Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
brYNN
The first thing I notice is the cold.
Not the sharp, corrugated cold of the shed – that was metal and wind and the particular bite of air coming off the harbour. This is different. Stone-cold. The deep, patient cold of a house that’s been empty for twenty years, slowly surrendering its warmth to the ground.
The second thing I notice is the silence.
No creak of the trawler’s hull shifting on its blocks.
No harbour sounds filtering through the shed walls – engine idling, chain clinking, gulls starting their shift.
Just the tick of the space heater cooling in the corner and the steady plink plink plink of water dripping into the saucepan I positioned last night.
One leak. Hallway. A cracked tile the roofer missed when he did the flashing – I can see the water trail on the ceiling, a single dark line threading towards the light fitting. The bedroom ceiling is dry. The kitchen ceiling is dry. This is one tile, one saucepan, one more line on the list.
Why doesn’t it ever stop raining in Cornwall? When I think of the first seven years of my life, all I remember are golden stretches of summer, hazy heat and warm pavements.
Not this. Rain, drizzle, and cloud cover that sits on top of your head like a sulky hat.
I’ll get up on the roof this afternoon. I’m not paying another ￡180 for a single tile.
The bed is cold. This isn’t new, but for the first time, the cold feels like an absence rather than the default.
I know exactly whose warmth I’m thinking about, and I refuse to give it a name.
I pull the pillow over my face. It smells of paint and plaster and the lavender fabric softener Dot sent up with the bed and mattress.
Fresh sheets from the charity shop in Pencross. The space heater moved up from the shed. Almost warm, if I don’t think about it too hard.
This is the first place I’ve slept that I actually own. The first bed in a room that nobody can take from me. No landlord. No lease. No midnight calculations about whether the rent increase means I’m moving again.
That alone makes the cold bearable.
Outside, the wind is picking up – rattling the windows, finding gaps in the pointing, whistling through the cracks around the door. March in Cornwall. The tourists haven’t come yet. The village is contracted into itself like a fist against the cold.
I should get up. Check on Ghost. Start the day.
Instead, I lie there for one more minute, thinking about Monday.
This can’t happen.
I know.
Jude’s face, so close to mine I could count his eyelashes. The way his voice dropped when he said my name – not Trelawney, not an insult, just Brynn, like it was a word he’d been turning over in his mouth all day. The heat between us on that harbour wall. Undeniable. Terrifying.
And the way he stepped back.
Colleagues.
Right.
The saucepan of rainwater overflows. Water spills onto the floorboards.
‘Shit.’
I’m up and moving, grabbing a towel, mopping the flood, emptying the saucepan and repositioning it under the drip. One tile. I’ll fix it today.
I make coffee – instant, because decent coffee costs money I don’t have, and this jar is the particular kind of instant that strips the back of your throat and murders your taste buds – and stand at the kitchen window.
The cooker works now, the gas blue and steady, the kettle boiling properly for the first time since I fixed the thermocouple.
Small victories. Grey sky, grey water, grey stone.
The faint scream of a gull from the harbour.
Monday I’ll be there. Training. Working alongside Jude Harding while we both pretend that shed never happened. While I pretend I don’t know what his hands feel like. While I pretend his voice doesn’t do things to the base of my spine when he’s being serious.
Colleagues.
The drip continues. Plink plink plink.
I need to find something to seal that tile. There might be supplies in the back room – the room I’ve been avoiding since I arrived. The room where Grandad stored everything he couldn’t bear to look at but couldn’t throw away.
The room full of our family’s other life. The one that was taken from us.
The door sticks when I push it – swollen wood, warped frame, everything in this cottage resisting entry. I have to shoulder it open, and when I do, dust swirls in the grey light from the single window.
It’s smaller than I remember. Or maybe I’m bigger, and the boxes stacked along the walls have settled into permanence. Grandad’s handwriting on the labels, neat and precise:
TAX RECORDS 1990-2000. BOAT MANUALS. PHOTOGRAPHS. GARETH.
That last one stops me cold.
My father’s name in my grandfather’s handwriting, on a box shoved into the corner as an afterthought. Like a secret.
I should look for the roofing sealant. That’s why I’m here. Practical reasons.
Instead, I’m crossing to the corner, pulling the box out from behind a broken chair and a stack of mildewed books.
It’s lighter than I expected – not much inside, then.
Which makes sense. My father didn’t leave much behind.
Just debts and questions and a daughter who spent her childhood trying to be enough.
I sit on the floor, box in my lap, and lift the lid.
Photographs first. A few of them, curled at the edges. Dad as a young man – younger than I am now, maybe early twenties. He’s handsome in that careless way some men have, dark hair falling across his forehead, half-smile like he knows a secret. He looks happy.
I don’t remember him looking happy.
I remember him staring out of windows. Remember the smell on his breath at breakfast, sour, sharp, what I’d later learn was whisky. I remember the way he’d look at me sometimes, through me. No, not at me, through me.
Dad. Dad, are you even listening to me?
I was maybe twelve, and furious, not knowing why. He was at the kitchen table in the flat in Taunton – the one above the chip shop, the one where the walls sweated grease and Grandad kept the heating off in March because the metre was running down and there was nothing left to feed it.
Why do you look at me like that? I’d demanded, standing in the doorway with my school bag over one shoulder, my uniform two sizes too big because Grandad bought ahead and I hadn’t grown into it yet. Like I’m not even here?
He didn’t answer. Just reached for his glass and turned away.
The next photograph: Dad and Grandad, standing in front of a boat.
The Lady Catherine, I think – one of the trawlers Grandad ran before everything fell apart.
Before we left Sea Salt Bay and Grandad lost his harbour berth, his contracts, his shed, his name on the wall.
A Sea Salt Bay fisherman without Sea Salt Bay is just a man who knows about boats.
He took whatever work he could find – warehouse shifts in Taunton, boatyard labour in Bristol, scrubbing other people’s hulls in Southampton for nine quid an hour.
A man who’d been his own skipper, reduced to maintenance on vessels he’d have outrun in his prime.
They’re not touching in the photograph, not smiling, but there’s a closeness in the way they’re standing. Solidarity, maybe. The aftermath of a fight they won together.
Under the photographs, papers. Boat registrations, old licences, a sheaf of bills that no longer matter. And underneath those—
Letters.
A bundle of them, tied with kitchen string gone grey. I pull them out carefully, afraid they might crumble.
The envelopes are addressed in my father’s handwriting. But there’s no postmark. No stamp. They were never sent.
And they’re all addressed to H.
H. Not my mum, then. My mother’s name was Paula.
Paula Reynolds from Leeds, who met Dad at Plymouth and got more than she bargained for – me, the accident, the surprise nobody planned.
She went back to Leeds when it didn’t work out.
No hard feelings, or none she ever expressed.
Some people are in your life and some aren’t.
I have no memories of Plymouth and no real memories of my mother, and that’s not bitterness – it’s just fact. Like the weather or the tide.
So not P.
H.
I should put them back. These are private – my father’s words, meant for someone whose name starts with H.
A woman. A piece of whatever happened during one of those long periods when he’d disappear into himself and Grandad would shake his head and pour another cup of tea and say nothing, because what could he say?
I should put them back in the box and close the lid and go find the roofing sealant.
But then these aren’t private, they belong to me, in this cottage, and everyone else is dead. I untie the string.
My dearest H,
I know I can’t send this. I know you’ve made your choice. But I can’t stop writing to you – it’s the only way I can still feel close to you, even though I know you’ll never read these words.
The boys are lucky to have you. I understand why you chose them. I would have chosen them too, if I could. But understanding doesn’t make it hurt less.
I miss you. God, I miss you. Some days it’s all I can do to get out of bed, knowing you’re in the same village and I can’t touch you, can’t speak to you, can’t even look at you without everyone seeing what we had.
What we lost.
The letter continues, but my eyes have snagged on one phrase.
The boys.
H has sons. Had sons. This letter is old – written when they were still in the village, before we left.
And my traitorous brain supplies, unbidden: the harbour wall. His face inches from mine. Knowing you’re in the same village and I can’t touch you.
I shove the thought away. I am not my father. This is not the same thing.
But the echo is there, and it frightens me.
I flip to the next letter. And the next.
H, I saw you in the village today. You looked through me like I wasn’t there. I know that’s what we agreed – no contact, no acknowledgement – but Christ, it hurt.
Sometimes I wonder if leaving is the right thing. W thinks so. He says we’ll destroy everything if we stay – the business, the family name, the children. Maybe he’s right. But leaving feels like dying. Leaving means admitting you’re never coming to me.
W. That’s Grandad. Walter.
So Grandad knew. Whatever happened between my father and this mysterious H, Grandad knew about it. Helped engineer the departure. Took us away to protect … what? The family name? My father from himself? The children – whoever they were?
The next letter is shorter. The handwriting’s different – shakier, the letters slipping sideways like the hand that wrote them had been drinking.
H,
Brynn asked me today why I look at her the way I do. Why I look right through her like she’s not even there.
I wanted to tell her: I go to you. Always to you.
She deserves better than a father who’s only half present. They all do. But I can’t seem to find my way back from wherever you took me.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
G.
I read it twice. Three times.
Brynn asked me today why I look at her the way I do.
I set the letters down carefully. My hands are shaking.
All those years I thought the problem was me.
That I wasn’t enough. I learned to fix engines because he worked on boats.
I learned to tie knots because Grandad said it might give us common ground.
I made myself indispensable, competent, strong – the daughter who could strip a gearbox and patch a hull and never needed anything from anyone.
And none of it mattered.
Because he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking through me, searching for someone else.
‘You bastard,’ I whisper to the empty room. ‘You selfish, broken bastard.’
The words echo off the damp walls. No one answers. My father’s been dead for two years, liver finally giving out after decades of damage. I didn’t make it to the hospital in time. He died alone in a ward in Bristol, probably still thinking about H, and I didn’t even get to ask him why.
Now I have half an answer. Worse than no answer at all.
I bundle the letters back together, hands clumsy with shaking. There’s more in the box – I can see another layer underneath – but I can’t do this anymore. Not today.
I shove everything back in, close the lid, push the box into its corner.
Some doors should stay closed.