Chapter Eight #4
Grabbing the mason jar of honey from the shelf, I add a spoonful to my steaming mug—remembering the way the honeycomb peeled away beneath the knife, remembering the warmth of Clay’s palm as I pushed the needle through his flesh.
I replace the lid on the jar, then walk to the sink in my bare feet, singing a few notes aloud.
“You look like a movie / You sound like a song. Ohhh…” I forget the words, mumble something, then continue.
“… this reminds me / Of when we were young.”
I rinse out the tea strainer and set it to dry on a kitchen rag, humming the lines to myself… when I hear him clear his throat.
I whip around and find Clay standing at the back door, hands holding a pair of leather gloves. The cut beside his thumb has turned smooth and pink, healing well. His eyes are watery in the cool air, and he smiles a little. “It’s a nice tune, what’s it called?”
Heat flushes my cheeks. “I can’t remember, actually.”
“It’s a sad song?”
I lift a shoulder. “Maybe a little. Adele has a history of suffering a broken heart.”
“A-dele?”
“The woman who sings it… she’s very popular, in my time.”
“I like when ye sing it.” His eyes tip to his feet, then back up—the sun across his face—then he reaches into his canvas coat pocket, pulls something out, and extends his arm.
The thing in his hand is small—white and smooth—a tiny shell, curved in on itself like a mouth pinched closed. It’s a cowrie shell; I remember them from my childhood.
“Found it on the shore, reminded me of the one ye wear—” He swallows, relaxes his shoulders.
I step forward and touch the perfect, rounded surface, noticing a tiny hole at the opening of the shell.
“Made a small hole,” he explains. “For yer necklace.” His eyes find my throat, my chest, where the chain drapes against my skin.
I lift the shell from his palm, startled by the kindness of this small gesture—the time he took to puncture a hole through the fragile surface of the shell.
“Ye dinnae have to wear it, if ye don’t want.”
“I do,” I answer quickly. “I want to wear it. It’s beautiful.” And it is, seeing it up close, the perfect curve and slope of it. Not a single flaw. Not damaged by the waves or rocks of the shoreline. I wonder how long he spent, searching, until he found this one. “Thank you,” I tell him.
He nods, gripping the leather gloves between his hands, like he’s unsure what to say next. There’s a hint of shyness flicking across his blue eyes. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll leave ye to it.”
He lowers his head, clomping down the back steps and out toward the garden.
I close my fingers around the shell. I let the sway of my heart press softly against my ribs. I allow the quietness of such a small gesture crack me open just a little. Unlocking a door inside me. Comforted by what it means—but unsettled by what it might.
I weave myself into this unforeseen life.
His life.
Twice I see him walk out to the steep cliff edge of the island, where the gravestone marks a grassy plot just beyond the birches.
He stands there for a time, shoulders toward the wind, his voice carried out into the sea, and I wonder what words he speaks to his wife and the twins who never took their first breaths.
What sadness he shares only with them. Does he speak of me, a strange woman wandering through his house?
A woman he must suffer until we run aground again, until I find an escape?
I imagine the night he pushed a shovel into that ground, splitting it open, laying his sorrow down inside. Maybe the land couldn’t take it. The terrain fractured, tore away from the mainland. Sent the island out into the sea. Some grief is too deep, even for the soil to hold.
I mark the days in my mind.
Twenty-nine. Thirty-three. Forty.
I’ve been on the island for over a month.
I watch each sunrise, the golden crest rising over the house at a different place each morning.
Adrift at sea, there is no rhyme or reason to east and west—we are at the mercy of the tide.
Some mornings the sun winks through the bedroom window, other days it rises into the kitchen, slanting across the table where I drink my tea.
The leeward side of the island—where the wind is calmest—is always changing.
Erratic and unpredictable. It’s an odd thing to feel directionless, to lose one’s bearings, to not know my location in the world.
But to be truly… lost. It’s something most will never experience.
Alice down the rabbit hole. With no way to wake up.
And there is the other concern of time, the one that itches at me, the one I try not to think about.
How much of it has passed back home? Months now, edging into years?
Every hour here, equal to a day on the mainland?
Or longer? How many search teams have scanned the Faroe coastline?
How many ships have been sent out, looking for a woman who swam toward an imaginary piece of land?
Perhaps they suspected Helen of something nefarious, questioned her for hours, accusing her of pushing me into the ocean, killing me off for a good ending to her podcast?
No, that wouldn’t make sense. If only she’d had a camera instead of audio gear.
If only she’d been filming the moment I swam out toward the island.
Instead, there is only her verbal account of what she saw that rainy afternoon, microphone held to her lips as she shouted for me to come back. But what does that prove?
Maybe they didn’t search for me for very long.
Instead, they decided quickly that I had surely drowned. Because how do you search for a fictional island, how do you convince others that it’s real enough to look for? I will be filed away along with all the other conspiracy theories. Ellie Mills, another unanswered mystery.
I push the thought away, because I need to believe I’ll find a way back, no matter how much time has passed. I hold on to this because it’s all I have.
Day fifty-two. Maybe fifty-three, I’m starting to lose count.
Clay and I find a rhythm in our shared existence. An ease to our daily life.
I crave the nights when we sit together in the kitchen, talking like old friends.
He asks about the world I left behind, and I tell him about satellites and smartphones, podcasts and social media.
The Cold War has ended, but many others have begun.
I tell him about civil rights and AI and how no one talks to strangers anymore unless it happens online.
He doesn’t respond, just frowns or shakes his head—in confusion or disbelief.
And I wonder if it’s better to not know how everything has changed—better to remember the world how it used to be.
How it is here, on the island. Uncomplicated.
Other nights, we sit silent on the front porch, sipping tea with honey, and I like the quiet between us. No need to muddy the minutes with words.
Sometimes he looks at me, really looks, and I wonder what thoughts churn inside him. Sometimes I can’t pull my eyes from his. Like I’m waiting for the song to begin, the riddle to be unraveled—waiting for the feeling to pass. For his eyes to turn a different shade of blue.
Waiting. For so many things.
The days feel like weeks, months like years.
It’s early evening—a breeze curling up from the sea, sailing through the open windows, smelling of the basil growing beside the back door—when Clay walks into the kitchen holding a barber’s blade.
His eyes are soft, flickering. I see the question he doesn’t know how to ask, jaw shifting side to side as if he’s working over a length of seagrass.
“I’ll warm some water,” I say in response.
Outside, Clay drags a wood chair to the edge of the porch, then sits facing the sea.
I gather a cloth, a bowl of steaming water, and a bar of sheep’s milk soap that Clay made himself but hasn’t yet taught me how—there are limits to what I want to know.
If I’m not staying, if soon I’ll be departing, then there’s no use knowing everything.
No point tethering myself too tightly to this place.
I stare at Clay from the shadow of the doorway—the profile of his bearded face like some sculpture or oil painting, a man who belongs in stories, whose life out at sea is written into the lines of his silhouette—where shadow and sunlight turn him into something immortal. And ageless.
He is a man who stirs up faraway thoughts that shouldn’t belong to me.
I touch the engagement ring on my finger, absently, before striding out onto the porch.
With the bowl of water resting on the railing, I hold the blade between my fingers, scraping the edge with my thumb to check the sharpness. “Have ye done this before?” he asks, sapphire eyes flicking up at me.
“Once.” Months ago, early one spring morning, James and I had showered together, made love beneath the spray of cool water, and then he’d asked me to shave the stubble along his jawline.
I felt so connected to him that day, that I doubted all my doubt.
I wondered why I was always so hesitant with him.
Why I always pushed him away. But the enchantment was broken by the time he left my house and walked to the café.
All the questions came roaring back in, and I had a terrifying sense that I was living someone else’s life.
That somewhere I had taken a wrong turn onto a dirt road, and now it was dark, and I didn’t know my way back.
Now, I run my hands along Clay’s jawline, his chin, softening his skin with the bar of soap.
It feels odd, being this close to him, touching him in this way.
I hadn’t realized how blond his beard was—a dark, sandy color threaded with a few strands of red—while the hair on his head is a light chestnut, streaked by the sun.
“Did you inherit your father’s hair or your mother’s?” I ask, trying to ease the tension in my chest, the restless patter of my heartbeat.