Chapter 5
Grace sat curled up in the corner of the sofa, her fingers poised over the keyboard of her laptop. Despite its remoteness, the island had surprisingly good Wi-Fi. But now what to search…?
Jacob was tucked up in bed, a fire was blazing cozily in the hearth, the curtains drawn against the dark night and even darker swathe of ocean.
Grace had opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a large glass to sip slowly throughout the evening.
It was the perfect quiet night in… so why did she feel so restless?
Ned the ferryman had been right, she reflected.
The quietness, the isolation and emptiness of this place, did something to a body.
Just two days into her stay on Lighthouse Cove Island, and she was feeling slightly stir crazy and even a little lonely, which was weird, because this was so what she wanted.
Everything about this evening was perfect.
And yet…
Grace listened to the wind whistle outside, a mournful sound, making the windowpanes rattle, and she shivered even though the room was warm.
It was strange, to feel so alone, so removed from civilization and society, miles from anything, and only a handful of people within any kind of reasonable distance at all.
Yesterday, during their impromptu coffee, she’d asked Bab about the other islanders.
“Well, there aren’t many of us, not anymore,” Bab had replied frankly.
“Just me and my daughter Becca and her son Lewis, and Ned, of course, and Isaiah. And Jethro, but a sourer old salt you’ll never meet.
He saved up all his money to retire to Florida, went all the way down there and decided he hated it, so he came back up here and he’s been grumpy ever since, wondering what the hell he saved his money for.
” She’d chuckled, seeming amused by this notion.
“That’s it?” Grace had asked, surprised. “I guess I shouldn’t trust Wikipedia, then. It said the population was twelve.”
“Well, it was twelve,” Bab had replied, pouring them both more coffee even though Grace had barely touched her cup.
Milky instant coffee with three spoonfuls of sugar was not, she’d found, her cup of tea, but she was making a valiant effort.
“The Edwardses moved out two years ago,” Bab had continued.
“They were a young family from the Maritimes. Wanted to make something of it here, but in the end the wife, Marie, couldn’t stand the isolation.
They have four little ones, so with them and the rest of us it would have been twelve, back then.
” She’d given a brisk nod, as if that were the last word on the matter, and once again Grace had had the strange sensation that there was something significant Bab wasn’t saying…
just like she’d had with Isaiah and Ned.
Now she glanced down at the search bar waiting for her words.
The Lawrences? Grayhaven? Lighthouse Cove Island?
She could probably type any of those and learn more about the seemingly mysterious family no one wanted to talk about, but she was reluctant to do so because she, of all people, knew how the internet lied.
How it hurled accusations and abuse you couldn’t fight, an enemy that was everywhere, all the time, aiming its invisible arrows at your most vulnerable parts…
and they hit a bullseye every damned time.
Ever since everything had blown up with Brad she’d tried to go online as little as possible, which was part of the reason why she’d come here so unprepared.
She hadn’t wanted to risk any kind of Google search.
Going online to look for a job had been hard enough, even when she’d kept to the most basic job sites.
And so she shouldn’t search now, on principle. Stalking someone online was, Grace firmly believed, both an invasion of privacy and a thoroughly unreliable source of information. There was no point to it at all.
With a sigh she closed the lid of her laptop and reached for her wine.
That morning, she and Jacob had walked down to the nature reserve office, which was no more than a one-room cabin of weathered shingle.
What she’d found had been pretty dispiriting—dust and grime over everything, mildew on the chair cushions, and a filing cabinet of folders from twenty years ago, with nothing more recent.
The computer, which looked like it belonged in a time capsule, hadn’t even turned on when she’d plugged it in.
The phone hadn’t worked, either. The calendar on the wall, of Maine’s seabirds, was from 2002.
Clearly the last few wardens had never even touched the place, but then they hadn’t stayed long.
Grace had spent a few hours doing her best to clean up a little; even if she intended to work from home, it felt like the right thing to do and Jacob had helped happily enough.
Afterwards they’d walked down to the point where the lighthouse that gave the island its name was perched, a beacon of weathered white stone that had definitely seen better days.
The door was boarded up, the glass of the lantern room on its top broken or missing completely.
A “Keep Out” sign had been nailed to a post near the entrance.
Taking in all these discouraging signs, Grace had bypassed the lighthouse completely and headed for the cove beneath it, a crescent of damp sand where she and Jacob had perched on a twisted piece of driftwood and had a picnic of jam sandwiches and clementines, while seagulls had circled above, cawing loudly, and the wind had whipped Grace’s hair from her neat braid around her face, so she’d got jam stuck in it.
Jacob, shivering in the cold, had looked fairly miserable, and so they’d headed back without exploring any more of the island.
All in all, it hadn’t been the most successful outing, but, she’d told herself, it was early days.
Tomorrow she’d look through those old files, and she and Jacob would explore the island a little more.
The salt marshes around the lighthouse deepened into a forest that ringed the cliffs, with Grayhaven perched on top like some kind of menacing stone vulture.
Grace hadn’t yet seen what was on the other side.
From the vantage point of the lighthouse, she’d been able to see the house more clearly, and it really did look like a castle.
An ugly castle, made of stone so dark it almost looked black, despite its name suggesting otherwise, and squat towers that looked like archers should be peeking through their crenellations, raining their arrows down on the hapless.
The whole place had an ominous, empty feel to it, and she realized she wouldn’t blame the Lawrences for choosing not to live there. Who would?
Below the house, in a break from the woodland, she’d seen the roofs of some other buildings, but it had been impossible to tell what they were from such a distance. Still, she was kind of curious about it all, and she definitely felt the island needed some further exploration.
Sipping her wine, Grace listened to the wind’s lonely howl and the waves crashing on the shore.
They were both restless sounds, ones that stirred something up inside her, a maelstrom of all the old emotions she’d been battling since she’d told Brad she wanted a divorce—grief, guilt, fear, anxiety.
Had she done the right thing in coming here?
And when these six months were over, what could her life possibly look like?
She certainly hoped the speculation and gossip would have died down by then, but would she be ready for whatever was next, when right now she couldn’t even imagine what it was?
And what about her son? Jacob was a shadow of the boy he’d once been, a happy if quiet kindergartener who had loved science, stamp collecting, and chess.
He’d been a student at one of Manhattan’s best private schools, but Grace had pulled him out to come here.
She knew Jacob was ahead in all his subjects, and missing the last few months of kindergarten wouldn’t matter much and might be a relief, especially considering how frustrated his teachers had been by his sudden muteness.
And yet… was coming to this forsaken place really the way to heal him? Maybe she should have engaged psychologists, therapists, professionals. She’d tried once, right after the divorce, but Jacob had shut down even more. She’d told herself he just needed time, but now all Grace felt was doubt.
How could you do the right thing when you didn’t even know what it was?
And since she had no one to talk to—her old friends had faded away after twelve years of a suffocating marriage, and her mother still thought she’d made a mistake in leaving Brad—Grace only had the endless loop of what-ifs in her mind.
They felt particularly loud in the quiet of this house at the edge of the world.
“Enough.” Her voice sounded too loud in the stillness of the room.
She needed to stop thinking like this, falling into the worn grooves of the old patterns of her life, her mind.
She uncurled her legs from beneath her and went to throw one last log on the fire before finishing her wine.
Tomorrow was a new day. This was their new life.
There was absolutely no point in second-guessing herself or her choices.
This would be the right decision for her son because she would make it so.
With that thought steeling her heart, Grace switched off the lights and headed for bed.
The sky was a pale blue, ruffled with cottony white clouds, as Grace walked with Jacob along the beach the next afternoon.
The salty breeze had blown away her doubts, at least for now, and after flipping through some of the old files in the nature reserve’s office and not learning all that much, she and Jacob had set out for the other side of the island, explorers in a new and untested land.