I lift a shoulder. “Maybe a little. Adele has a history of suffering a broken heart.”
“A-dele?”
“The woman who sings it… she’s very popular, in my time.”
“I like when ye sing it.” His eyes tip to his feet, then back up—the sun across his face—then he reaches into his canvas coat pocket, pulls something out, and extends his arm.
The thing in his hand is small—white and smooth—a tiny shell, curved in on itself like a mouth pinched closed. It’s a cowrie shell; I remember them from my childhood.
“Found it on the shore, reminded me of the one ye wear—” He swallows, relaxes his shoulders.
I step forward and touch the perfect, rounded surface, noticing a tiny hole at the opening of the shell.
“Made a small hole,” he explains. “For yer necklace.” His eyes find my throat, my chest, where the chain drapes against my skin.
I lift the shell from his palm, startled by the kindness of this small gesture—the time he took to puncture a hole through the fragile surface of the shell.
“Ye dinnae have to wear it, if ye don’t want.”
“I do,” I answer quickly. “I want to wear it. It’s beautiful.” And it is, seeing it up close, the perfect curve and slope of it. Not a single flaw. Not damaged by the waves or rocks of the shoreline. I wonder how long he spent, searching, until he found this one. “Thank you,” I tell him.
He nods, gripping the leather gloves between his hands, like he’s unsure what to say next. There’s a hint of shyness flicking across his blue eyes. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll leave ye to it.”
He lowers his head, clomping down the back steps and out toward the garden.
I close my fingers around the shell. I let the sway of my heart press softly against my ribs. I allow the quietness of such a small gesture crack me open just a little. Unlocking a door inside me. Comforted by what it means—but unsettled by what it might.
I weave myself into this unforeseen life.
His life.
Twice I see him walk out to the steep cliff edge of the island, where the gravestone marks a grassy plot just beyond the birches. He stands there for a time, shoulders toward the wind, his voice carried out into the sea, and I wonder what words he speaks to his wife and the twins who never took their first breaths. What sadness he shares only with them. Does he speak of me, a strange woman wandering through his house? A woman he must suffer until we run aground again, until I find an escape?
I imagine the night he pushed a shovel into that ground, splitting it open, laying his sorrow down inside. Maybe the land couldn’t take it. The terrain fractured, tore away from the mainland. Sent the island out into the sea. Some grief is too deep, even for the soil to hold.
I mark the days in my mind.
Twenty-nine. Thirty-three. Forty.
I’ve been on the island for over a month. I watch each sunrise, the golden crest rising over the house at a different place each morning. Adrift at sea, there is no rhyme or reason to east and west—we are at the mercy of the tide. Some mornings the sun winks through the bedroom window, other days it rises into the kitchen, slanting across the table where I drink my tea. The leeward side of the island—where the wind is calmest—is always changing. Erratic and unpredictable. It’s an odd thing to feel directionless, to lose one’s bearings, to not know my location in the world. But to be truly… lost. It’s something most will never experience.
Alice down the rabbit hole. With no way to wake up.
And there is the other concern of time, the one that itches at me, the one I try not to think about.
How much of it has passed back home? Months now, edging into years?
Every hour here, equal to a day on the mainland? Or longer? How many search teams have scanned the Faroe coastline? How many ships have been sent out, looking for a woman who swam toward an imaginary piece of land? Perhaps they suspected Helen of something nefarious, questioned her for hours, accusing her of pushing me into the ocean, killing me off for a good ending to her podcast? No, that wouldn’t make sense. If only she’d had a camera instead of audio gear. If only she’d been filming the moment I swam out toward the island. Instead, there is only her verbal account of what she saw that rainy afternoon, microphone held to her lips as she shouted for me to come back. But what does that prove?
Maybe they didn’t search for me for very long.
Instead, they decided quickly that I had surely drowned. Because how do you search for a fictional island, how do you convince others that it’s real enough to look for? I will be filed away along with all the other conspiracy theories. Ellie Mills, another unanswered mystery.
I push the thought away, because I need to believe I’ll find a way back, no matter how much time has passed. I hold on to this because it’s all I have.
Day fifty-two. Maybe fifty-three, I’m starting to lose count.
Clay and I find a rhythm in our shared existence. An ease to our daily life.
