face made Lark want to reach for the last sentence and pull it back into her mouth. The insult was almost comical.