I squint at him, confused.
Resting in his palm, I see a circular band of gold, and a flash of deep, dark blue. A ring.
“Sapphire,” he says. “It belonged to my mother before she passed. And my gran before her.” He takes in a breath, looks up at me. “That night on the beach, I didnae have a ring for ye, an’ it’s been bothering me, wishing I had something to give ye.”
“Clay—” Emotion catches in my throat.
“Not sure if the size is right.” He smiles a little. “It was never meantto be a wedding ring, my mother only wore it now an’ then. Said it carried the luck of all the strong women in her kin. I’d nearly forgotten about it. Took some time finding it, tucked in an old shoebox.”
Tears leak down my cheeks, but he wipes them away, his strong hands capable of such delicate acts.
“I promise to take care of ye.” He breathes. “Until the very end.”
The night on the beach, we made a similar promise to each other, and I hadn’t expected anything more. I didn’t need a symbol of how he felt. But now, I hold out my shaking hand and he slides the ring onto my finger. Incredibly, it fits nearly perfectly—only slightly loose. As if my hand has been waiting for it. A hand that once wore a ring given by another man—a ring that always felt out of place. But as the candlelight catches softly on the sapphire, I feel like a woman who is finally at home in her own life.
I lean forward to press my lips against his. “Until the very end.”
He squeezes my hand. “Tha goal agam ort.”
I don’t know what the words mean, not completely, but I see their meaning in his ocean eyes.
I love you.
The sea is brutal, cold and barbaric.
We’re drifting farther north. Each day the sun seems trapped behind a heavy layer of clouds, and snow begins to spiral down from the gray, bottomless sky.
We rise late each morning, neither of us wanting to brave the cold of the house, but Clay is always first to slip free from the blankets, kissing my forehead, then making his way downstairs to start a fire in the stove. By the time I dress, pull on wool socks, and enter the kitchen, it’s at least mildly warm.
Our newly planted crop begins to wither as snow dusts the soil. But thankfully, inside the greenhouse, the temperature remains tepid. Wemanage to harvest fresh green onions, root vegetables, and handfuls of tomatoes. The fishing is good along the shore, mostly yellowfin tuna and Atlantic cod.
But the days feel unending, and my mind settles into a kind of somber certainty: that we will likely remain in the cold for months, maybe a whole year, before the winds push us south again.
And yet, there is something beautiful about the glacial sea, the dark, biting wind always hissing under the front door, always licking at our necks when we step outside. It feels like our wind, our life, our sea. The constant harshness of it.
Until one evening, standing at the kitchen window, peeling potato skins into the sink, I notice something glinting out on the water. I dry my hands on a towel and walk to the back door, stepping out into the cold. I don’t bother grabbing a coat. I walk in my bare feet down the path to the slope that drops down to the rocks below.
The light outside is dull, the sun beginning to set, and I lift a hand over my eyes.
I’ve been fooled before into thinking there is something out on the sea, when it’s only the waves shaping themselves into something they are not.
But this illusion remains, even after I blink.
It slips in and out of focus as the ocean swells upward, then reappears when the sea dips back down again.
Land.
A hard knot tightens in my chest.
This long stretch of mainland is different from before. It stirs a memory inside me, distant but known. I fold my arms over my chest, against the chill, and watch as the winds push us closer with each surge of the tide. The evening sky grows darker, and a lighthouse comes into view, pulsing rhythmically from a jetty.
A short distance away, I make out a harbor just up the coast, the masts of sailboats rising like limbless trees.
This isn’t like finding the deserted beach.
There are people here, a town. A community.
Alive.
