The other thing I found in that box was a letter, written in my grandmother's hand but never sent. I've read it so many times the paper has gone soft at the creases, the ink fading in places where my fingers have touched it most often.
I cannot go back, she wrote.Even if I found it, even if the sea would take me, I cannot leave the children. Cannot abandon the life I've built on land, dry and solid and safe. But the water calls to me still, after all these years. Every storm, every high tide, every dream that drags me down into the dark. It calls, and I cannot answer.
Perhaps one day, one of them will hear it too. Perhaps the blood runs stronger than I dared believe.
I didn't understand what she meant when I first read those words. I thought it was metaphor, the poetic ramblings of an old woman who missed her homeland. But the more time I spend on Skara, the more I feel what she described. The water calls to me. Not poetically. Not metaphorically. Actually calls, in a voice that isn't quite sound, pulling at something deep in my chest like a fishhook buried beneath my ribs.
I push back from the desk and walk to the window, pressing my palm flat against the cold glass. The sun has slipped below the clouds on the horizon, painting the water in shades of copperand rose. Beautiful and strange and endlessly mysterious, hiding depths that no satellite or sonar array can fully map.
My grandmother was born on this island. I discovered that six months into my research, digging through parish records for a project on local fishing traditions. Ailsa Drummond, born 1932, daughter of a fisherman and his wife, baptized in the small stone church that still stands in the village center. She left in 1954 and never returned, settling in Edinburgh and marrying my grandfather, a practical man who worked in insurance and probably had no patience for fairy tales.
She never talked about Skara. I didn't even know it existed until I found the photograph and the letter and started asking questions that led me here, to a cottage on the shore road and a mystery I can't solve with science alone.
My tea has gone cold. I dump it in the sink and consider making another cup, then decide against it. The restlessness that's been building since I left Grayson's dock won't be soothed by tea. It wants movement, action, answers to questions I don't know how to ask.
Instead, I pull out my notebook and review what I know about the man who holds the keys to the waters I need to study.
Grayson Hale, the sole owner and operator of a fishing trawler calledDeepwatch. Inherited the boat and the dock from his father, who died at sea fifteen years ago under circumstances no one on the island seems willing to discuss in detail. Lives in what the locals call the Warden's Tower, an old fortification on the cliffs above a cove that doesn't appear on any official maps. Keeps to himself. Has a reputation for knowing the waters better than anyone alive and for refusing to share that knowledge with outsiders.
Until today.
I still don't understand why he said yes. The mention of Maritime Development Corporation clearly struck a nerve, butthere was something else in his reaction, something beyond concern about ecological damage or economic exploitation. When I showed him the sonar data, his face went blank in a way that wasn't confusion. It was recognition, quickly hidden.
He knows what's down there. I'm certain of it now. Whatever impossible thing my instruments have been detecting for five years, whatever draws the whales to these waters and makes them swim in patterns that defy biological explanation, Grayson Hale has seen it with his own eyes.
Tomorrow, maybe I'll see it too.
The thought sends a shiver down my spine that has nothing to do with the cold draft leaking through the window frame. I should be excited. This is what I've worked toward, what I've sacrificed relationships and career opportunities and any semblance of a normal life to pursue. The chance to understand something no other scientist has documented, to make a discovery that could reshape our understanding of marine biology.
But excitement isn't what I feel as the light fades and the stars emerge over the water. It's something closer to recognition. Like the moment before a storm breaks, when the air goes heavy and electric and your body knows what's coming before your mind catches up.
My mother used to joke about it, calling me her little weather girl. But the jokes stopped after I predicted the hurricane that killed six fishermen off the coast of Aberdeen. I was twelve years old, and I woke screaming from a dream of drowning, of waves taller than buildings, of pressure crushing the air from my lungs. The storm hit three days later, exactly as I'd dreamed it.
After that, I learned to keep my predictions to myself.
The dreams have been worse since I came to Skara. More vivid, more insistent, more difficult to dismiss as the product of an overactive imagination. I dream of swimming through waterso deep that light doesn't reach, of pressure that should kill me but doesn't, of breathing darkness like air and finding it sweeter than oxygen. I dream of shapes moving in the black, vast and ancient and utterly unconcerned with human existence. And sometimes, lately, I dream of a man standing on a shore I almost recognize, watching me with eyes that hold something between wariness and longing.
I don't know what any of it means—or if it means anything at all.
What I know is that my grandmother left this island and spent the rest of her life mourning something she could never name. What I know is that the water calls to me the same way it called to her, and I'm not sure I have the strength to resist it forever. And tomorrow morning, I'm getting on a boat with a stranger who looks at me like I'm either a threat to everything he values or the answer to a question he doesn't want to ask.
The pendant rests against my collarbone, warm despite the chill in the cottage. My grandmother's pendant, the only jewelry she still wore at the end—her wedding ring having been buried with Grandpa years before—passed to me when she died. A simple silver disc on a tarnished chain, engraved with symbols I've never been able to identify. Not Celtic knotwork, not Norse runes, not any of the decorative traditions I've researched. Something older, maybe. Something from a time before writing, when meaning lived in shapes rather than words.
I touch it now, as I often do when my thoughts turn to Gran. And this time, for the first time, it pulses beneath my fingers.
Warmth spreads from the silver into my skin, gentle but undeniable, like pressing my hand against sun-warmed stone. My breath catches. The logical part of my brain scrambles for explanations. Body heat reflected back. The metal responding to temperature changes. A psychosomatic response to stress and exhaustion and the strangeness of this place.
But the warmth intensifies, spreading up my throat and down my chest, and the symbols on the pendant seem to glow with faint luminescence in the dimness of the cottage. Outside the window, the sea has gone still in a way that isn't natural, waves frozen mid-curl, foam suspended on the surface like lace.
Then the moment passes. The pendant cools against my skin, ordinary silver once more. The waves resume their endless roll toward shore.
But my heart is racing, and my hands are trembling, and when I look out at the moonlit water, I could swear I see something watching me. A shape darker than the darkness around it, breaking the surface for just an instant before slipping back beneath the waves. Eyes that catch the starlight and reflect it back with an intelligence that has nothing to do with seals or dolphins or any creature I've catalogued in five years of research.
Something is out there.
Something that knows I'm here.
I step back from the window, my hand pressed flat against my chest where the pendant rests. My grandmother's words echo through me, the letter I've read so many times I could recite it by heart.
