Chapter Six
I feel arms hauling me up from the slick rocks.
Eyes blinking, I try to peer through the rain, across the thrashing sea, to see if Helen is at the shore. I think I spot her on the beach, arms waving, shouting wildly, but then the thick fog and sea mist swallow her up. Maybe she was never there at all.
Warm blood courses down my thigh from where the rock tore open my flesh. The air feels strange in my lungs, as if I’m breathing in the rain… gulping it down like a fish.
And then I too am swallowed by the dark. A blotting out of pain and cold.
And nothing else.
The bed I lie in isn’t mine. It’s hard, the mattress curved in all the wrong places. The pillow smells of someone unknown. Wool and dirt.
I open my eyes, blink around the room, but it’s all watercolors and fractured light.
My skin feels papery, wafer-thin, like the dampness might separate it from my skeleton.
I wonder if I’m going into shock, the cold making my thoughts spin and darken, unable to settle clearly on anything, so I let myself sink back into sleep.
Time weaves around me. I lose track of the hours.
A shadow slides over me, a man.
Pain. Pain. Pain. It runs its dagger through me, straight down my leg, like it wants to see me scream. And I do, but it only comes out as a whimper. So I sleep again.
Amber light streams through a window, touching the side of my face, warming me. I pull the bedsheet up to my chin, stretching my legs a little, and pain crawls up my torso. My eyes snap open. I’m not at home. I am here, in this strange place.
Inhaling, I push myself up, back rigid against the headboard.
My fingers slide down my side, finding the source of the pain.
Folding back the blankets, I see the bruised, swollen flesh along my left hip bone.
But there is something coating the wound, a balm, a waxy substance just above the line of my underwear.
The man has been tending to me, touching my bare hip while I slept.
I try to swing my legs over the edge of the bed, but there is more pain, a new source.
The back of my head throbs so fiercely it feels like it’s being squeezed between two concrete walls, right in time with my heartbeat.
Fuck. I sink back against the headboard, eyes pinched shut.
Get up, I tell myself. I can’t stay here.
I shift my legs slowly, biting down on the pain, and slip off the edge of the mattress. My feet find the floor, a dagger lancing along my rib cage. My head wheels, the room rotates, but after a moment of deep breaths, I blink and everything settles. I focus on the bedroom door.
Fresh air, I think. If I can breathe in fresh air, all the violent upheavals happening in my body will soften. I straighten up, take a step, and the pain in my hip stabs down into my leg, making my knees buckle. I hit the floor with a thud. Ears ringing. Lungs heaving. Muscles spasming.
The bedroom door swings open, footsteps, and then his arms are around me again, bracing my ribs, lifting me up and placing me carefully back into bed. “Gonny no dae that,” he mutters under his breath. Gaelic or some Scots dialect, words that melt into the pain.
I ease myself down to the rough pillow, head vibrating.
The man looks down at me. “That hip needs to heal,” he says, words I actually understand.
I relax my shoulders back, close my eyes, and let out a long breath before looking up at him. But my vision is still whirling, and he’s just out of focus. “Where am I?”
He walks to a wooden chest of drawers, pours a glass of water from a ceramic pitcher, then carries the glass back to me. “Nae where yer supposed to be.”
The water is frigid as it spills down my throat, but soothes me when it hits my stomach. I blink again, and the man’s face is a little less vague. “I need to get back,” I say, teeth feeling brittle and cold.
“Too late for that.”
Sunlight streaks through the bedroom window, golden like honey.
The curtains, the color of wheat, are tied open beside the frame.
The light touches his face, cheekbones, eyes—a piercing, painful blue—like they’ve seen the harshest of winters, known grief and anger and desperation.
An overgrown beard covers most of his face—light brown, speckled with strands of red.
But even through the beard, I know.
He is the same man I remember from a long-forgotten dream, from a childhood that was haunted by thoughts of this island.
But it’s more than this.
Helen was right.
The man I met that night off the coast of Nova Scotia was in his mid-thirties, tall and broad-shouldered.
He should be in his fifties by now, body slightly more slumped and used up.
But this man in front of me is unchanged from the man I met almost twenty years ago.
Dark, damp hair, shoulders towering above me, long-sleeve cotton shirt rolled up to his elbows.
This is the same man.
The same.
As if time has stalled or slowed around him—like a photograph left undeveloped.
He hasn’t aged a day.
The air seems to shake around me—in disbelief, in confusion—a tinny vibration pressing against my eardrums. “Do you have a boat?” I ask, head pulsing with too many questions that I don’t have time to ask.
Because I know I need to get back to the mainland before we drift too far out into the Atlantic.
He takes a few steps back from the bed. Shakes his head. “Lost it to a bad gale some years ago. And it widnae do ye any good unless ye could see land.”
“We can’t be that far from the Faroes yet.”
He turns to the window, features cast in silhouette—a face that’s been carved by the sea-winds, a sleeplessness about him, an exhaustion, eyes like a long-awaited storm, as if they are always watching for something: for the rain to come, for death, or something else.
He is a man who shouldn’t be here, who shouldn’t look as young as he does.
“The Faroe Islands?” His mouth slackens, and I can’t sort out what it is, but he is different, somehow, than how I remember.
The way he moves, breathes, the muscles in his forearms tensing as he slides his hands into the pockets of his wool pants.
I place the glass of water on the side table, beside a candle stub burned low.
“I can’t stay here,” I say, releasing a shaky exhale.
“I need to get off.” I never intended to be here this long—I only wanted to see the island, step foot onto its shores, to prove it was real.
To know, once and for all, that I didn’t make it up all those years ago.
And then I would swim back to the mainland, to Helen, having seen the truth. With a story inside me I couldn’t deny.
“Ye shouldnae come in the first place,” he answers, a severity to his voice, an irritation.
“When we get close to land again, I can swim back to shore.”
A twitch pulls at his temple. “Nae tellin’ when that’ll be.”
Pain races down my hip, and I blow out a breath, resting my head back.
But when I pinch my eyes closed, trying to conjure up a different outcome, a way out of here, memories slide like sand through my mind, to the last time I was here.
With trembling fingers, I reach into the collar of my shirt, searching for the chain around my neck…
but it’s gone. My eyes flick up, meeting with his.
Stillness passes between us, his face unreadable.
But from his pocket, his hand unfolds, revealing the chain sitting like a pool of silver in his palm, the locket like a glaring eye. He took it from around my neck while I slept.
“Why do ye have this?” he asks, running his thumb along the edge of the locket, as if it were an old friend he is trying to recall. “There was a wee girl who was here,” he continues. “She stole it… I never saw it again. How did ye get it?”
Guilt tightens in my chest, and my mind whirls—at the unfathomable nature of this moment, this conversation.
“I took it,” I admit, my eyes flicking to the window, the doorway, observing every detail, wondering if any of this is real.
If I’ve lost my mind. If I drowned out there at sea, and this is some momentary illusion before I tumble into the afterlife.
“I’m sorry,” I manage. “I never should have.”
He closes his fist around it, like he doesn’t want me looking at it. His. But when his eyes lift, there is a new thread of curiosity in them. “That’s not possible. The girl was here only a year ago.”
My heart thuds like a small, clipped bird. Desperate, panicked, needing a way out. “It was twenty years ago.”
He slides the locket back into his shirt. The chain still holds the small, delicate shell that Nana gave me. But I don’t dare ask for it back. I am a thief. A stranger in his house. Again. Still, a shard of relief ripples through me, knowing the locket is back where it belongs.
“You haven’t aged,” I tell him in a near whisper. “You look just how I remember…” My voice falters, breaking under the weight of how impossible it is.
He walks to the bedroom window, touching the curtain. “The sea can play tricks on a person.” A gust of wind throws rain against the glass; the house rattles. “Ye learn not to trust what happens out here.”
The last twenty years of my life, all the time I spent trying to convince myself that none of what happened that night was real, is now crumbling in my hands. I feel both relief and something close to shock as I stare up at the same man I met all those years ago.
“Ye need rest,” he says now, turning away from the window, the dim light sliding along his face: the scruff of his beard, the quietness of his eyes.
I shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t be happening.
“Get some sleep, if ye can. Storm might sound bad, but trust me, this house has weathered far worse.” He stops in the doorway, hesitates. “I don’t know yer name.”
My throat feels too dry, my head feels too full of thoughts, but I say, “Ellie.”