I go after him, irritated, angry. Needing answers now. Needing him to tell me the truth, tell me all the things he’s been thinking these last few months but was too afraid to say aloud. Tell me what he was thinking when his hand touched my face on the front porch. “Are you listening to me?” I call.
He stops on the path, swiveling back to face me. “Aye,” he answers. “I hear every word ye say.” And there is something in his face I can’t decipher. An ache, a need. Something I’ve seen flashes of before.
“Then why do you treat me like this, like you couldn’t care less aboutme, until a boat washes up on shore and now you tell me it’s too dangerous to go? Why do you walk away, why do you cringe sometimes when we get too close, why are you looking at me now, like—?”
“Because I don’t trust myself around you,” he says roughly, shoulders squared. “Because at night, when I think of ye asleep in my bed, I…” He shakes his head, unable to finish the thought.
My heart stops pumping blood. I blink, shifting my gaze to the moon as it inches above the roof of the barn, and I swear time sputters, falls apart in my hands.
“Ye came to this island once before,” he goes on, looking up at me. “You are the only person to ever step foot here after all my time at sea. An’ now, months ago, ye found yourself here again.”
My head thrums. I feel drunk.
“Out here, the sea decides what comes and goes—” His voice finds a cadence that reminds me of the tide outside Nana’s house when I was a kid, the whoosh and rush of the sea at night when I slept. It soothed me. And something about his voice settles me now. “It decides who lives and dies, it disnae make mistakes, and for reasons neither of us can understand, it brought ye back here… twice. An’ if ye leave again, how many more times will ye come back? Will ye return again? Find yerself thinking about this place, longing for it, like a sailor’s song in yer bones ye can’t be rid of? But the next time… if ye do find yer way back, you will be someone else… older. An’ I will have stayed the same. Time will have betrayed what we are right now.” His eyes feel like two sharp ends of a blade, his mouth a perfect symmetry, each word held carefully on the curve of his lips. “This is all there is… right now.” He lifts his chin, his tongue scraping against the edge of his teeth. “If ye go, if ye leave—” He points to the boat waiting on the shore, his words bleeding into my flesh, spoken hoarsely, like they have pained him for too long, burned holes in his throat, and now he’s finally letting them out. “If ye leave, there’s no coming back to how things are right now. This time will be long past.”
I’m shaking and my heart is contracting like a balloon losing all itsair. The meaning between his words sinks in too deep, and I feel myself doubting everything. Every choice, every chance… this moment I have to finally leave. To go home.
“Yer not a stranger in this house,” he adds, softer now. “This is yer home, for as long as ye want.” His eyes flash to the sea, then back. “You could stay,” he suggests with a tilt of his upper lip, three words that could change everything. “Stay on the island, be sure of what ye want before ye leave, before you make a mistake ye can’t take back.”
“A mistake…” I echo so softly I doubt he’s heard.
His face relaxes, his boots shift in the dirt. “If ye want to go, I winnae stop ye. But I’m asking ye to stay. I want you to…” His voice falters.
I think of the nights I lay awake imagining what it would feel like to sleep beside Clay, the sound of his breathing, the warmth of his skin, his hands reaching for me across the mattress. Thoughts I tried to shove away. But now I know, he was awake too, unable to sleep. Treacherous thoughts skipping through his mind.
We were only a floor away, a few steps, but neither of us brave enough to see.
“I don’t trust myself,” I admit, voice trembling.
His eyes tip up slightly. “Why?”
“Because of you, because of this place. All these years, I thought I made you up, that it was all in my head. I’ve spent my whole life running from this island, but also, somehow, running toward it, desperate to see it again, just one more time. But now that I’m here…” My legs sway beneath me, like the ground is crumbling—a subtle tectonic shift. “I don’t know what to do.”
“It disnae need to be so hard.” He looks at me like he can see all my truths and lies, all my sleepless nights, like he forgives me for everything I haven’t yet done. Like he will always forgive me. No matter what happens next. “Just tell me what ye want.”
What I want? As if it were that simple. As if this were a fairy tale and the heroine always gets her happily ever after. As if the real worldweren’t waiting for me beyond the pages of the book. I swallow, knowing that it’s time I woke up.
He looks to his feet when I don’t answer, rubbing a hand across his neck, before his eyes find me again. “What’ll ye do when ye get back, Ellie?” he asks. “Pretend ye were never here? Spend the rest of yer life trying to convince yerself this place doesnae exist?”
I want to tell him all the ways in which I think I could be happy here, in this house, with him, but my mind is tangled up in too many what-ifs. I can’t trust my own unstable heart. I can’t look at him and tell him the truth: that I do want to stay. But I can’t. “I’m sorry” is all I manage.
His jaw settles, the ember in his eyes gone out.
He can see I’ve made up my mind.
But what he can’t see is the hurt tightening like a fist in my gut. The doubt seething just behind my eyelids.
I turn, before my lips betray me—swallowing down the urge to go to him and touch his face—and instead, I step through the doorway into the house. I climb the stairs, leaving him outside, a man I crave in ways I’ve never wanted anyone before, and I close the bedroom door softly.
Both of us haunted by what we can’t have. Haunted by our pasts.
I don’t sleep. I’m not even tired. I watch the sky through the window, no rain in sight.
And by the time the light begins to change, beckoning the oncoming sunrise, I’ve made up my mind.
There is no one coming to save me.
No one who will rescue me from this island.
