Chapter 2
Chapter Two
JUDE
The afternoon stretches out like old fishing line – taut, unreliable, likely to snap if you pull too hard.
I’m taking stock of nets with Tom, pretending my shoulder doesn’t still ache from yesterday’s haul, when the sound cuts through Sea Salt Bay’s usual Tuesday quiet like a gutting knife through mackerel.
Tom and I are sitting in companionable silence eating his sandwiches. The March sun is doing its best to pin us in a small globe of tepid spring warmth, but it’s a losing battle – the wind keeps finding us, sharp-edged and salt-heavy.
I’ve got half an eye on the swell which is decent. Clean lines, glassy faces. An ache pulls through me, the faintest longing for the freedom of walking out with my dusty board under my arm, the rush of freedom. I push it back, lock it down. Focus on anything other.
Like watching for Dad to come back in to dock. He’s been out for hours after turning up about an hour after Kit and Isla left with Maisie. Dad, you remembered they were leaving, right? I’d asked him.
His answer is now looping around my head with the churning of the cheese and pickle sandwich Tom handed over. Course I did. Did they need a fanfare send-off?
But I saw the look in his eyes.
The spark of remembrance. The half-second where his face went blank before it rearranged itself into his gruff but familiar exterior, making it look like intention rather than forgetting.
I’ve been seeing that more lately – small lapses, tiny gaps, like a net with holes he doesn’t know are there.
It’s nothing. He’s sixty-three and tired. That’s all it is.
I didn’t say anything and neither did he.
A cormorant surfaces near the breakwater, sleek and dark. Thirty seconds they can hold their breath. I used to time them. Focus, Jude.
The Mary Jane needs her filters changed.
I should be doing that instead of sitting here eating Tom’s sandwiches and watching Dad’s boat not come in.
But the paperwork mountain on my desk won’t climb itself either, and someone’s got to reconcile last month’s catch logs with the harbour master’s records before Friday.
I check the horizon again. Dad’s boat – there, finally, rounding the headland. Moving slowly. Too slowly.
It’s nothing. He’s fine.
Tom and I both turn as the sound of music, angry, female, and turned up loud enough to wake the dead, blasts down the sleepy lane behind us.
The harbour freezes, all eyes zero in on a vintage Land Rover – rust-orange like dried blood, chrome catching the sun – as it tears into the harbour car park.
I’m almost expecting doughnuts and burnt rubber, but instead the music cuts off abruptly, leaving a silence that feels louder than the noise. Then the door opens.
She steps out in ripped jeans and steel-toed boots. ‘Christ,’ Tom mutters beside me. ‘Who’s that then?’
I don’t answer because I’m too busy staring.
My gaze focused on the set of her shoulders, the way she’s planting her feet like she’s expecting a fight.
My brain’s doing that thing where it tries to match a present threat with a past pattern.
It’s coming up empty but insisting I should know – I should recognise the familiarity in the way she moves, and believe me, it’s all contained violence and deliberate space-taking.
She’s surveying the harbour with a hint of possession that makes my hackles rise before I even know why.
She’s parked in the old spot by the harbour wall. The one we’ve been using for equipment storage so long I’d forgotten it was ever anyone else’s.
‘Shit,’ I say, and start walking over before I’ve even decided to.
‘Jude?’ Tom calls after me, but I’m already halfway there, some primitive part of my brain recognising trouble before my conscious mind catches up.
‘You can’t park there,’ I say, and I sound like a useless tool, but it’s too late to back down now. ‘Public parking is up in the car park.’ I gesture back up to the road sloping away from the harbour.
She turns, lifting aviator glasses that she perches on espresso tangled waves, and the world does that thing where it tilts just enough to make you seasick on dry land.
Her eyes are dark, so dark, as they blink at me, one shutter of long lashes, and then another.
I’m sure she has a rest of a face, I just can’t look at it yet.
I’m stuck on the eyes. A loose thread in the back of my mind gives a little tug.
‘Says who?’ Her accent’s not quite Cornish – someplace else, Welsh maybe, or further, not city, not like some of Isla’s friends who have visited recently.
And I don’t know why I do it. It’s probably the way she’s standing there looking at me like she’s just tacked me on the sole of her shoe into her house, but I decide instantly to be an arse.
‘Says common fucking decency. We’ve been using that spot for—’
Her hand comes up to cut me off. Rude. But then I did just swear at her for no reason other than I’m a moron.
‘For storing your shit in a space that doesn’t belong to you?
’ She reaches into the Land Rover and produces paperwork like a magic trick.
A wad of official-looking documents is paperclipped together.
She makes a show of pretending to read it, like she’s reading to a five-year-old.
‘Oh, there. Trelawney Marine Services. Still own it. Never sold, just … abandoned.’ Her smile is cherubic hell bitch.
Trelawney.
The name hits like cold spray in the face, and the gears in my brain start grinding together. Suddenly I’m nine years old, chasing a girl with seaweed dripping from my hands while she shrieks and runs, stopping every few paces and glancing over her shoulder to make sure I’m still following.
Suddenly it’s summer again, not March, and the edges are softened, brilliant with impossible colours as we sit on the harbour wall and protect our ice-creams from seagulls circling over easy prey.
Jesus Christ.
‘Brynn?’ The name comes out strangled. Forgotten. Sideways in my throat.
Her eyes narrow. Pouted lips pull into an upturned smile. Then her expression clears, a beat of a breath, before hardening into icy depths of darkness. I swear a cloud passes across the sun in the same moment. ‘Well, well. Jude Harding.’
She says my name like it tastes bad.
‘You came back.’ It’s possibly the stupidest thing I could say, but my brain’s still catching up to the fact that Brynn Trelawney – the girl whose grandfather left in disgrace, whose family name became just whispers and legends, the girl I asked to marry me with a Haribo ring when we were both seven.
The girl who I tried to learn to surf with, falling under waves, laughing as we choked on salt water, is standing in front of me glaring like she wants to burn the whole harbour down with me as the guy stuck on the top.
‘Disappointed?’ She leans against the Land Rover, all studied casualness, but her shoulders are high, the toes on the foot she’s crossed over the other are drumming into the sand-topped pavement of the dock. I’m speechless. Which is a lifetime first. ‘Thought all the Trelawneys were gone for good?’
‘I thought—’What? That she’d dissolved into memory? That I’d always wondered what happened to make her family leave in the middle of the night and never return. That I’d spent years listening to my dad badmouth them.
That ultimately, I’d forgotten her.
‘We were kids.’ She tilts her head, and there – there’s the girl who built sandcastles with architectural precision just to prove they were better than mine.
‘You’ve grown up. Got tall. Got…’ She gestures vaguely at all of me, and I can’t read whether it’s insult or observation.
‘That limp new or did I do that when I hit you?’
‘You broke my nose, not my leg.’
‘Shame. Would’ve been a better story.’
We’re standing too close for strangers, not close enough for whatever we used to be. The space between us feels charged, like the air before a storm rolls in.
‘You can’t park here,’ I say again, because falling back on the original argument feels safer than whatever this is.
‘Watch me.’ She turns back to the truck, leaning inside the cab, and I catch myself noticing the way her hair falls, a thick curtain of brown waves turning fire red under the shine of the sun.
‘Brynn—’
‘That’s all you’ve got?’ She turns back, arms full of boxes. ‘Twenty years and the best you can manage is “You can’t park here”? At least tell me to fuck off properly. Make it interesting.’
‘Fine. Fuck off.’
‘No.’
‘Brynn—’
‘What are you going to do, Harding? Chase me with seaweed until I cry?’ Her smile is sharp as fish hooks. ‘Oh wait, that already didn’t work.’
The memory surfaces fully now. Her laughing as she ran, not really scared, turning it into a game until I caught her by the old boat shed and told her I loved her with all the seriousness a nine-year-old could muster. She’d punched me in the face and run home crying.
Then the Trelawneys were gone.
‘Welcome home, Brynn,’ I say, and it comes out more sarcastic than intended. ‘Try not to run away crying this time.’
Her face flushes, lips pursed, gaze narrowing like a wild cat, before it hardens into an expression truly terrifying. Blank. Closed. Empty. Her gaze sweeps across me, taking in what she sees and clearly finding it wanting.
‘Fuck you, Harding.’ She says it like a promise. ‘And get your shit out of my space by tomorrow.’
She stalks off towards the harbour office, and I absolutely do not watch her go. Except I do, because apparently, I’m still nine years old and stupid around Brynn Trelawney.
‘So,’ Tom says, appearing at my elbow with that grin he gets when he’s about to be insufferable. ‘Want to tell me what that was about?’
‘That,’ I say, still staring after her, ‘was Brynn Trelawney.’
‘And?’
‘The girl I asked to marry me once.’
Tom chokes on nothing. ‘What the hell?’
I rub my jaw, phantom pain from a twenty-year-old punch. ‘I was seven and she hit me. Broke my nose. There was a lot of blood. Very romantic.’
Tom’s laughing now, the bastard. ‘You proposed to a Trelawney?’
‘We were both seven. Different times. Less family politics.’
‘Your dad’s going to lose his mind.’
And there it is. The fact of this new developing situation.
Dad’s held a grudge against the Trelawneys for twenty years.
Business rivalry, he calls it – fishing rights and territory disputes – though I’ve always suspected it was more personal than that.
The type of feud that gets passed down like inheritance, until it’s become a lore where nobody remembers the original sin but everyone knows who to hate.
And Dad – Dad remembers everything about that feud, even on the days when he forgets his own son’s name.
‘Yeah,’ I say, watching Brynn disappear into the harbour office like she owns that too. ‘He really is.’
Tom claps me on the shoulder. ‘Want me there when you tell him?’
‘What, so you can watch the explosion?’
‘Obviously.’
I’m still watching the spot where she disappeared, trying to reconcile the sharp-edged woman with the wild-haired girl in my memory. The one who built elaborate sandcastles just to knock them down, who knew the name of every boat in the harbour, who hit harder than any of the boys.
‘She came back,’ I say, more to myself than Tom.
‘After twenty years,’ Tom agrees. ‘Question is why.’
Why indeed. But standing here, with the phantom taste of Haribo cherries and the ghost of childhood humiliation, I have the sinking feeling we’re all about to find out.
‘Come on,’ I tell Tom. ‘If I’m going to tell Dad that a Trelawney’s back in Sea Salt Bay, I’m going to need a drink first.’
‘It’s two in the afternoon.’
‘Your point?’
We head towards The Ship, but I can’t help looking back one more time. The Land Rover sits in that space like it never left, like twenty years was just a pause between breaths.
Brynn Trelawney is back.
Christ, we’re all fucked.