14. Isla
ISLA
The hull plank had carried a residual charge.
Faint, embedded in the grain like a fingerprint pressed into wet clay, but unmistakable once she'd held it long enough to feel the frequency.
She'd wrapped it in a strip of linen treated with grounding herbs and walked it back to the dock that afternoon, expecting to leave it with one of Rafe’s crew and be gone before anyone noticed.
Rafe had been below deck when she arrived.
She could hear him working, the sound of a mallet on wood and his voice giving someone directions that were more detailed than they probably needed to be.
She'd left the plank with a man of a short but wiry frame, skittish yellow-green eyes but more inquisitive then threatening, and pale blonde hair at the gangway along with a folded note explaining what she'd found and what the treatment would neutralize.
Clean exchange. Professional. Nothing in it that required her to stand on his dock and think about the way his hands had felt on her hips twelve hours ago.
She was thinking about it anyway.
Walking back through town, she took the main path instead of the western cutoff because she needed things from the Mercantile and because avoiding the square would feel like hiding, which she refused to do.
The afternoon was warm, the storm damage from last night already being managed.
A crew was clearing debris from the drainage channel near the bakery, branches and silt packed into the grate.
Two women she recognized from the seasonal market were sweeping the steps of the community hall, talking in low voices that stopped when she passed.
They'd never stopped talking when she passed before.
She kept walking. At the Mercantile, Edgar was at the counter instead of Rufus, sorting a delivery of jarred preserves with the careful attention he gave everything. He looked up when she came in and smiled, but it was half a beat slower than usual.
"Isla. What can I get you?"
"Salt. The coarse kind, if you've got it. I’m running low on my mix already, given the spring storms." She had tried to make a joke out of it, but fell flat.
"Should have some in the back." He disappeared through the storeroom door.
A woman browsing the herb shelf near the window glanced at Isla, then looked away. Not unfriendly. Evaluating, as if she was deciding what the risks were by being near her.
Edgar came back with the salt. "Anything else?"
"That's it. Thank you."
He rang her up. On her way out, he said, "Lot of weather talk this morning. People get nervous when the spring storms stack up like this."
"They should. Spring storms are unpredictable."
"That's what I told them." He held her gaze for a moment, steady. Then he went back to his preserves.
She walked out into the square. The feeling was everywhere now that she was looking for it.
Not hostility. Hollow Oak didn't work that way, at least not in her experience.
It was subtler, a recalibration happening in real time, the community adjusting its posture the way a person adjusted when they heard a sound they couldn't identify.
Watchful. Careful. Waiting to see what happened next.
She'd felt this before. In two of the four towns she'd left, the shift had started exactly like this.
Not anger but caution. Not accusations but questions asked just out of earshot.
The weather's been strange lately, hasn't it?
Didn't that start around the time she arrived?
The questions never required answers because the answers were already built into the asking.
The old response was in her legs before she'd consciously thought it.
Go home. Pack light. Leave before the caution turned into something harder.
She'd done it enough times that the sequence was almost muscle memory, and for a moment, crossing the square with a bag of salt in her hand, she felt the pull of it so strongly she had to stop walking.
She stood on the cobblestones where it was flat and silver in the afternoon light. The dock visible at the eastern bank, the Ashvane sitting in her mooring. Somewhere below that deck, Rafe was fixing what she'd broken.
Maybe she just needed a lay. That was the cleanest explanation.
She hadn't been with anyone in over a year.
The proximity and the storm had done what proximity and storms did, and the man had hands that knew what they were doing.
Simple. Biological. Nothing that required analysis or follow-up or the pathetic spiral she'd been running since she woke up alone in her bed this morning and found a neatly folded blanket on her sofa.
He'd slept on the floor. She kept circling back to that like a dog with a bone it couldn't bury.
He'd had sex with her on her kitchen counter and then slept on her floor because he hadn't assumed the counter gave him access to her bed.
Who did that? What kind of man had that distinction ready in his head after what they'd done?
The kind who was leaving in four days. That kind.
She made herself keep walking.
The lakeside path brought her past the lower dock structures, the small equipment sheds and storage buildings that sat closest to the waterline.
A crew was already working there, stacking sandbags along the foundations where last night's storm had pushed water up past the usual high mark.
Spring runoff was swelling the feeder channels, and with more weather expected, the low-lying structures needed reinforcement before the next front.
Rowan was directing the effort. He stood at the far end of the retaining wall with a clipboard, his dark hair tied back, work jacket open over a thermal that was already dirty.
Two of his regular crew were hauling bags from a flatbed cart while a third man was measuring water marks on the shed walls with a tape.
She'd spoken to Rowan maybe five times in the year she'd been here. Practical conversations, never long. He was Rafe's type in some ways, steady, not much excess talk, competent without needing to announce it. Diana's mate, she'd gathered, though neither of them advertised it.
He noticed her when she was twenty feet away and gave her a nod that carried no extra weight. "Isla."
"You need help?"
He looked at her, assessing the offer. "You know sandbag placement?"
"I know water. I know where it goes when it's moving fast. I can tell you which of these foundations is going to take the worst of it if another front comes through."
He considered that for about three seconds. "Show me."
She walked the retaining wall with him, reading the water stains on the stone, the angle of the drainage slope, the way the ground had settled unevenly near the oldest shed.
She pointed to the southeast corner where the wall met the bank.
"This section. The grade drops by about four inches over the last ten feet and the runoff from the upper channel is going to funnel straight into this joint.
Last night's storm pushed water to here.
" She pointed at a dark line on the stone. "Next one will go higher."
"How much higher?"
"Depends on the front. If it's another mountain system like last night, you'll get two to three inches above that line. If it comes off the lake, more."
"And you'd know which one it is."
"Before it hits, yes."
He studied the wall. "That's useful." He handed her a pair of work gloves from his belt. "Take the southeast section. Stack them tight to the base, overlap the seams. Emmet's got the sand if you need more bags."
She took the gloves. They were too big but she folded the cuffs back and they held well enough.
She worked the southeast section for the next hour, hauling bags from the cart and stacking them against the wall in a staggered pattern that would hold against lateral pressure.
The work was physical and repetitive and exactly what she needed.
Her shoulders burned after thirty minutes.
Her hands ached through the gloves. The afternoon sun moved across the lake and warmed her back while she lifted, placed, tamped, and did not think about Rafe Lupeus.
Or at least mostly did not think about him.
One of Rowan's crew, the man with the tape measure, worked alongside her for a while without saying much. Eventually he nodded at her stack. "Good placement."
"Thanks."
"You've done this before?"
"Coastal towns. You learn fast when the water doesn't wait."
Rowan came by at the hour mark with water. He handed her a bottle and looked over her work. The southeast section was stacked tight, the seams overlapping, the sandbags packed firm against the stone foundation. He didn't comment on it directly, which she was learning was his version of approval.
"There's a second crew going out tomorrow morning to do the equipment dock on the north shore," he said. "If you want in."
"What time?"
"Seven."
"I'll be here."
He nodded and moved on. She drank the water and looked at what she'd built. Forty sandbags, placed well, protecting a wall that would hold if the next storm came through. It wasn’t much.
A few hours of labor on a retaining wall in a town that was quietly deciding whether she was worth the weather she brought with her.
But she'd shown up. She'd done the work.
Rowan had asked her back, and that was more than she'd had this morning.
The square was busier when she walked back through it on her way home.
The late afternoon crowd at Griddle and Grind was spilling out onto the patio, Twyla visible through the window pouring something steaming into a row of cups.
A group of men stood near the fountain, talking about the flooding on the lower road.
One of them looked at her as she passed.
Not the evaluating look from earlier. Closer to neutral.
She'd been at the retaining wall all afternoon and people had seen her there, hauling bags alongside Rowan's crew, doing the same work they were doing.
It wasn't acceptance. It wasn't forgiveness or trust or any of the things she'd been carefully not hoping for over the last year. But it was presence. She had been visibly present, practical, and impossible to frame as dangerous.
She passed the dock road on her way to the western path.
The Ashvane's mast was visible over the tree line, Rafe's crew still working on the deck. She didn’t stop or look for him.
She walked the birch-lined path to her cottage with sand under her nails and an ache in her shoulders and the quiet, stubborn refusal to leave sitting heavier in her chest than it had this morning.
The cottage was cool and empty when she let herself in. She washed her hands at the kitchen sink and stood at the counter where he'd lifted her onto the surface last night and pressed her palms flat against the wood.
He was leaving. That was the fact she needed to hold onto. Whatever had happened between them was weather, not a season. It would pass.
She made tea. Drank it at the window seat. Watched the lake go silver in the fading light and tried not to think about the way he'd said her name.