Chapter Seventeen
We are not alone.
Clay makes his way across the rocky inlet connecting the island to the shore, a handgun hidden at his waist, limping slightly.
I watch from the grassy slope. The rifle at my side.
The dog gallops to greet Clay first, tail swishing, head nudging into his palm.
The boy waves at Clay, smiling—friendly.
He can’t be more than eight or nine. And when they meet, the young boy—reddish-brown hair cut short, a good two feet shorter than Clay—holds out his hand, a formal greeting.
They talk for several minutes, then the boy gestures to the trees.
Clay turns his head back to the island, to me, but he doesn’t wave.
Maybe he doesn’t want the boy to know I am here, that there is a woman waiting on the island. He remembers what happened last time.
He turns and follows the boy into the shadowed tree line.
I sit at the edge of the island, my heart racing, watching the trees, but as time passes, my body relaxes and I sink into the grass.
I finally bite into the peach, greedily, the juice dripping down my fingers.
And when I’ve sucked the pit clean, my stomach immediately wants more.
One wasn’t enough. I pull dandelions from the soil, twirling them around my fingers before sticking them in my mouth.
I never knew dandelions were edible until Clay showed me.
I never knew life could feel so perilous, so close to the knife’s edge, until I found myself on the island.
Tiptoeing toward the edge of death, I’ve never felt so alive.
It’s nearly an hour before Clay appears from the trees, something tucked under his arm. Slowly, he makes his way across the inlet, then climbs up the shore. I want to run to him, but I don’t have the strength.
When he reaches me, he holds out the thing he had been carrying.
“Bread,” he says, exhaustion in his eyes, relief. I bring the bread to my nose, breathing it in—sweet and dense with the scent of grain. “There’s people, Ellie. A community, up in the trees.” His eyes flash back to the shore.
“How many?”
“Couldnae tell. A hundred maybe.”
My head whirs, wanting to feel hope, but it’s fear that finds me first. “Is it safe?”
He lifts a shoulder. “Too soon to be sure. I talked to a man at the edge of their village. He seemed relieved to see me, said it’s been years since anyone new came to their shores.”
“What do we do now?”
“He wanted to know if we had anything to trade. I said we didnae have much.” He lets out a long breath, looks weak. “But he invited us to stay.”
Stay. A word that’s never had much meaning for us.
“Maybe we can trade for seeds, replant our garden, begin again,” he suggests.
I step closer to him, leaning into his chest, following his gaze to the shore. “Did they say where we are? Does this place have a name?”
He folds an arm around me. “Used to be part of the southern U.S. coast. The old name is lost to them now. But they call it St. Helena Harbor.”
We eat peaches and sliced bread for dinner.
From the porch, we can see the faraway hint of firelight deep into the trees.
We landed against the shore of this place when we needed it most, as if the sea knew we were near death.
It thrust us into the arms of this island that was once part of a much larger continent.
Anchored against a shoreline, time slows, as if it’s settled back into place.
The hours pass easily.
Days like air, sifting through an open window.
We are cautious at first—wary of these people who have managed to survive in a world that has been shredded and torn apart.
There are seventy-three members of their community, living simple lives on an abandoned golf course—the greens now wild and overgrown.
But they are welcoming, generous and curious, asking questions about our life at sea.
Their speech is strange, slightly blunt.
As if their language has been worn down by necessity.
“Tide pull you wrong?” one man asked when we first met the community, eyes scanning our threadbare clothes, our thin frames, all the hardship evident in our faces.
“Rain find you last eve?” a woman wanted to know, edging closer to us—which I took to mean she wanted to know if it rained the night before we arrived.
And from an older man whose face was like cracked bark: “You find folk out there? Or just ghosts floatin’ by? ”
They speak like people who’ve shed the luxury of small talk. Every word must earn its place.
But they are not castaways scraping out a living from what’s left behind.
They have no longing for a time before, no sense of what might be missing.
They do not measure their lives against what was.
They are a gathering of people whose ancestors surely came from the farthest seas.
Their clothing hand-stitched from wool, flax, or sun-bleached cotton.
Hues of sand and stone. Palettes from the land itself.
Skin in every shade—warm amber, deep earth, soft brown, golden tan.
Hair twisted or sheared or left to tumble in the wind.
A people bound not by origin or nation, but—as Clay would say—by the quiet kinship of resilience.
We trade what we can: two coffee cups, a wooden chair we took from the catamaran, a handful of books.
It’s the books that excite them the most. One woman clutches a copy of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a classic children’s novel that I discovered we had two copies of.
Later, I overhear her referring to it as The Book of Green.
At night, we return to the island, lying in bed, facing each other, our bellies full, a safety in our chests we haven’t known in a long time. “I know what yer thinking,” he says, his eyes lidded and watery in the moonlight through the window.
“What’s that?”
“I know my wife wants to make this place her home.”
I coil my toes around his. I drape my leg over his calf, I slide myself closer.
Flesh to flesh. He smells like the sea, always.
I remember a time when I craved him, but I never thought I’d feel his hands on me like they are right now.
I feel desperate for him most days, desperate to pull him inside me and lay kisses along his collarbone, desperate to defy time.
To hold this life in the palm of my hand so I can make each minute last.
“Maybe we should stop drifting,” I say.
He runs his thumb across my eyebrow, down to the tip of my nose, then pauses, staring at me. Like he can see the words inside me, see the secret I’m keeping.
“Ye never were any good at lying to me.” His voice is calm, waxen and unhurried. “There’s something ye aren’t saying.”
I let my lips edge into a smile—he can always see the truth in my eyes, in the way I breathe, every exhale giving me away.
I find his hand, bringing it to my stomach, pressing his palm flat. “I don’t know for sure, not yet, but I think so.”
His eyes fall to my abdomen, light flickering behind them, before they go dark.
“If I am, it won’t be like before,” I assure him. “What happened to Alice won’t happen to me.”
He swallows, shakes his head. “I canna lose ye.”
“You won’t.”
His hand lifts to my face, and I kiss his palm.
I had been so careful for so long, counting my cycle, noting the days so life wouldn’t form inside me. But after the Arctic, I lost track of time. It was about survival. I didn’t think it was possible, didn’t think my body was strong enough for cells to divide. For life to begin.
But I was wrong. And it found a way.
“There are women here who’ve delivered babies before, and they will make sure I’m safe.”
He folds his fingers around my waist, pulling me flush against him, so every part of me touches every part of him. So he can ease inside me.
“Maybe it’s time we… stay,” I say.
He lays his mouth against my lips. “I’d give ye anything ye asked for.”
In the morning, he begins hauling rocks up from the beach, laying them out across the inlet.
He works through the day, sweating in the afternoon heat, the sun against his back.
I walk up to the community, working with the women as they grind oats into flour under the shade of oak trees, then harvest honey from the cluster of hives up in the east meadow.
They tell stories about the old world, when I ask—a time of towers and metal birds, lights that burned untended through the night.
But mostly, they talk about the shifting seasons, of an early frost that took last spring’s cherries, of the thick-bodied fish that return each year with the warmer tides, and of the boy who lost his first tooth and the girl who won’t stop asking about the patterns of the stars.
They tell me about mending nets and foraging for mushrooms after it rains.
About salting cod to last the winter, and about an ache in the bones that tells them when the weather is about to turn.
Their lives are stitched together by the earth and the sea, by hunger and abundance.
I can see the resilience in them. A kind of unshakable hope that Clay and I have known all too well.
When I return home with a basket filled with pears, we sit on the porch and dream of our own future.
“Solasta,” Clay mutters, nodding at the sunset, the sky blush, a rosebud pink—like it’s embarrassed of its own beauty. I remember the first time I heard him use this word, when he was still a stranger to me. When I desperately wanted off the island.
Now, there’s nowhere else I want to be.
From the porch, I see the rocks he’s stacked from our island onto the jetty, connecting the two strips of land.
He’s not sure if it’s enough, if it’ll hold, but one of the men from the community told Clay about a length of heavy chain—an abandoned anchor chain from a ship—that sits coiled farther down the beach.
Rusted and forgotten. He offered to help Clay drag it up the beach, to secure the island to shore.
We are making this place our home. Mooring ourselves here so we won’t be pulled out to sea.
Clay touches my hand in my lap, both of us staring out at the Atlantic, watching the sun disappear into the wide, endless ocean.
“When ye swam to the island that day—” he says, squeezing my hand.
“I thought ye were a trick of the sea, or I’d finally gone mad.
But in the morning, ye were still there, asleep in my bed, walking barefoot through the house, yer skin like milk.
” He strokes his thumb across my palm. “You were real. An’ I could watch ye every day for the rest of my life—” He smiles a little, remembering.
“Ye changed me, Ellie. I never deserved you. But ye found me all the same.”
I place my hand over his heart, feeling each thud against the wall of his chest. We all crave something. A thing we can’t say aloud. A life unspoken, a life pushed aside and forgotten. Few of us go after it, recklessly, willing to burn the old life to the ground.
I did just that. Not because I was brave, but because I was afraid of who I was becoming. Who I’d be if I didn’t.
My life used to feel unfinished. A story without an end. But maybe this is the ending I was waiting for, with a man I can’t live without. I never stopped believing in the island. Even when I pretended I didn’t, even when I told myself I had to let it all go.
I turn my eyes back to the horizon, to the last of the daylight. And in that final, fragile instant… it happens. A flash of green sparks outward from the place where the sun touches the sea—irradiant and lucent. Before it vanishes into the dark.
The fabled green flash.
“Did you see it?”
Clay nods, contentment in his eyes. “Aye.”
I don’t know why this house and this land broke away from the mainland all those years ago. I don’t know why Clay was swept out to sea, and I don’t know why I was drawn here as a young girl, why this island has called to me my whole life. I don’t know why time moves strangely against its shores.
Maybe Clay’s broken heart severed time, cracked it like an egg. Maybe a man’s heart is capable of powerful things.
Maybe mine is capable of even more.
“I’m sorry you’ll never see your homeland of Scotland again,” I say softly, breathing in the evening air. Now that we are anchored, we will never drift east—toward the land where he was born.
He slides a hand along my thigh, his breathing shallow, but also, somehow, weightless, as if a calm has descended over him.
His fingers brush lightly across my hip until his palm comes to rest against my abdomen—where particles of life gather and grow inside.
A life made from the past, from the hours I spent tangled in his arms. From all the nights his touch broke me open, making new symbols of my flesh.
I never imagined my life this way. Raw and beautiful. I count the seconds to make them last. I count the days and months and years, because it’s all any of us have.
Time.
Measured and weighed, it amounts to a whole life.
His eyes lift, pouring through me like mercury, filling me up, remaking me. He touches my cheek. Starlight pricks awake overhead, a gentle offshore breeze stirring the soft hairs at my temple, the tall grass twisting up through the porch steps.
“I’ve no need for Scotland,” he says, in answer—close enough to kiss me, to pull me to him and make me forget everything that came before, but he waits.
He holds time in the palm of his hand. Until there are no hours left, no winters or springs, until at last we surrender to the sea.
“A man’s heart may be devoted to the land he works, sweat and blood and sleepless nights, but when it takes root in the woman he loves, he’ll never need land again.
” He brushes his thumb across my cheek. “She becomes the ground. A territory he’d die to protect.
” His voice is a whisper, a low tide. Clouds in his eyes. “Ye, Ellie, are my homeland.”