Page 120 of Bonetide

I take another sip and set the mug down. I’ve got about six hundred questions, and they’re all jockeying for the front of the line. Most of them are terrible, so I pick the boring one, because it’s the easiest to handle.

“How old are you?”

He looks at me a beat. “Older than this cottage.”

“That’s not an answer,” I retort, even though it kind of is because this cottage is at least a hundred years old—that alone should stun me.

“It’s the answer I have, love,” he replies, offering a sympathetic smile. “I don’t know what year I was born—there’s much about those days that I can’t remember. I know it was before the Galloways came to this loch, and I didn’t speak English, but another language. I know I was a man with a life and dreams and then…I wasn’t. And that it was a long time ago.”

I let that sit and have another sip of my coffee. “How did it happen? The…you know. I mean, what happened?”

His face strains, like he’s reaching for a memory worn so thin that he has to be careful not to tear it. “A storm. I was out on the loch in a boat I shouldn’t have been on, in weather I shouldn’t have been on it in. The boat went over and I went under, and…I was under a long time.”

“And then?”

“And then I came up.”

“As what you are now?”

“Aye.”

“And the man you were?”

“Was already drowned by then.”

“Were you drowned…by something?”

“Yes, I think so,” he says with a thoughtful look. “Helped along. But I don’t know what it was. Something like I am now, I suppose. Whoever—or whatever—it was, I never saw them again. But I know I didn’t become this alone.”

I don’t know what to do with my face, so I look down at my coffee instead. “So you are the undead, then. Like a vampire.”

He offers me a soft smile. “No. Not like a vampire. I am not dead, Iris. I am very much alive, as you can see. It’s just that I was brought back as something else, started a second life, that’s all.”

I snort. “Oh, that’s all.”

He shrugs. I suppose he has had a lot of time—centuries?—to become used to these facts and I’ve had, like, a minute.

“Was there anyone for you then? When you were a man?” I ask. “Did you have a family? A wife?”

He’s quiet for a long beat. “There was a lass, aye. I’d been meaning to ask her father if I could court her properly. I’d been saving for the bride-gift. I’d not yet had the conversation.”

“What was her name?”

He presses his lips together and shakes his head. “I don’t remember.”

I look at him.

“That’s the truth of it, foxglove. I couldn’t tell you her name if you held a blade to me. I remember the feeling of wanting her. But the name went a long time ago, and the face after it. That’s what the years do. They take the small things first.” A pause. “I used to think forgetting her would feel like a betrayal. But it didn’t feel like anything, and that was the worst of it. So, you see, my grief isn’t for her. It’s older and stranger than that; grief for the forgetting itself, for being a thing that outlasts everyone it loved and knew until even the loss wears smooth.”

His words sink into me, the tenderness in the tone, that longing. That watching time as it ticks past, never to take you along.

“Did you ever go back? After, I mean. As what you are.”

“To her village?”

“Yes.”

“Once. She was old by then. I stood at the edge of the woods and watched her in her garden, and then I went away again. She never knew what I had become.”