Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
brYNN
The training session Monday evening is brutal.
Cal runs us through scenarios until my arms are burning and my lungs ache. Rope work in the rain. Equipment checks in the dark. Communication drills where we have to coordinate without seeing each other, trusting only voices through the static.
I throw myself into it. Let the physical exhaustion burn away everything – the letters, my father’s ghost, the cottage that’s held its breath for twenty years while mine stopped making sense.
Jude’s there. Acting deputy means he’s running half the drills, and tonight he’s teaching throw-bag technique.
Which means he’s standing behind me, adjusting my grip on the rope, and his fingertips graze the inside of my wrist as he repositions my hand and my pulse jumps so hard I’m certain he can feel it through the neoprene.
‘Elbow higher,’ he says, his breath warm against the back of my neck. ‘Release on the forward swing. Like this—’
He demonstrates, and I watch his arm extend in the rain, the smooth motion of someone who’s done this a thousand times, and my pulse quickens, because he’s patient when he’s teaching.
Focused. None of the bravado, none of the smirk.
This version of Jude – careful, competent, his voice low and steady in the downpour – is worse than the cocky one.
The cocky one I can resist. This one makes me want to lean into him and stay there.
I throw the bag. It arcs out across the water, lands within a metre of the target.
‘Good,’ he says. Just that. Good. And he moves on to Bill, and the cold air rushes in where his warmth was.
Colleagues.
‘Casualty recovery,’ Cal calls from the platform edge. ‘Trelawney, Harding – you’re up. Simulated unconscious casualty, moderate swell conditions. I want to see communication, coordination, and a clean extraction. Three minutes.’
The practice dummy bobs in the training pool, face-down, arms splayed. Weighted to feel like a real body. I’ve done this drill a hundred times in other stations, other harbours, other lives. It’s muscle memory. Routine.
Except my partner is Jude Harding, and nothing about Jude Harding has been routine since the moment I arrived in this village.
‘I’ll take point,’ I say, not looking at him. ‘You stabilise from the platform.’
‘Fine.’
We move into position. Professional. Efficient. Two colleagues doing a job.
I lower myself into the pool and the cold hits like a slap – even through the drysuit, even expecting it.
The wave generator is running, pushing swells across the surface that make the dummy roll and drift.
I swim out, get my arms under it, start the turn.
The weight is realistic – dead weight, the hardest kind, the kind that fights you without meaning to.
‘Bringing him in,’ I call. ‘Ready on the platform.’
‘Ready.’
I kick towards the edge, hauling the dummy with me. The platform is about a foot above the waterline – you need leverage and a second pair of hands to get a casualty up and over. That’s the point of the drill. You can’t do this alone.
Jude’s kneeling at the edge, arms braced. I push the dummy up towards him. He grabs the harness, takes the weight, starts to haul.
‘Lift on three,’ he says. ‘One, two—’
On three, we both heave. The dummy comes up and over the lip of the platform, and my hands slide forward to guide it onto the deck, and that’s when it happens.
His fingers close over mine.
Not a brush. Not an accident. His hand lands directly on top of mine on the dummy’s harness, his palm flat against my knuckles, and the contact is – it’s nothing. It’s a fraction of a second. It’s two people in neoprene gloves hauling a weighted mannequin onto a concrete platform in the rain.
It’s everything.
His fingers are cold and wet and I can feel the pressure of each one individually, like they’re being mapped onto my skin.
My pulse slams into my throat. Every nerve ending in my hand fires simultaneously and sends a signal straight to the base of my spine and I cannot – I absolutely cannot – react.
Cal is six feet away with a clipboard.
Bill is watching from the equipment bay.
I do not look at Jude.
If I look at him, he’ll see it. The wanting.
The stupid, inconvenient, catastrophic wanting that has nothing to do with the shed and everything to do with the way he said, ‘You’re good,’ on the harbour wall like he meant it.
Like my competence was worth admiring, not fearing.
Like I was a person he respected, not a problem he was managing.
Nobody has ever made my competence feel like a gift. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know where to put it.
His hand is still on mine.
One second. Two.
He pulls back. I pull back. We both return to the dummy, positioning it for the mock assessment, and neither of us acknowledges what just happened because nothing happened. Nothing at all. Just a hand on a hand during a routine drill.
‘Airway,’ Jude says, voice slightly rough. He clears his throat. ‘Check the airway.’
‘I know how to check an airway.’
‘Then check it.’
I tilt the dummy’s head back. My hands are steady. I’m a professional. I am completely, absolutely fine.
Except I can still feel the exact weight of his fingers on mine.
Can still feel the heat of his palm through the neoprene.
Can map the precise location of each point of contact like a diagnostic – index finger across my second knuckle, thumb against the base of my wrist, the heel of his hand pressing into the back of mine.
I have a mechanic’s hands. I notice pressure, grip, torque. I can’t stop noticing.
‘Airway clear,’ I say. ‘Breathing absent. Commencing CPR.’
I press my palms to the dummy’s chest and count. One and two and three and four. Mechanical. Rhythmic. Focusing on the count because the count is safe and the count doesn’t make my skin burn and the count doesn’t have dark eyes and a jaw that tightens when he’s concentrating on not looking at me.
‘Good,’ Cal says from somewhere behind me. ‘That’s clean. Nice work, both of you.’
I sit back on my heels. Jude’s already standing, already stepping away, already putting distance between us with the practised efficiency of a man who knows exactly how close is too close.
He doesn’t look at me.
I don’t look at him.
We’re fine. This is fine. We’re colleagues.
‘Good work,’ Cal says at the end, rain dripping off his jacket. ‘Trelawney, you’re solid. Keep showing up like this and you’ll do fine.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Harding, a word?’
They move off towards the station, heads bent together. I wring the rain out of my ponytail and try to slow my heartbeat down to a rhythm that won’t show on a cardiac monitor.
Bill materialises at my shoulder. ‘Not bad, Trelawney.’
From Bill, this is practically a standing ovation.
‘Thanks, Bill.’
‘Most newcomers take weeks to settle in. You fit like you’ve been here all along.’ He pauses, and his weathered face softens. ‘Peter would’ve been impressed. He liked people who could work.’
My throat tightens. ‘So I’ve heard.’
‘Friday night. The Ship. Crew tradition – well, village tradition, honestly. Tilly does fish and chips. Best in Cornwall, though don’t tell anyone in Padstow I said so.’ He claps my shoulder. ‘You should come.’
‘Maybe.’
‘That’s a yes, then.’ He ambles off towards the car park.
I’m left standing in the rain, thinking about belonging.
I’ve never stayed anywhere longer than eighteen months.
Not because I chose to go – because staying was never an option.
The work dried up. The rent increased. The lease wasn’t renewed.
You move when the ground shifts under you.
You stop unpacking properly. You keep your tools in the Land Rover because tools are the one thing you can’t afford to lose when the notice comes.
I came here expecting hostility and found … this. Bill buying me a pint. Dot giving me a bed. Nina keeping a seat. The only person who’s actively hostile is Reuben, and even that feels less like cruelty and more like a man defending the only story he has left.
But I went to Nina’s when she needed someone. And I’m considering going to the pub on Friday. And there’s a cat sleeping in my shed that I’ve started thinking of as mine.
And there’s Monday. Every Monday. For five weeks.
The cottage is dark when I get back from training. I let myself in, hang my wet jacket on the hook I installed last week, and stand in the kitchen listening to the quiet. The space heater ticks. The silence is the particular kind that comes from being alone in a house that’s too big for one person.
I could text him. I won’t. But I could. I have his number now – crew contact list, purely professional – and his name sits in my phone like a dare.
Colleagues don’t text at 9 pm.
I make tea instead. Stand at the kitchen window in the dark, watching the harbour lights reflect off the water.
Colleagues.
The boat is in worse shape than I admitted.
I discover it Wednesday morning – or rather, I stop ignoring what I’ve known since I bought her.
The hull damage isn’t just cosmetic. The planking near the stern is soft, waterlogged, ready to give way.
The engine, which I’ve been coaxing back to life piece by piece, has corrosion in places I didn’t expect.
The fuel system I’ve been carefully rebuilding is connected to tanks that might be compromised.
She’s a money pit. A beautiful, hopeless money pit that I can’t afford to fix properly.
I sit on the shed floor, legs stretched out, back against the trawler’s hull, and do the maths for the hundredth time.
What’s left of the inheritance money: nothing.
What I had before I came here: ￡437 from eight years of garage work and boatyard labour and never quite earning enough to save.
What I’ve got now: less than nothing, if you count the roof tile sealant I bought from Dot on credit.
Smart move, Brynn. Really excellent life choices all around.
‘You look like someone stole your biscuit.’
I look up. Nina’s in the shed doorway, travel mug in hand.
‘Just contemplating my financial ruin.’
‘Ah.’ She sits beside me on the concrete floor, close enough that our shoulders almost touch. ‘The cottage or the boat?’
‘Both. Either. Does it matter?’
‘Probably not.’ She offers me the travel mug. ‘Coffee. The good stuff, not that instant atrocity you’ve been drinking.’
I take it gratefully. ‘How do you know what I’ve been drinking?’
‘The orgasmic expression you make when you taste mine. Dead giveaway.’
We sit in silence for a moment. Ghost appears from somewhere in the shadows and drapes himself across Nina’s lap like she’s his rightful owner, which she sort of is. She scratches behind his ear, making him arch his scrawny back.
‘I found some letters,’ I hear myself say. ‘In the cottage. My father’s.’
Nina doesn’t push. Just waits.
‘Love letters. Unsent. To someone called H. Apparently he spent his whole life pining for a woman who chose her sons over him.’ I take a sip of coffee.
It’s good. ‘I never knew. I thought he was just – sad. Broken. That it was the drinking, or the moving, or just who he was. But it wasn’t.
He was in love with someone he couldn’t have, and it ate him alive, and the rest of us got caught in the wreckage. ’
‘And now?’
‘Now I think my grandad knew. Helped cover it up. Took us away from Sea Salt Bay to protect – I don’t know. The families. The children. Whatever was going to explode if we stayed.’
I stare at the hull of the trawler above us. My boat. My grandfather’s legacy. The only thing the Trelawneys have left.
‘Peter kept a journal,’ Nina says quietly. ‘Did I tell you that?’
I shake my head.
‘Found it after. Hidden in his desk drawer.’ She stares at Ghost, not at me. ‘He wrote about us. About how scared he was that he wasn’t good enough for me. That I’d wake up one day and realise I’d made a mistake.’
‘That doesn’t sound like the Peter everyone describes.’
‘It wasn’t. Or it was – just the part he kept hidden. We all have those parts, don’t we? The fears we don’t say out loud.’ She glances at me. ‘Maybe your father was the same. Maybe the letters were his hidden place.’
Maybe.
‘Friday,’ Nina says, changing subjects with the abruptness of someone who knows when a topic has been mined enough. ‘You’re coming to the pub.’
‘Bill already recruited me.’
‘Good. I’ll save you a seat.’ She stands, brushes off her jeans, dislodging Ghost, who gives her a look of pure feline betrayal. ‘And Brynn? Whatever’s in those letters – it’s about him. Not about you. His choices. His regrets. You didn’t cause them.’
I want to believe that. I’m not sure I can.
‘I’ll see you Friday,’ I say instead.
She smiles and heads out into the grey morning, leaving me alone with my ruined boat and my father’s ghost and the unanswered questions piling up like storm clouds on the horizon.
H.
Who is H?