Pull Me Under (Sea Salt Bay #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

JUDE

The harbour at half five is supposed to be mine.

Just me, the slap of rope against masts, seaweed stink and gulls tearing at yesterday’s chip papers, and the grim routine of nursing this business along when everyone else has the good sense to be in bed.

But this morning, my brother Kit’s out there loading his Range Rover like he’s prepping for the apocalypse, and I’m watching him from the quay wall with coffee gone stone-cold in my hand, and there’s a twist and pull tight behind my ribs that I’d rather not name.

‘That’s Maisie’s activity bag, you daft bastard.

’ I don’t raise my voice. I’ve never been the shouting type.

That’s Dad’s territory. Kit’s trying to wedge his daughter’s pink unicorn carry-on between Isla’s matching designer luggage, and Christ, it’s painful to watch.

‘Unless you fancy Maisie singing, “Are we there yet” from here to Heathrow, I’d leave that where she can reach it. ’

Kit straightens up, runs a hand through his hair in that nervous tic of his which means he’s overthinking everything. Again. ‘You could help instead of standing there like a useless bloody ornament.’

‘Could.’ I take a deliberate sip of cold coffee, letting it sit bitter on my tongue. ‘Won’t though. This is entertaining.’

Truth is, if I help, I’ll have to think about what this means.

Six weeks. Six weeks of running Harding and Sons solo while Kit plays supportive partner in Manhattan, cheering Isla on from the wings while she remembers she’s Isla Quinn, not just another face in the Sea Salt Bay school-run queue.

Six weeks of managing the quotas, the buyers, and Dad, who’s been calling me Kit more often than Jude lately.

That last bit. I tell myself it’s nothing. Grief does that. Scrambles things. He’s just tired.

The thing about Harding and Sons Fisheries is the plural on sons.

It’s right there in peeling paint above the office door.

It’s a two-brother operation. Except it hasn’t been, not really, not since Kit stepped back to build a life with Isla and his little girl.

He’s still here, lives two streets up, comes to the harbour when the mood takes him.

But his head’s been somewhere else for a while now.

Broadway, apparently. His heart, his future, his family that doesn’t smell of diesel and brine.

Can’t blame him for that.

Doesn’t stop me wanting to.

I’m the one who stays. I’m always the one who stays.

Kit doesn’t know about the other Tuesday, when I found Dad waiting at Peter’s mooring at three in the morning, asking when Peter was getting back from his holiday in Plymouth.

Peter’s been dead six months. Some holiday.

I’d wanted to tell Kit. Nearly did, twice.

But he had Maisie’s school play that week and Isla’s new and improved agent on speakerphone every other hour negotiating the Broadway contract, and there just wasn’t a gap that felt like the right shape for Dad might be losing it and I don’t know what to do.

So I walked Dad home, made him tea, and sat on the end of his bed while he told me the same story about catching a bluefin off the Scillies in 1987 that he’d already told me at breakfast.

He was fine the next morning. Completely fine. Knew what day it was, knew the tide times, called me by my actual name.

So. There you go. Nothing to worry about.

My eyes drift to that mooring now, where the Jenny’s Dream sits exactly as Peter left her.

Lines coiled with his particular obsession for order, his lucky cap still hanging from the cabin hook, that stupid air freshener shaped like a mermaid he swore brought good catches.

Nina can’t bring herself to sell the boat, and none of us can bring ourselves to suggest it again.

She’s become part of the harbour’s architecture now, a memorial that bobs with the tide, pretending everything’s normal when nothing has been since the storm took Pete.

The truth is nothing’s been normal since that night. Since Kit’s engine died three miles out in a force 9 and the shout went up and Peter, RNLI to his bones, climbed onto that lifeboat and went out to bring my brother home.

Kit came back.

Peter didn’t.

Now his fishing boat sits here like it’s waiting for a man who’s never going to untie the lines, and my brother can barely look at the harbour without seeing the debt he can’t repay.

‘The monthly MSY returns are due by the fifteenth,’ Kit’s saying, still fighting with luggage but unable to stop himself listing duties. ‘That’s Maximum Sustainable Yield to—’

‘I know what MSY means, you patronising git. I’ve been doing the paperwork for this business since I was twelve.

’ The sigh that leaves me is both wordless and loud.

That’s the thing Kit never quite grasped.

He was always the one out on the boats with Dad, learning the trawls, the nets, the engine temperaments.

I was the one in the office, making the numbers work, keeping us the right side of every regulation the MMO could dream up.

Different kinds of useful.

Though you’d never know it from the way Dad talks.

‘Right. And the buyer from Newlyn’s coming Thursday. Don’t let him lowball you on the megrim sole. Market price is up fifteen per cent this month.’

‘Twenty, actually. Checked yesterday.’ I drain the cold coffee, grimacing.

‘And before you start your whole speech, yes, I’ll check the shot ropes on the beam trawls, yes, I’ll make sure Billy doesn’t forget the escape panels in the nets again, and yes, I’ll keep the catch composition records for the Marine Management lot. ’

Kit pauses, gives me that look. The look that says I see you and I’m worried about you and I know I’m leaving you holding everything again and I feel guilty but not quite guilty enough to stay.

‘The new regulations about spurdog—’

‘Prohibited species, immediate release if caught, log it in the ICES database. Jesus, Kit, I’m not completely incompetent.’

Sometimes.

‘I know you’re not.’ He abandons the luggage altogether and walks over to where I’m sitting. ‘It’s just—’

‘Tom says he’ll help out when he can,’ I interrupt, because I refuse to do emotional damage before daybreak. It should be illegal. ‘Between surgeries, obviously. Though apparently Mrs Penrose’s cat has developed a talent for getting stuck in drains, so his availability might be limited.’

‘Tom’s a good man.’ Kit pauses, gaze drifting to the sea that’s lightening with dawn. With new starts. With life for those of us still here.

‘The best.’ I watch a cormorant dive for breakfast, clean and purposeful, folding into the water like it was designed for nothing else.

There’d been a time when I wanted to study that. Marine biology. Understand why they dive where they dive, what the water holds, what moves beneath the surface of everything I’ve spent my whole life looking at without really seeing.

One of those sixth-form dreams that got shelved.

Shelf’s been gathering dust a long time now.

‘He’s been checking in,’ I say instead. ‘A lot.’

‘He’s worried about you.’

‘Tom worries about everyone. It’s why he’s developing that permanently concerned expression. Like a constipated headmaster.’

‘Jude—’

‘Isla needs this.’ I cut him off, turning the conversation like avoiding a sandbank. ‘The Broadway thing. After everything with that Marcus Vale bollocks, she needs to be Isla Quinn again, not just Kit Harding’s girlfriend hiding in Cornwall.’

Kit’s shoulders drop slightly, that tension he carries like ballast easing a fraction. ‘Yeah. She does.’

As if walking onto set at the perfect time, Isla appears at the cottage door, sunrise catching in her hair like copper thread, one hand resting on the slight swell beneath her cashmere cardigan.

Twelve weeks now, though they haven’t announced it.

The whole village has been pretending not to notice.

Collective amnesia is Sea Salt Bay’s superpower.

Just like we pretended not to see Kit hosing off in the garden all winter, trying not to bring the smell of fish and grief into their cottage.

‘We need to head off in…’ She cuts off as she takes in the chaos of luggage. ‘Kit, please tell me you haven’t reorganised everything I already packed.’

‘Helping,’ he says, palms lifting innocently.

‘Hindering,’ I correct, earning a smile from Isla that makes her look younger, less battered by the media wringer.

Isla Quinn, even when we were kids, was stunning. Not ‘oh she’s pretty’ stunning. I mean stop-you-dead, what the hell is someone like that doing in a place like this stunning.

The only person who ever stopped her in her own tracks was Kit Harding. My big brother. The grumpiest arsehole fisherman around.

‘Jude.’ She pulls me into a hug that smells of vanilla and home at the same time. ‘You sure you’re okay with this? Six weeks is a long time.’

I pull back, give her my best smile. The one that’s got me out of trouble since I was five and blamed the broken window on atmospheric pressure.

‘Isla Quinn, are you suggesting I can’t handle a few weeks of playing captain? I’m wounded.’

‘I’m suggesting’—her gaze narrows, scanning my face—‘that it’s okay to admit when things are hard.’

‘Nothing hard about it. Dad’ll be fine. The quota’ll be fine. You’ll come back to find I’ve revolutionised the whole operation. Might even paint the Mary Jane pink while you’re gone. Really lean into the whole absent management crisis.’

‘You fucking won’t,’ Kit growls.

‘Language,’ Isla and I say in unison.

For a moment, we’re a proper family.

Kit glances at his watch. ‘We really should be heading off.’ He looks around. ‘I thought Dad would get up to see us off.’

My lips crimp together for a moment then I breathe deep and put on that grin again. ‘And miss his beauty sleep? He needs it more than most, Kit, you know that.’

But then Maisie explodes from the cottage like a tiny hurricane, still in her unicorn pyjamas under her coat, brandishing Captain Bear like a battle standard.

‘Uncle Jude! We’re going to NEW YORK!’

‘I heard, monster.’ I scoop her up, spin her until she shrieks. Pure joy, the kind only kids can manage before life teaches them to moderate their happiness. ‘You going to bring me back something good?’

‘A snow globe?’

‘Perfect. One with the Statue of Liberty giving me the finger.’

‘JUDE!’ Kit warns, but he’s fighting a smile.

We don’t drag out the goodbyes. Can’t. Kit grips my shoulder.

‘The spring tides are next week. Watch the moorings.’

What he means is call if you need anything. We both know I won’t.

‘Make sure you eat something besides coffee and whatever Nina forces on you,’ he adds.

‘Sure, Mum.’

Isla plants a kiss on my cheek and whispers, ‘Look after yourself too. Not just everyone else.’

Maisie demands fourteen hugs, counting them out loud with the seriousness of a nuclear physicist, arms wrapped around my neck like kelp. I give her all fourteen, slip in another for luck when she’s not counting.

‘Look after them, yeah?’ I tell her quietly. ‘You’re the sensible one.’

‘I know,’ she says solemnly. ‘Daddy needs supervision.’

Then they’re gone. The Range Rover swallowing them up, efficient and final.

The echo of their voices thins out like morning mist, leaving me with all the words I never managed to spit out.

The ones about being scared. About missing Peter so much it feels like drowning.

About how sometimes I wake up and forget for thirty seconds that our idyllic safe haven was splintered by one bad storm and a friend who never made it back to shore.

The harbour settles into its new quiet, heavy with absence. Even the gulls seem subdued, circling half-heartedly like they’re going through the motions.

I glance at the swell beyond the breakwater. Clean lines rolling in from the west, the kind that would be perfect at the reef break on the far side of the headland.

My board’s been leaning against the hallway wall at home for weeks now, gathering a fine layer of guilt.

One more thing I keep meaning to get back to.

One more thing there’s never time for.

I turn back to the boats. Nets that need mending before tomorrow’s dawn shot. The Mary Jane’s engine that’s been coughing like a sixty-a-day smoker since she was righted after the storm six months ago. Fuel filters that should’ve been changed last week.

Enough work to keep both hands and mind out of dangerous territory.

The phone buzzes.

Tom: Surgery’s quiet this morning if you need help with the boats. Also Nina says you haven’t eaten actual food in two days.

All good, mate. Had a pasty yesterday.

That was three days ago. I was there.

Time’s a construct.

So is malnutrition. I’ll bring sandwiches.

I don’t reply, but we both know he’ll show up anyway. That’s what Tom does. Shows up, brings food, doesn’t ask the questions that don’t have answers.

Six weeks.

Starting now.

I look at Peter’s boat once more, that fucking mermaid air freshener visible through the wheelhouse window, and make myself turn away.

There’s work to do.

There’s always work to do.

That’s the point.

The sun’s properly up now, turning the water into hammered bronze, and somewhere beneath it the fish are running their ancient patterns, completely indifferent to our human disasters.

Lucky bastards.

I could sit here all day just watching, noting, understanding. Unravelling the whole secret language of the sea.

Instead I’m up here with a spreadsheet and a diesel bill.

And the sea keeps its secrets to itself.