ISLA
The walk back to my rental cottage stretches along the shore road, and I spend every step of it replaying the conversation with Grayson Hale.
He said yes. Against every instinct he clearly possesses, against the walls he's built around himself and whatever he's protecting out there in those waters, he agreed to take me out on his boat tomorrow at dawn. I should feel triumphant. Instead, I feel like I've stepped onto thin ice and felt the first crack beneath my feet.
And I can't stop thinking about the handshake.
It shouldn't mean anything. A simple gesture, the kind of professional courtesy exchanged a thousand times without notice. But when his callused palm pressed against mine, something passed between us that had nothing to do with courtesy. A jolt of energy, sharp and unexpected, that raced up my arm and settled somewhere behind my ribs. His eyes widened for just a fraction of a second before he pulled away.
Another thing I can't explain. The list keeps growing.
The cottage comes into view as I round the final bend, a whitewashed stone building with a slate roof and windows that face the sea. Mrs. MacPherson, the elderly widow who owns it,warned me when I signed the lease that the place gets lonely in winter. That the wind comes off the water like a living thing, rattling the shutters and finding every gap in the old walls. That most renters don't last more than a month before fleeing back to the mainland.
I've been here six weeks, and I have no intention of leaving.
Inside, I drop my messenger bag on the kitchen table and put the kettle on, more out of habit than any real desire for tea. The cottage is small but comfortable, with a sitting room that doubles as my workspace, a bedroom barely large enough for the brass bed frame, and a kitchen where I can touch both walls if I stretch out my arms. Everything smells faintly of peat smoke and salt air, scents that have seeped into the stone over generations of islanders living and dying within these walls.
My laptop sits open on the desk by the window, surrounded by printed charts and handwritten notes and the accumulated debris of five years' obsessive research. I settle into the chair and pull up the migration data, even though I've memorized every pattern, every anomaly, every impossible thing the whales have been doing in these waters.
Five years ago, I was a newly minted PhD with a research grant and a theory about North Atlantic whale communication. Standard academic fare, the kind of work that gets published in journals nobody outside the field ever reads.
But the deeper I dove into the data, the stranger things became. Pods changing their migratory routes without any apparent environmental cause. Whales congregating in specific locations during specific lunar cycles, as if gathering for some purpose my instruments couldn't detect. And always, always, this stretch of water around the Isle of Skara appearing in the data like a gravitational beacon, pulling everything toward it.
I scroll through the sonar mappings I showed Grayson this morning, the ones that made his face go hard and closed. Herecognized something in them. I'm certain of it. Whatever he knows about these waters, whatever he's hiding, my data came too close to exposing it.
The kettle whistles, and I make myself a cup of tea I won't drink, carrying it back to the desk where the work waits. Hours disappear the way they always do when I lose myself in the data, cross-referencing migration patterns and lunar cycles and water temperature fluctuations until my eyes burn and my shoulders ache.
When I finally look up, the afternoon light is already beginning to fade, the northern latitude stealing hours from the day as autumn deepens toward winter. The sea stretches out to the horizon, gray-green and restless, waves rolling in with the steady rhythm that has become the soundtrack of my life.
I've always loved the ocean. Even as a child growing up in Edinburgh, far enough from the coast that the sea was a special occasion rather than a daily presence, I felt its pull like a current I couldn't fight. My mother thought it was charming, my fascination with tide pools and marine biology books and documentaries about deep-sea creatures. My father called it a phase I'd grow out of, the way children grow out of dinosaurs or space travel.
They were less charmed by the other things. The way I could hold my breath underwater for minutes at a time, long past the point where the lifeguards at the public pool would panic and dive in after me. The way I sensed storms before they formed, waking from sleep hours before the first clouds appeared on the horizon. The way I sometimes stood at the water's edge and felt the tide respond to my presence, waves reaching toward me like hands.
My parents learned not to talk about these things. I learned not to demonstrate them.
Only Gran understood.
She was the one who took me to the shore whenever she visited, standing at the water's edge while I splashed in the shallows, her face carrying an expression I was too young to interpret. Longing, I think now. Grief that had nothing to do with age or illness. She would watch the waves like someone looking for a face in a crowd, searching for something she'd lost so long ago that even the memory had worn thin.
"The sea-folk know these waters," she told me once, when I was eight or nine years old. We were sitting on a rocky beach in Fife, watching seals sun themselves on the distant rocks. "They've swum these currents since before there were people to name them."
"Sea-folk?" I'd asked, delighted by the idea. "Like mermaids?"
Her smile was sad around the edges. "Older than mermaids. Different. They wear seal skins in the water and shed them on land. Selkies, the old stories call them."
I begged her for more, but she grew quiet after that, her gaze fixed on the horizon. Later, I asked my mother about selkies, and she laughed and said Gran filled my head with too many fairy tales. I learned not to bring it up again.
But I never forgot.
The memory surfaces now as I stare at my data, at the whale migration patterns that trace boundaries no one else seems to see. The whales are avoiding something, or guarding something, or warning something. I've spent five years trying to determine which, and I'm no closer to an answer than I was when I started.
What I am closer to is understanding that my grandmother's stories weren't entirely fiction.
I pull open the desk drawer and retrieve the photograph I found after Gran died, tucked into a box of old letters and dried flowers and other relics of a life lived mostly in secret. The image is black and white, faded with age, showing a young womanstanding on a beach I didn't recognize until I came to the Isle of Skara. Now I walk past that beach twice a week on my way to the village market. The cliffs in the background are unmistakable.
In the photograph, my grandmother is perhaps twenty years old, beautiful in that unguarded way of youth, with dark hair whipping in the wind and bare feet sinking into the sand. She's clutching something against her chest, something gray and folded that I couldn't identify the first time I saw the image. A blanket, I thought. Or a coat.
Now I'm not so sure.
