33. Freya
Freya
The takings sat in the drawer uncounted. First rule of the new administration. Some nights you count, and some nights you leave the number alone in the dark to think about what it's done, and you go down to the water instead.
I walked the harbour at low tide with the evening going long and gold.
Past the chippy, closed now, my mother's board wiped clean of ABOUT TIME.
Past the chandlery. The quay stones still held the day's warmth through my shoes.
Lights were coming on round the harbour in ones and twos, and I could name every window.
I could name them in March too. Back then each one had felt like a witness.
Now they were only windows, with people I loved variously behind them, which I suppose is what a town is, once you let it be one.
I'd walked this exact line in March with one bag and a knife roll, reading every window for the cost of coming home.
The windows read back nothing tonight but light.
The workshop door stood open, the stove ticking down, and I didn't go in. I went and sat on the bench in the yard instead. His bench. The wood now mended, I noticed. Of course it had.
Rhys came out after a while, wiping his hands, and sat beside me without a word, and we watched the tide think about turning.
"Good day," he said, eventually, which from Rhys is a civic address.
"Good day," I agreed. "Edith's coming Tuesday."
"Aye. Heard her say." A pause with a whole smile in it somewhere. "You'll be wanting more salt in nothing, then."
"Not a grain."
We sat on. A man came out of the Mermaid's Arms, saw us, and went back in to report. The tide turned. You can't hear it happen. You can only notice, after, that everything has started moving the other way, quietly, all together. Which I suppose was the year I'd had, told in water.
I settled the last of the old questions there, the kind that never belonged in a drawer anyway.
Ten years in the city, and I'd spent the spring wanting them refunded.
Sat on that bench, I found I didn't anymore.
The city taught my hands. It gave me speed, and steel, and two hundred covers of nerve, and everything my gran's book couldn't. It just never once fed me.
Somewhere up the country tonight a nineteen-year-old is crying into a bin at the end of a double, the way I did, being told it's the price.
I'd write to her if I could. Keep the speed, love.
The fear was never part of the knife skills.
They only ever sold them to you as a set.
I could keep the hands and leave the hunger. Nobody had told me that was allowed.
"They're good years now," I said, out loud, to the tide. "I've decided. They were the prep. This is the service."
"Aye," said Rhys, who has never in his life needed a thing explained twice.
We went up to the cottage as the light went.
Miles had chops on. Hudson was at the table mending the strap of my knife roll, unasked, uninvited, unstoppable, the new mark riding above his collar as he bent to the work.
The kitchen smelled of all four of us now.
It had for a week. I stopped in the doorway anyway, the way you stop at a view.
The cottage had held the three of them for twenty years and it fits them like an old jumper.
Boots by the door in a line Hudson maintains and denies maintaining.
Miles's stall paperwork on the dresser under a fossil he swears is lucky.
The lifeboat photographs going up the stairs, four generations of them, all in the same weather.
I used to think a room like this would feel like a museum of everything I'd missed.
But it felt like a kitchen with my supper in it.
The fourth chair stood by the stove where it has always stood. Nobody looked at it. Nobody has ever once looked at it, in twenty years of keeping it, which is the most Violet Bay fact I know.
I sat in it.
Hudson put the fourth mug down in front of me without ceremony.
It was old, that mug. Older than the others by decades, the glaze crazed like a chart of the coast, and it had been washed regularly, all these years, for nobody.
I drank my tea out of twenty years of being expected.
There ought to be a stronger word than welcome.
The kettle went on. Four mugs came down.
Miles turned a chop and said something scandalous about the vicar's cabbages.
Hudson threaded the strap. Rhys leaned on the dresser with his tea, watching the room the way he minds a tide, and no one remarked on the chair at all.
The seat was worn smooth. Twenty years of being kept ready does that, even to oak. Especially to oak.
Here is what I would tell the woman on the bus, the one with the bag and the knife roll and the shoulder braced against every door in the world.
You were wrong about the arithmetic, love, but not the way you think.
You thought needing people was a debt you'd never climb out of.
It isn't a debt. It's the harbour. The boats that need it aren't failing at being boats.
They're the ones that come home, and go out whole in the morning, and come home again.
For years. For lifetimes. For as long as the water holds them and someone keeps the light.
I needed three men and a town and my mother and my grandmother's recipe book. I need them tomorrow and every day after, the way the Maris needs the tide.
I have never in my life been stronger.
Hudson finished the strap and set my roll on the table, squared to the edge, the way he leaves things. Miles put a chop in front of me I hadn't asked for. The stove clicked. Up the hill my café sat in the dark with the sign over the pass, came true, staying up.
"Budge the chair in, love," said Miles. "Supper."
So I budged it in. And that was all, and that was everything, and the evening carried on the way evenings do now, which is to say, at home.