Chapter 9
CORA
I spend the evening after the storm updating the booking system and responding to tour inquiries.
My hands are steady on the keyboard but my shoulders ache from hauling boats, from bracing against wind, from holding myself upright on the dock four inches from Muir while the rain came down.
The adrenaline has burned off and left me hollow.
Restless. I reorder supplies. I eat leftover sinigang standing at the kitchen counter, the sour tamarind sharp on my tongue, my body wanting fuel it doesn't want to sit down for.
Rex texts at half past nine: you okay?
I text back: doing inventory
Rex texts back: that's a no then
I put my phone face-down and finish my sinigang. I go to bed. I don't sleep well.
I find Muir the next morning at the equipment shed.
He's always there by seven forty-five, doing gear checks or line maintenance, absorbing tasks into his routine without being asked.
When I come around the corner of the Snack Hut at ten past eight, the shed door is open and there's the sound of something being methodically worked through inside.
The morning air is cool and clean, the lake smell mixing with pine and the faint diesel tang from the dock.
The shed is small. Twelve feet by sixteen, shelving along three walls, dive equipment racked to the right, paddleboard gear to the left, workbench along the back.
It smells like neoprene and lake water and well-maintained equipment.
The light comes in low through the door, still golden at this hour, catching dust motes in the air.
Muir is at the workbench.
He's working on a wetsuit zipper that seized up yesterday.
The zipper pull is set in the vice, lubricant beside it, his hands applying careful steady pressure.
He's wearing the grey San Pedro Eco-Tours shirt, sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and the morning light turns his hair nearly white.
His forearms are corded with muscle, his hands broad and capable and unhurried.
There's a quality to his stillness that fills the space—not tense, not waiting, just present.
Occupying the shed the way water occupies a container.
“Cora,” he says, without turning.
“The zipper on the three-millimetre,” I say. “I was going to get to it.”
“I know.” He works the pull once, testing. “I got to it first.”
I step inside. The shed is small enough that stepping inside puts me close to the workbench. Close enough to see the concentration in his profile, the line of his jaw, the way his shoulders move under the shirt. I don't back away.
My heart is doing something it shouldn't. Picking up speed. My lungs feel tight.
“Yesterday,” I say.
“Yesterday,” he agrees.
“The boats. The girl. You didn't have to go back in.”
“She wasn't in danger. Serious danger. But the chop was pulling her wrong and she was fighting it. It would have tired her before she reached the dock.” A pause. “It was the simpler solution.”
“You were already out of the water.”
“So I went back in.”
He went back in because it was the right thing to do, and now he's fixing the wetsuit zipper, and both of those things happened in the same register.
I look at his hands on the vice. The tendons shifting under skin. The careful pressure.
“I've been trying to maintain a professional distance this summer,” I say.
The hands still.
“I'm aware,” he says.
I face him. He's two feet away. Maybe less. The shed feels smaller than twelve by sixteen.
“You left me,” I say. “No note. No explanation. Nothing. Four years.”
He turns to face me now. He's leaning against the workbench, arms at his sides, hands loose. He's watching me with those grey-green eyes, and he's not filling the space with anything at all. Not excuses. Not deflection. Not movement.
He's waiting.
It costs him something to stand here and not move toward me. I can see the effort of it in the set of his shoulders, in the quality of the stillness. In the way his hands stay at his sides when the distance between us is nothing. When closing it would take one step.
“Why,” I say, “would I trust you now?”
Muir is quiet for a moment. Then something shifts in his face. Confusion, maybe. Something that looks almost like hurt.
“Cora.” His voice is careful. “I left you a note.”
The shed goes very still.
The air doesn't move. The dust motes hang suspended in the light. My heart does something strange—a skip, a stutter, a lurch sideways.
“I had to leave fast,” he says. “That morning. I left a note explaining. Everything. Why I had to go, what was happening with my family.” He stops.
His eyes don't leave mine. “I left it through the water channels so no one in the house would find it first. But I thought you'd get it. I thought you understood.”
My heart is doing something strange in my chest. Something that feels like falling.
“What note,” I say.
His face changes. The confusion sharpens into something else. Understanding, maybe. Or the beginning of it. His hands tighten against the workbench edge.
“The one I left in the water,” he says slowly.
“Through the channels you use. I thought it would reach you.
I thought you'd find it and understand why I couldn't stay.” He's watching me now like he's seeing something he didn't expect.
Like the ground has shifted under both of us. “You didn't get it.”
It's not a question.
“I didn't get anything,” I say.
The air between us has changed. Something has cracked open that neither of us was ready for.
“Jesus Christ,” he says quietly. “Cora. You thought I just left. You thought I walked away without a word.”
“You did walk away without a word.”
“No.” His voice is rough now. Raw. “No, I didn't. I explained. I tried. I thought...” He stops.
Starts again. His hands have gone white-knuckled on the workbench edge.
“I thought you got the note and decided you didn't want anything to do with me.
I thought that's why you never answered. Why you never called back.”
My hands have gone cold.
The cold is spreading. Up my arms. Into my chest. My legs feel strange. Unsteady.
Four years. Four years of carrying the weight of his silence, of his abandonment, of the clean cut he made when he walked out of my life. Four years of building walls around that wound.
And there was a note.
There was an explanation.
I never saw it.
The shed tilts. The light shifts. My breath has gone shallow.
“The water channels,” I say, and my voice sounds strange. Distant. Like it's coming from somewhere outside my body. “You left it in the water channels.”
“Yes.” His voice is quiet. Careful. Like he's watching me fracture in real time. “I thought they were safe. I thought only you would understand how to look for it there.”
But the channels are old. They flood in spring. They shift with the seasons. Something that precious, something fragile, would never survive.
The weight of it lands in my chest. Heavy. Crushing. Four years of hurt that didn't need to happen. Four years of silence that was never silence at all.
My hands are shaking.
I'm moving before I've decided to move. Toward the door. Away from him. Away from this conversation that has just rewritten four years of my life. My legs feel like water. My heart is doing something I can't control.
“Cora,” he says.
I don't stop.
I'm out of the shed, past the Snack Hut, my feet carrying me somewhere, anywhere that isn't here with this information I don't know how to hold. The morning air hits my face and I'm still cold. Still shaking. Still falling through space with nothing to catch me.
I go straight to the water.
I strip off my shirt and shorts, leave them in a pile on my personal dock, and dive.
The lake takes me in cold and clean. I shift before I'm three feet under, my legs fusing into my tail, scales rippling pink to purple down my body. The water opens around me like a door I've been trying to find.
I swim hard for the north channel.
The channels are old. They run under the docks and between the properties, carved by water and time and the particular magic of a lake that has always known more than it should.
Some of them flood in spring. Some shift with the seasons.
If Muir left something in the water four years ago, it could be anywhere. It could be gone.
But I have to know.
I surface near the reeds where the north channel meets the marina inlet. Phineas is there within two minutes, his green-scaled head breaking the surface beside me.
“Cora,” he says.
“I need your help.” My voice comes out rough. “Four years ago, someone left messages in the water channels. For me. I need to know if anything survived.”
Phineas tilts his head. His yellow eyes are calm. “What kind of messages?”
“A letter. Maybe more. I don't know.” I push wet hair out of my face. “Can you ask the sprites? The young ones collect things. Strong feelings. If there's anything left—”
“I'll look,” he says.
He disappears under the water without another word.
I spend the next hour searching the channels myself. I check the reeds, the places where debris collects, the quiet pockets where the current slows. My hands are cold. My chest is tight. I find nothing.
When I surface at my own dock, Phineas is waiting.
He's holding something.
A dry bag. Small, sealed, the kind designed to keep things safe underwater for a long time.
“North channel,” he says. “Wedged under the dock pilings. The water kept it.”
My hands shake when I take it.
“Thank you, Phineas,” I say.
He nods once and slips back under the water.
I pull myself up onto the weathered cedar planks. I open the seal.
Inside: a journal.
Hardcover, small, maybe four inches by six. Dark blue cloth, water-stained at the lower corner but intact. The spine is cracked from use. The pages are wavy from old moisture but readable.
The handwriting on the first page is Muir's.
I sit down on the dock. I open the journal and read.
The entries span two years. Our two years. He wrote about the lake, the dives, the way light moved through water at different depths. He wrote about me. She sings in the evenings when she thinks no one is listening. I haven't told her I've heard it. I don't know if I should.
And then, deeper in: My uncle Callum says that every selkie leaves eventually. He says this like it's weather. I want to ask him when he decided to believe it.
The entries get harder near the end.
The family's broke. Worse than broke. They're into people who don't forgive debts. They found my sealskin last month. They're holding it. They want me to run jobs for them. Smuggling, mostly. They say it's temporary. They say once the debt's clear, I'm free.
I told them no. They said they'd burn the skin.
I don't know what to do. If I stay here, they'll use Cora to get to me. If I go back, I become the thing they want me to be. Either way, I'm poison.
She'll be better without me. I keep telling myself that.
The last entry is dated four years ago. The week he left.
I'm leaving the journal here. Too dangerous to bring it back with me. If they find it, they'll know about her. But maybe she'll find it someday. Maybe that's enough.
I close the journal. My throat is tight.
Phineas surfaces again. He reaches into his bag and pulls out a plastic envelope. Old, brittle, the label faded but legible. Cora San Pedro, San Pedro Eco-Tours, North Dock, Harmony Glen.
“Found this in the reeds,” he says. “Same channel. The sprites had it.”
I take it. My hands are steadier now, but only just.
The letter is three pages. His handwriting, compressed and careful.
Cora,
I'm sorry. I have to leave. My family's situation is worse than I told you. They have my sealskin and they're using it to force me into things I won't do near you. If I stay, they'll come after you to get to me. I can't let that happen.
I'm going back home to handle this. I don't know how long it will take. I don't know if I can fix it. But I have to try.
I will call you when it is safe.
I'm sorry.
Muir
I fold the letter. I put it in the journal.
I spent four years angry at him. Four years building walls. Four years being right about the wrong story.
He tried. He left me everything he could. And I never saw it.
“Fuck,” I say.
Phineas slips back into the water without a word.
I pick up my shirt and shorts from where I left them. I walk up to my house, the journal and letter in my hands, and sit down in one of the alpine chairs on the porch, wrapping the Turkish blanket I keep there around my legs.
The lake stretches out in front of me. The sun is warm. The willow at the south end trails its fingers in the water.
I open the journal again. I read it from the beginning.
The sun has moved across the sky when Rex's truck pulls into my driveway.
I don't look up. I'm reading the journal for the third time, the letter folded on my lap. The afternoon has passed in a blur. I haven't thought about tours or schedules or supplies. I haven't thought about work at all.
Rex's footsteps are quiet on the porch steps. He sits down in the chair beside me.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
He's quiet for a moment. Then: “Muir and I held it down today. Tours ran fine. Closing's handled.”
I nod. My throat is tight.
“You didn't think about work today, did you?” he asks.
“No.”
“Good.” His voice is warm. Proud, even. “That's really good, Cora.”
I look at him. His brown eyes are steady.
“You never step away,” he says. “Not once in the years I've known you. This is the first time you've let yourself feel something more important than the schedule.”
I don't know what to say to that.
He stands up. He leans down and kisses my forehead—warm, familial, the kind of gesture that says I love you without needing the words.
“Muir and I are holding it down,” he says. “Easy peasy. Get some rest.”
He walks back to his truck then drives away.
I sit in the alpine chair with the letter in my hands and the lake in front of me. The evening is settling in, the light going golden across the water.
The story is different now.
And I know it.