Chapter Eight #10
I have to make a decision.
Back in the house, I gather a loaf of freshly baked bread, a jar of blueberries I picked yesterday, and a canteen of rainwater. I hope I won’t need any of it. I hope I’ll see land within an hour of leaving the island. I hope this isn’t a mistake.
Tomorrow, just after sunrise, I plan to leave.
Clay knows it, senses it, sees me preparing things, and he doesn’t come into the house for dinner.
He stays out at the barn, working even after the sun has set.
I leave him a plate of boiled potatoes with thyme and rosemary, tidy up the kitchen, then start for the stairs when I hear the front door open.
He stands in the doorway, eyes sloped down, hands in the pockets of his canvas pants. Candlelight from the three sticks I left burning on the table dance across his face—making him look golden and not quite real. “Ye leaving tomorrow?” he asks, voice measured, even—too even.
I touch the banister, my eyes hesitant to meet his. “I can’t stay here forever.”
“Ye’ll die out there.”
I understand why he says this, but he won’t change my mind, so I say simply, “I’m taking water and some food. I hope that’s okay.”
His jaw constricts, his shoulders tense down like he’s holding back a tide of frustration and fear. “Ye canna go.”
“You never wanted me here,” I point out, narrowing my eyes at him. “I thought you’d be relieved to be rid of me. To get your home back. Your life.”
The house creaks softly, always shifting, always alive. “Not like this.”
I’m surprised by the bluntness of his words. “I’ve already been here too long… too many days have passed.”
“Yer worried about yer life back on the mainland?”
“Yes,” I answer, my tone short—because he already knows this, knows I can’t stay. “I left everything I know behind—they all probably think I’m dead. I have to go back.”
“To James?”
My mouth falls open, stunned he would even ask. “Yeah, I—” I shake my head, the question peeling me open. Unmooring me. But I don’t owe him an explanation.
“Yer not going back to him—” he states, as if he knows more about my intentions than I do. “Yer going back to a memory of him. Not who he really is. Not what ye really want.”
I can’t believe he’s saying this, can’t believe the words leaving his mouth—his accent dulled, muted, each word sharpened somehow.
But more than his words, I can’t believe the look in his eyes—the hurt shivering through them, the worry…
the panic. Like he knows he only has a few moments left to say everything he’s been holding in.
Before it’s too late. Before I slip away.
“You don’t know what I want,” I snap.
“Maybe not.” He nods. “But I know what I want.”
I squint at him, releasing my hold on the banister. “What do you want?”
We stare at each other. And it feels like the air is breaking between us. Like we are destroying it with every breath. And I realize I don’t want to hear his answer, I don’t want to know. Because I’m leaving, and his words might only make it harder.
Stay, stay, stay, my heart hisses again.
“I have to go back, Clay,” I tell him. “It’s not fair to everyone else… for me to stay, to wait any longer.”
“Fair—” Clay scoffs, tilting his head down. “Life is rarely fair. It’ll destroy ye if given the chance. So I suggest ye spend less time worrying over what’s fair for everyone else, for James, an’ more time deciding what’s fair for you.”
I don’t have any right to compare fairness with Clay, a man who lost everything the night his wife died. But I look down at my hand, at the ring, and it feels like someone else’s engagement band, someone else’s life. “It’s where I belong,” I say. Words that feel cut into my flesh.
“How do ye know?”
My eyes flinch up. “What?”
“How does one know where they belong? How can ye be so sure ye belong back there”—he gestures to the sea, to some unnamed continent in the distance—“and not—”
“And not here?” I ask, bristling.
He stares back at me but doesn’t reply.
“What do you mean?” I press.
But he turns in the doorway, walks back outside into the clear night, boots thudding down the porch steps.
I go after him, irritated, angry. Needing answers now. Needing him to tell me the truth, tell me all the things he’s been thinking these last few months but was too afraid to say aloud. Tell me what he was thinking when his hand touched my face on the front porch. “Are you listening to me?” I call.
He stops on the path, swiveling back to face me. “Aye,” he answers. “I hear every word ye say.” And there is something in his face I can’t decipher. An ache, a need. Something I’ve seen flashes of before.
“Then why do you treat me like this, like you couldn’t care less about me, until a boat washes up on shore and now you tell me it’s too dangerous to go? Why do you walk away, why do you cringe sometimes when we get too close, why are you looking at me now, like—?”
“Because I don’t trust myself around you,” he says roughly, shoulders squared. “Because at night, when I think of ye asleep in my bed, I…” He shakes his head, unable to finish the thought.
My heart stops pumping blood. I blink, shifting my gaze to the moon as it inches above the roof of the barn, and I swear time sputters, falls apart in my hands.
“Ye came to this island once before,” he goes on, looking up at me. “You are the only person to ever step foot here after all my time at sea. An’ now, months ago, ye found yourself here again.”
My head thrums. I feel drunk.
“Out here, the sea decides what comes and goes—” His voice finds a cadence that reminds me of the tide outside Nana’s house when I was a kid, the whoosh and rush of the sea at night when I slept.
It soothed me. And something about his voice settles me now.
“It decides who lives and dies, it disnae make mistakes, and for reasons neither of us can understand, it brought ye back here… twice. An’ if ye leave again, how many more times will ye come back?
Will ye return again? Find yerself thinking about this place, longing for it, like a sailor’s song in yer bones ye can’t be rid of?
But the next time… if ye do find yer way back, you will be someone else…
older. An’ I will have stayed the same. Time will have betrayed what we are right now.
” His eyes feel like two sharp ends of a blade, his mouth a perfect symmetry, each word held carefully on the curve of his lips.
“This is all there is… right now.” He lifts his chin, his tongue scraping against the edge of his teeth.
“If ye go, if ye leave—” He points to the boat waiting on the shore, his words bleeding into my flesh, spoken hoarsely, like they have pained him for too long, burned holes in his throat, and now he’s finally letting them out.
“If ye leave, there’s no coming back to how things are right now. This time will be long past.”
I’m shaking and my heart is contracting like a balloon losing all its air. The meaning between his words sinks in too deep, and I feel myself doubting everything. Every choice, every chance… this moment I have to finally leave. To go home.
“Yer not a stranger in this house,” he adds, softer now.
“This is yer home, for as long as ye want.” His eyes flash to the sea, then back.
“You could stay,” he suggests with a tilt of his upper lip, three words that could change everything.
“Stay on the island, be sure of what ye want before ye leave, before you make a mistake ye can’t take back. ”
“A mistake…” I echo so softly I doubt he’s heard.
His face relaxes, his boots shift in the dirt. “If ye want to go, I winnae stop ye. But I’m asking ye to stay. I want you to…” His voice falters.
I think of the nights I lay awake imagining what it would feel like to sleep beside Clay, the sound of his breathing, the warmth of his skin, his hands reaching for me across the mattress.
Thoughts I tried to shove away. But now I know, he was awake too, unable to sleep.
Treacherous thoughts skipping through his mind.
We were only a floor away, a few steps, but neither of us brave enough to see.
“I don’t trust myself,” I admit, voice trembling.
His eyes tip up slightly. “Why?”
“Because of you, because of this place. All these years, I thought I made you up, that it was all in my head. I’ve spent my whole life running from this island, but also, somehow, running toward it, desperate to see it again, just one more time.
But now that I’m here…” My legs sway beneath me, like the ground is crumbling—a subtle tectonic shift. “I don’t know what to do.”
“It disnae need to be so hard.” He looks at me like he can see all my truths and lies, all my sleepless nights, like he forgives me for everything I haven’t yet done. Like he will always forgive me. No matter what happens next. “Just tell me what ye want.”
What I want? As if it were that simple. As if this were a fairy tale and the heroine always gets her happily ever after. As if the real world weren’t waiting for me beyond the pages of the book. I swallow, knowing that it’s time I woke up.
He looks to his feet when I don’t answer, rubbing a hand across his neck, before his eyes find me again. “What’ll ye do when ye get back, Ellie?” he asks. “Pretend ye were never here? Spend the rest of yer life trying to convince yerself this place doesnae exist?”