“What?” I shake my head, confused.
“I said take them off.”
Frowning, I step out of the boots, my bare feet sinking into the cold, wet earth.
He won’t look at me, but walks to my side, grabs the boots from the ground, then heads for the house.
The rain falls harder, the soil turning to soup, and I know that the boots must have been his wife’s—and for some reason, I’m allowed to wear her clothes, but not the boots.
When I reach the house, making muddy footprints through the front door, he’s already at the stairs. “I’m sorry,” I say, shivering. “I should have asked before I took them. I won’t do it again.”
He stops, breathes in a way that feels like it unsettles the entire house, makes time stall against the walls. He turns, looks at me, but I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“I just want to get out of here,” I add, my voice pitiful, small.
His jaw tenses, eyes hard, and he crosses the living room back to me,his boots heavy with each step. His hand touches my arm, gentle but firm, and he leads me back out the door.
“What the hell are you doing?”
He releases me once we’re standing at the edge of the porch, and he points out at the sea. “That’s no ocean out there,” he growls. “It’s a black hole that’ll swallow ye up. Sailors die in that water. Even with a good sturdy boat, ye widnae survive on yer own.”
“You want me to stay here for five months, waiting for us to see land?”
“Nae,” he answers, a coldness in his eyes. “But we’ve no choice, have we?”
I listen to his footsteps cross the floor below me, the soft unnamable sound of him pulling off his boots, undressing in the living room while I occupy his bedroom, and then the subtle depression of couch springs, before everything falls quiet.
The farmhouse is old, small, no spare bedroom.
There is heartbreak in the way he moves. In his eyes. The grief is sharp and unmistakable—I’ve seen it in the kids who walk into my office. But he is also gruff, boorish, and often rude. A man who has lost all his civility. His manners. He is nothing like James, and it makes me long for James in a way I’ve never known before. It makes me feel guilty for leaving, for hesitating when he asked me to marry him. He is a kind, patient man—a predictability about him that I crave now more than anything.
But I am stuck on this impossible island with a man who is none of these things. And I promise myself, when I finally return to the mainland, to Seattle, I’ll tell James how deeply I love him. I’ll promise to never leave his side, not for anything. I will be the fiancée—the wife—I should have been long ago. I resolve myself to this, and it gives me something to hope for.
I spin the engagement ring around my finger—the diamond a small weight, linking me back to James. To home. I count the days I’ve beenhere: This will be the seventh night. But how many nights have passed back home?
When I was twelve, I had only been on the island a few hours, but it was a whole week on the mainland. Time distorted somehow, bent and tangled.
I try to calculate the difference now, but the results are too terrifying. Seven days here could mean months on the mainland.
I’ve been missing for months…
I imagine Nana wandering the shoals in front of her house, hoping I might appear from the sea. Has James flown to the Faroes, chartered a fishing boat, joined a search party out looking for me? But after so long—months in their timeline—surely they can’t imagine I’m still alive. The odds of finding me would seem slim by now. Maybe James has gone back to Seattle, called my patients, and told them… what? That I’ve disappeared without any hope of being found again? I’m sure the local news has spread to national media outlets: young girl who vanished at age twelve has disappeared once again, twenty years later. When I finally manage a way off this island, I’ll need to go into hiding just to avoid the press. But James will see to that, he’s good in a crisis. He’ll know what to say: She needs time to process what’s happened. I’ll be back in therapy in no time, hours spent talking to one of my colleagues, sorting through the details of this imaginary experience. Dealing with the trauma. Again.
Because maybe that’s all this is: trauma.
A head injury.
Maybe I’m lying in a hospital bed back in the Faroe Islands, trapped in a coma-induced nightmare.
Maybe… I just need to wake up.
I slide myself beneath the blankets, my face against the cotton sheet, breathing in the salty, earthen scent. And as I begin to drift off, I think how oddly safe I feel. There’s something about the soft depression in the mattress, the weight of the wool blankets, the sea-wind against thewalls of the house, the unbroken quiet—not a single hum from electronic devices. No cell phone dinging from the bedside table, no TV static or central heating or streetlamps through the window. No cars driving through the rain outside, no dog barking next door, no sirens in the distance.
Out here, it’s a different kind of quiet.
I feel sheltered. As if this old house were holding me in the palm of its hand.
Admittedly, I haven’t slept this good since I was little.
