Chapter 6
Chapter Six
JUDE
The Ship Inn after a call-out used to be loud.
Peter would be at the bar, reenacting the rescue with wild hand gestures, making everyone sound more heroic than they were, making even the grim ones seem like victories.
Big bloke filling the room with his voice and his laugh and that red-grey beard wagging while he talked.
Now it’s all hushed conversation and careful silences, like we’re in a library or a funeral parlour, because even though it’s been months, having fun without him still feels guilty.
Maybe it will pass, I guess eventually it does, right?
Tom’s nursing a pint he hasn’t touched, still in his waterproofs because he came straight from checking on the tourist we pulled out – hypothermic but alive, another idiot who thought March swimming was a grand idea.
Tom’s a vet, not a doctor, but he’s the closest thing we’ve got at short notice, and hypothermia’s hypothermia whether you’ve got two legs or four.
Frankie and Bill are at their usual table, playing cribbage without keeping score.
The rest of the crew scattered to their corners, everyone present, but no one really here.
Dad’s glowering at his pint like it personally offended him.
He gets worse after call-outs now, like every rescue reminds him of the one that went wrong.
The one where Peter jumped in and the sea didn’t give him back.
Or maybe he’s just angry that I’m here instead of Kit.
Six weeks until his preferred son comes back, except coming back doesn’t change much.
Kit’ll be here but somewhere else, same as always – his world shrunk to Isla and Maisie and the cottage they’re doing up, the business a thing he used to do rather than the thing that defines him.
He stepped back. I stepped up. Nobody held a ceremony.
Six weeks until Kit returns and Dad can stop pretending I’m adequate.
‘Good work today, lads,’ Ayo tries from behind the bar, bright yellow jumper practically glowing in the pub’s dim light, earring catching the lamp as he polishes a glass that’s already clean. ‘Textbook rescue.’
‘Textbook if the book’s missing half its pages,’ Frankie mutters. ‘Need more crew.’
‘We’ve got applications—’ I start.
‘Applications from kids and pensioners,’ Dad cuts in. ‘Not proper crew.’
‘Peter wasn’t proper crew when he started,’ Tom says quietly, and the temperature drops another degree.
Dad turns that look on Tom – the one that could strip paint – and Tom holds it. Tom always holds it. It’s one of the things I’ve always liked about him.
‘At least we got a decent price on the turbot this week,’ I say, because someone has to redirect before this becomes a wake. ‘Eighteen per cent above asking. New supplier contract’s looking—’
‘Anyone can negotiate fish prices, Jude.’ Dad doesn’t even look at me when he says it. Just waves a hand, like I’ve mentioned the weather. ‘Kit would’ve had that hydraulic system stripped and rebuilt by now. That’s what we need. Hands that can fix things.’
Right. My hands, which negotiated the contract that’s keeping the business solvent this quarter, which manage the accounts and the licences and the quota returns and every invisible thing that lets Harding and Sons continue to exist – those hands don’t count.
Because they’re not Kit’s hands. Because they hold pens instead of spanners.
I take a drink and say nothing. Twenty-seven years of practice.
Tilly sweeps in from the back, bangles jangling, sun-worn freckles and flowing scarves, carrying a tray of pasties nobody ordered. She’s got that expression that means she’s about to manage us all whether we like it or not.
‘Eat,’ she commands, setting the tray down. ‘All of you. Especially you, Jude Harding. You look like a stiff wind would knock you over.’
‘I’m fine—’
‘You’re not, but we’ll pretend.’ She pauses, adjusting her scarves, and I know that pause. That’s the pause before Tilly drops information like grenades. ‘Interesting morning at Nina’s café.’
‘Is she all right?’ Tom asks immediately. Always immediately, when it’s Nina.
‘She will be. Had help, actually. You’ll never guess who from.’
Here it comes.
‘Little Brynn Trelawney. All grown-up and back in Sea Salt Bay. Helped Nina through the worst of it when the siren went – very capable, very calm. Looks just like her grandfather, that one. Same stubborn jaw.’
The silence is different now. Charged. Electric.
Dad’s head comes up slowly, like a dog catching a scent it hates. His eyes find mine across the pub, and I know I’m fucked.
‘You knew.’ Not a question. ‘You knew a Trelawney was back and you didn’t tell me.’
I shrug, aiming for casual and probably missing by a mile. ‘Wasn’t sure she was staying. Could be just passing through.’
‘Passing through.’ He’s standing now, the stool scraping against the floor. ‘A Trelawney. In my harbour.’
‘Technically, it’s everyone’s—’
‘Don’t.’ The word hits like a slammed door. He’s already heading for the exit, that determined stride that means someone’s about to get the full Reuben Harding experience. ‘Twenty years those people have been gone, and now one sneaks back while my back’s turned?’
‘Dad, for Christ’s sake—’ I’m following him out, aware that the entire pub is watching through the windows. ‘You can’t just—’
‘Can’t I?’
The harbour’s gone quiet – the ambient noise still there, the rigging and the gulls and the water, but the people have gone still. Watching. A cormorant surfaces near the breakwater, sleek and dark. Instantly I’m distracted, waiting for it to surface. Focus, Jude.
Dad’s heading straight for the Trelawney shed, and of course he knows exactly where it is, probably dreams about it. I’m half-running to keep up, bad leg protesting at the pace, trying to figure out how to defuse this before it goes nuclear.
‘Dad, stop. You don’t even know why she’s back—’
‘I know enough.’
‘You know nothing! You’re about to barge in there and what? Yell at her for existing? For coming back to property her family owns?’
‘Property they abandoned—’
‘Because you drove them out!’
That stops him, just for a second, but it’s enough for me to get in front of him. We’re face to face on the dock, and I can see the vein in his temple pulsing.
‘Business rivalry,’ he says, low and dangerous. ‘Fishing territory. They undercut us, stole our contracts, poisoned the well. That’s what happened, boy. Don’t you forget it.’
Business rivalry. That’s what he’s always called it. But business rivalries don’t make you spit when you hear a name. Business rivalries don’t empty a family out of a village at three in the morning. Business rivalries end in solicitors’ letters, not exile.
‘Dad. Please. Just … leave it.’
‘Move, boy.’
‘No.’
‘I said move.’
‘And I said no.’
We’re standing there, squared off in the middle of the harbour, and I can feel the audience – Frankie and Bill in the pub doorway, Cal pausing by the Celtic Pride, even Tom hanging back by the harbour wall, ready to intervene if needed.
This is how it always goes – Dad charges forward, consequences be damned, and someone else cleans up the wreckage. Usually Kit. Now me.
He sidesteps me – surprisingly quick for someone with bad knees – and before I can grab his arm, he’s at the shed door. Doesn’t knock. Of course he doesn’t knock. Reuben Harding has never knocked on a door in his life.
The door slams open, and there she is.
Brynn’s at the workbench, reading what looks like Peter’s old maintenance manual, cup of tea at her elbow like she lives here.
Which she does now, I realise – there’s a sleeping bag on the camp bed, a holdall tucked underneath, steel-toed boots lined up by the door.
She’s moved in. She looks up slowly, deliberately, like she was expecting this exact moment and has been rehearsing her expression.
‘Mr Harding,’ she says, voice steady as a held breath. ‘Took you longer than I expected.’
Dad fills the doorway. All wounded authority and twenty years of fermented rage.
‘You think you can just show up and slip back in like nothing happened?’
Brynn doesn’t move from the workbench. Just leans against it like he’s weather she’s decided to wait out. ‘I don’t recall asking for your blessing.’
‘Your family left this town in ruins—’
‘We left quietly.’ Her jaw twitches – the only crack. ‘At three in the morning, actually. And for reasons none of you ever bothered to ask about.’
That lands. I see it hit in the way his shoulders tighten, the pause before his next attack. ‘Your grandfather was a coward and a thief.’
‘My grandfather was a fisherman who built half the boats in this harbour.’ She sets down Peter’s manual with deliberate care. ‘Including yours, if memory serves.’
‘Memory serves nothing when it comes to Trelawneys. You twist everything—’
‘I was seven.’ She says it like laying down a card. Simple. Factual. Devastating. ‘Seven years old when we left. So whatever sins you’re laying at my feet, Reuben Harding, you’d better be sure they’re mine to carry.’
She stands then, and I realise how small she is next to Dad’s bulk. How young she must have been. How none of us ever really knew what happened – just that one day the Trelawneys were gone and we weren’t supposed to ask why.
‘You come back here,’ Dad’s building up, face going a shade of red that usually precedes a visit from Dr Abott, ‘thinking you can just claim what you abandoned—’
‘What we own.’ She cuts him off clean. ‘What we’ve always owned. What you’ve been using rent-free for two decades while you told everyone it was a business rivalry.’
‘It was a business—’
‘It wasn’t.’ Her eyes are black and steady. ‘And you know it.’
‘You ungrateful—’
‘Dad.’ I grab his arm. He shakes me off, hard enough that I stumble, the bad leg buckling for a second.
‘Don’t you touch me, boy.’