Chapter 4
Four
LAYLA
The Airbnb was a small rental cottage two blocks from the sound side waterfront.
It was clean and anonymous in the way of places that existed to house strangers.
Predictably, they’d gone with lots of blue, gray, and white mixed with a beach theme.
Lots of cookie-cutter prints of beachscapes and seashells.
A basket of local honey and hot sauce sat on the counter, which was a nice touch.
I unpacked the groceries into the refrigerator, got Koa’s bowls set up in the kitchen corner, and gave him water while I changed clothes.
The braid took longer than the rest of it. I worked it tight against my skull, flat sections folded close, nothing loose enough to grab. Old habit. The kind you developed once and never lost. I tucked the tail under and pinned it, checked it in the bathroom mirror, and moved on.
The knife sheaths were already on, accommodated beneath whatever I was wearing the way they always were.
I swapped the jeans for running tights and rebuckled everything over them, checking the draw on both, before pulling a fleece over the top.
Pepper spray went on the left side of the waistband.
I slung one of my camera bags crossbody, taking only the small-body Canon with a wide lens, more out of reflex than intention.
If something was worth seeing, I wanted to be able to document it.
That instinct was older than the sheaths and had never required a reason.
Koa was already at the door by the time I reached for his lead, his body vibrating with a need to move.
“Okay,” I told him. “Let’s go.”
The sound side beach was a five-minute walk through quiet streets.
Late November meant the village was stripped back to its working bones.
A few restaurants with lights on, the dim glow of the island market’s sign in the opposite direction, a bakery dark for the night.
I noted the layout automatically, the way I always did somewhere new—exits, blind spots, the geography of a place at night versus how it would change in daylight.
The beach access opened between two buildings and deposited us onto sand.
I stopped.
Pamlico Sound moved in the dark, a low, patient lapping of waves that reached deep and unlocked my shoulders a fraction.
All my life, I’d been pulled by the ocean, by water.
I never quite relaxed away from it. Lights from the houses and businesses along the waterfront laid amber strips on the beach that didn’t fully reach the water.
Nobody was out. Not when out equaled the penetrating damp and chill, and warm meals beckoned inside tidy houses.
I’d get to that. But Koa and I both needed to move first.
I stepped onto the beach, automatically registering how different the fine, pale sand felt beneath my feet compared to the dark, rocky expanses of home. For a moment it seemed as if the island would suck me in entirely. My heart skipped a beat before I told myself it was nonsense and kept going.
Koa hit the sand, and his whole body changed.
Nose down, quartering back and forth, tail working, cataloguing the array of scents the beach offered.
He’d been cooped up in the car for three days, and he moved like an animal reclaiming something owed to him.
The scents, sounds, and sights of a new place.
I gave him the lead and let him work.
Even in the dark, I saw the waterfront held buildings where I didn’t remember buildings.
A restaurant with a lit sign I didn’t recognize, a stretch of newer construction further along the shore that hadn’t been there before.
More developed than it used to be, the village pushed further along the waterfront in both directions.
It made sense in the wake of the hurricanes that regularly battered these shores.
I’d studied maps and Google Street View before embarking on this trip.
But seeing the changes on a screen didn’t capture the weight of knowing a place had kept moving while you weren’t looking.
I’d explore the village properly another day. Tonight I just needed to be here. To get through whatever the first night was going to be without anyone watching me do it.
I tipped my head back.
The sky was enormous out here. No mountains to wall it in, no fir canopy, just the full dome of it from horizon to horizon, the stars dense and close in a way they never were at home.
Different sky. Same sky. I’d thought about that on the ferry, and I thought about it again now—how the same stars arranged themselves differently depending on where you stood underneath them, and how that was either comforting or the opposite, depending on the night.
Tonight I hadn’t decided which.
Koa’s head came up, his ears pricking.
Not the casual alerting of a dog tracking a new smell.
His whole body stilled, weight forward, attention fixed down the beach to the north.
I followed his gaze, my hand dropping to my hip, fingers resting against the outside of my fleece over the sheath beneath. A twitch of my wrist, and I’d be armed.
A figure moved south along the waterline, unhurried, hands in his pockets. Still a hundred yards off, but closing. Long stride, loose in the hips, the kind of unhurried economy of movement that came from a body that knew what it was capable of. In my experience, that meant someone worth watching.
He’d clocked us. His trajectory didn’t change, but the quality of his attention did, the slight shift of a man who’d registered something ahead and was deciding what to do with that information. He kept coming. Didn’t slow, didn’t speed up, didn’t angle away.
Koa growled. Low and precise, not a warning so much as a statement of position.
The man stopped ten feet away, maybe twelve. He looked at Koa with the equanimity of someone who’d been growled at before and understood it as communication rather than threat.
“Beautiful dog,” he said.
Dark hair. Several months of dark beard. He didn’t look at me the way men sometimes looked at a woman alone on a beach at night. He just stood there, hands still in his pockets, giving Koa all the space the dog had asked for.
“Thanks,” I said.
He tipped his head back and looked up at the sky the way I’d been doing before Koa had pulled my attention north. “Hell of a night for stars.”
My fingers hadn’t moved from my hip. I kept my weight on the balls of my feet and said nothing.
He stood there looking up for a moment longer. Unhurried. Unbothered. Then he looked back at the beach ahead of him and nodded once in my direction. “Have a good night.”
He walked on with that same loose, unhurried stride, south along the waterline. I watched him cross through those amber strips of light until the dark had taken most of him, and there was just the shape of a man getting smaller, and then nothing.
Koa watched him too. When the man was gone, he looked back at me, waiting to see what I’d do.
I didn’t move for a long time. In the dark, the waves whispered, Hush, hush, in an effort to lull me.
Somewhere down the beach, the man was still walking, or had turned somewhere, or had arrived wherever he was going.
I had no way of knowing, and I made myself stop caring about it the way I made myself stop reading exits in rooms I’d already cleared—deliberately, one breath at a time.
So much of my life had been lived one breath at a time.
He’d stopped when Koa growled. Hadn’t pushed closer, hadn’t tried to make friends with the dog, hadn’t used the dog as a way in, as some men did. He’d given the animal the respect of taking a warning seriously.
I didn’t recognize him. Dark hair, dark beard, the kind of face that would look wholly different in daylight instead of shadow. But I’d been gone a long time, and I shouldn’t expect to recognize anyone. The island had kept moving. So had I.
I stood at the edge of the water until my shoulders came down from around my ears. Until my fingers drifted away from my hip. Until the cold stopped registering as a threat and started feeling like just cold.
Then I called Koa and turned for the lights.