Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
JUDE
The winch groans as we lower her down, chains clanking against steel. Brynn’s hand brushes mine as she steadies the line – the lightest of touches, nothing more – but I feel it everywhere.
I don’t breathe.
She doesn’t flinch.
The boat doesn’t touch the water. She settles onto timber blocks inside the shed instead, hull meeting wood with a dull, final thud. The smell of wet rope and diesel thickens in the air. Brynn steps forward immediately, palm flat against the hull like she’s checking a pulse.
I watch her. Can’t seem to stop doing that.
‘You sure about this?’ I ask.
She doesn’t look at me. ‘About what?’
‘About all of it.’
She runs her hand along the gunwale, fingers finding cracks I can’t see. ‘You helped lower her in. Bit late to ask now.’
‘Not that.’ I nod at the hull. ‘This one. Why this boat?’
That makes her pause. First time I’ve seen Brynn Trelawney pause for anything.
Rain rattles the roof. Somewhere outside a halyard slaps against a mast. The whole harbour feels like it’s holding its breath.
‘I remember Grandad having one like her,’ she says finally.
‘Not this exact one. Same make. Same lines.’ She knocks lightly against the hull – two sharp raps, like a doctor checking for response.
‘He used to pull the engine apart in here. Spread it across the floor like a puzzle. Hundreds of pieces, all laid out in order.’
I glance around the shed. Hard to picture that now.
‘I thought he was mad,’ she goes on. ‘Taking apart things that already worked. But he’d sit there for hours, explaining how every piece connected to every other piece. How if you understood how things were built, you could fix anything.’
‘That what this is?’ I ask. ‘A nostalgia project?’
Now she looks at me. And whatever’s in her face isn’t nostalgia.
‘No.’
The word lands like a door shutting.
‘This isn’t about fishing,’ she says. ‘I’m not trying to run a trawler. I don’t want quotas and buyers and your dad yelling at me about spurdog regulations.’
‘Then what?’
‘I want to rebuild her.’ Her voice drops – quieter, more certain. ‘Engine out. Wiring redone. Hull sealed properly. Every bolt and gasket. So I know I can do it. Properly. Not just patching things up the way I’ve been doing in every port town that would have me for the last ten years.’
The shed feels smaller suddenly. Or maybe she feels bigger in it.
‘And then what?’ I ask.
‘Then I bring in more. Refits. Repairs. Engines no one else wants to touch.’ She straightens up. ‘Trelawney Marine Services used to mean a lot in this harbour.’
Her jaw tightens. I recognise that set – it’s the same one I see on Dad when someone questions the business. The jaw of someone defending a thing they haven’t built yet but can already see whole.
‘I’m not here to squat in a cottage and disappear again,’ she says. ‘I’m here to find out if this place fits me. If I fit it. But I’m not staying because it’s pretty or because I owe anyone anything.’
‘You think this village is going to roll out the red carpet for a Trelawney?’
‘I don’t want a red carpet.’ She steps back from the hull, wipes resin from her fingers onto her jeans. ‘I want space. A shed. A boat. A chance to build a life that doesn’t get taken away.’
Not disappear. Taken away. That’s different. That’s specific. That’s twenty years of a wound I don’t fully understand.
I look at the boat again. At the shed. At her hands, still faintly mapped with resin.
It’s not scrappy anymore. It’s not reckless.
It’s a blueprint.
And I realise – with a slow, uncomfortable clarity – that she’s not trying to take away from this harbour.
She’s trying to add to it.
‘So you’re not leaving,’ I say.
She meets my eyes.
‘Not unless I choose to.’
I’m pretty sure there’s a pulse in the ground beneath my feet. Not a seismic shift. No earthquake or blast of undeniable magnitude. Instead, it’s a vibration. A hum.
I turn and walk away before I can name it. Before I’m fool enough to tell her that watching her plan a future in a place that tried to forget her is the bravest thing I’ve seen anyone do in this harbour since Peter jumped off a lifeboat to save my brother.
The Ship is too loud.
Too full. Too bright. Too much, and I’ve only been inside for thirty seconds.
Everything feels wrong. The air is close and thick with the smell of fried food and stale beer. The regulars are louder than usual – compensating, maybe, for the empty spaces. For the people who should be here and aren’t.
Sea Salt Bay on a Sunday in March and most of the village are here because there is nothing else to do when the rain has been lashing for days and there’s nothing good on the telly.
Hell, even if there was something to watch, we’d probably all still be in here regardless. Small town communities and all that.
Tom’s behind the bar tonight – not his usual spot, but Tilly’s at some crystal healing event in Pencross and Ayo needed the help.
Tom’s got that patient, worn-down expression that comes from twenty minutes of mediating Old George and Malcolm’s anchor debate – chain versus rope, as old as the village itself and about as likely to be resolved.
I slide onto a barstool and he shoots me a grateful look.
‘Pint?’ he asks.
‘Yeah. Doom Bar.’
He pulls it without comment, sets it in front of me with such delicacy it’s like he thinks I might shatter. Maybe I will. Everything feels fragile tonight, like someone moved all the furniture in my memories and now nothing sits right.
‘Haven’t seen Nina around,’ I say, because the silence between us needs filling and because I’ve been wondering. ‘She still avoiding the place?’
Tom’s expression shutters. ‘Yeah. Can’t blame her, can you?
Peter was in here every weekend for four years.
Four years of him on that stool, pint in hand, telling that one about the lobster pot.
Before him, it was just a stool. Now it’s…
’ He trails off. ‘She says she still sees him. Says it’s too hard. ’
‘Maybe she’s right.’
‘Maybe.’ He wipes down the bar with slow, methodical strokes. ‘Grief’s funny, though. Sometimes you have to walk through the places that hurt before they stop hurting.’
I take a drink. The beer tastes like copper. ‘Sometimes walking through just makes it worse.’
Tom gives me a look – the kind that says he knows I’m not just talking about Nina anymore – but he doesn’t push. He never does. That’s why Tom’s still one of the few people in this village I can stand.
The door swings open and Dot bustles in, shaking rain from her coat like a wet terrier. Glasses on a chain, eyes bright with the particular gleam that means she’s got gossip and she’s dying to share it.
‘Tom, love, have you heard about the postman situation?’
Tom’s mouth twitches. ‘Can’t say I have, Dot.’
‘Well.’ She settles onto the stool next to mine, barely acknowledging me except for a quick nod. ‘Trevor’s still off with his hip, poor lamb, so they’ve sent someone from Pencarrow to cover the route. Pencarrow.’
She says it like she’s announcing a Viking invasion.
‘And?’ Tom prompts, because Dot needs prompting like fish need water.
‘And he’s been putting letters in the wrong boxes! Mrs Pascoe got a package meant for the Hendersons, and you know how she is about her privacy. Went absolutely spare. Said if they can’t send someone competent, they shouldn’t bother at all.’
‘Revolutionary,’ I mutter into my pint.
Dot swivels towards me, offended. ‘It’s not a small thing, Jude Harding. What if it had been important. Or secret. Like a sex toy?’
‘Dot. Please.’ I hold my hand up to stop her continuing this line of theory. ‘It was probably something from an old lady catalogue.’ And that’s what I will tell myself should this conversation ever pop into my memories.
Dot’s expression says otherwise. ‘That’s not the point—’
Malcolm’s voice cuts across the pub, louder than necessary. ‘I’m telling you, George, rope rode better in a blow. Chain’ll have you swinging all over the bloody harbour.’
‘Chain’s got weight,’ George fires back. ‘Keeps you steady. You want scope, you need chain.’
‘You want scope, you need brain cells, which you’re clearly—’
Tom sighs and abandons me for diplomacy. Dot, blessedly, spots someone else to torment and flutters off towards the corner table where Mary Tremaine is sitting with her knitting.
I’m alone again.
Not alone. Surrounded. But somehow, impossibly, alone.
Outside, rain streaks the pub window. I watch it run down the glass and think about how storms churn up nutrients from the deep.
Then I hear it.
Dad’s voice, carrying from the other end of the bar like he wants to be overheard. Like he’s playing to an audience.
‘Trelawney girl thinks she’s going to run a fishing business without a boat.’ He laughs – sharp and mean. ‘Shows how much she knows. Trelawneys never did have much sense. Or staying power.’
Heat crawls up my neck. My fingers tighten around the glass.
She has a boat. He knows she has a boat.
I told him this morning when we were resetting the Mary Jane for the coming week, and he asked what she was up to in there.
He was standing on the dock, listening to the clanging and banging and asked me what it was, and I said, Brynn Trelawney’s bought herself a day-trawler and he said – what did he say?
Something about Trelawneys and money and a fool being easily parted.
So he knows. He was there. This morning. Just hours ago.
But he’s saying it like he doesn’t remember.
I add it to the catalogue. The growing, terrible catalogue of things my father forgets and I pretend not to notice.
‘She has a boat,’ I say, loud enough the whole damn place turns to look at me.
He turns slowly. Looks at me. Looks through me.
‘Stay away from her.’
It’s not a suggestion. His jaw is set but his eyes are slightly off – not quite focused on my face, more on the space around it.
‘You can’t tell me shit.’ My voice is quiet. Controlled. ‘I’m a grown man.’