Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
brYNN
Sunday morning in Sea Salt Bay has its own rhythm.
The harbour empties out like someone’s pulled a plug – fishing boats tied up, engines silent, the usual chaos of nets and crates and shouting replaced by a silence almost close to peaceful. Reset day, Grandad used to call it. The day the sea gives us back to ourselves.
I’ve been in the shed since seven, taking advantage of the quiet.
The trawler sits on her blocks, engine spread across the deck in pieces that would look like chaos to anyone else but make perfect sense to me.
Fuel injectors. Cooling system housing. The guts of a boat that’s seen better days but isn’t dead yet.
Neither am I, despite my best efforts.
Friday night keeps replaying. Reuben’s face, twisted with an emotion deeper than hate.
My own voice, shaking: My father is DEAD because of your family.
And Jude afterwards, on the harbour, looking at me like I was fragile and breakable, which I’m not, but in the moment made me feel as stretched and as brittle as blown glass.
I shouldn’t have said any of it. Should have kept my mouth shut, my head down, my secrets where they belong.
But God, it felt good to finally throw the weight of it at someone who might actually deserve to carry some.
Even if that someone isn’t Jude.
I’m elbow-deep in the fuel system when footsteps echo on the harbour stones outside. I don’t look up. Probably Bill, checking his boat. One of the weekend sailors come to admire their neglected toys.
‘Thought you might need this.’
Jude’s voice. Of course it’s Jude’s voice.
I look up. He’s standing at the shed entrance, two takeaway cups in one hand and a paper bag in the other. The morning light behind him catches the angles of his face, and he looks almost soft. Uncertain. Nothing like the scowling fisherman I’ve come to expect.
‘Coffee,’ he says, lifting the cups. ‘And whatever pastry Nina shoved in the bag. She said you hadn’t been in yet today.’
‘Checking up on me?’
‘Bringing you breakfast. There’s a difference.’
I wipe my hands on a rag and climb down from the deck, trying to ignore the way my heart has picked up. ‘And what do you want in return?’
‘Nothing.’ He holds out the coffee. ‘Call it a peace offering. After Friday.’
I take the cup. Our fingers brush, and I pretend I don’t notice.
‘Your father’s the one who should be offering peace.’
‘Yeah, well. Dad’s not great at apologies. Or peace. Or basic human interaction, really.’ He sets the bag on a crate, shoves his hands in his pockets, and his gaze drifts past me to the trawler’s stern. He stops.
‘You’ve named her.’
I follow his eyes to where I spent yesterday evening with a pot of marine paint and a steady hand. Betty. Dark blue letters on weathered wood. Not fancy. Not gold leaf. Just a name.
‘Betty,’ he reads, and I can hear the grin forming before I see it. ‘You’re naming a trawler … Betty.’
‘Problem?’
‘It’s a bit granny, isn’t it? Betty. Like she should be knitting in a rocking chair, not hauling nets.’
‘Betty was my great-grandmother. She crewed her husband’s trawler out of Mevagissey for thirty years, and when he died, she ran it herself for another ten.
She was seventy-two when she finally came ashore, and that was only because the boat sank under her.
’ I wipe my hands on the rag. ‘So yes. Betty. Like a granny who could outfish every man in this harbour.’
Jude stares at me for a beat. Then: ‘Fair enough. Betty it is.’
‘You’re damn right Betty it is.’
He’s trying not to smile. Failing. ‘For the record – the Mary Jane was named after our great-grandmother too. Similar sort of woman, apparently. Tough as old rope, and a menace to all who met her.’
‘So our great-grandmothers were both terrifying.’
‘Seems to run in both families.’
‘Did you just call me terrifying?’
‘I said it runs in the family. You drew your own conclusions.’
I shake my head, but I’m fighting a smile. ‘Drink your coffee, Harding, before I throw you in the harbour.’
He drinks. I drink. The silence is oddly comfortable.
‘So,’ he says, eyeing the engine parts across the deck. ‘Need any help?’
I laugh before I can stop myself. A real laugh, surprised out of me.
‘Help or hinder?’
‘I can be useful.’
‘Can you?’ I gesture at the dismantled fuel system. ‘Tell me what that is.’
He squints. ‘A … thing. A metal thing. Possibly important.’
‘It’s a fuel injector.’
‘I was going to say that.’
‘No you weren’t.’
‘No,’ he admits, the corner of his mouth twitching. ‘I wasn’t.’
‘How can you run a fishing business and not know what a fuel injector looks like?’
‘Because Kit does the boats and I do the books.’ He says it simply, like stating weather.
‘The contracts, the quotas, the accounts, the chandlery orders, the harbour fees, the insurance. Everything that doesn’t require getting your hands dirty.
Kit could strip an engine blindfolded. I can tell you what it costs to replace one, how long the lead time is from the supplier, and which insurance clause covers it. ’ He shrugs. ‘We were a good team.’
‘Were?’
‘Are. We are a good team. When he’s here.’
The way he says it. That slight flattening. I file it away.
‘So mechanical engineering isn’t your strong suit.’
‘Definitely not. Kit got those genes. I got the…’ He trails off. ‘I don’t know what I got, actually.’
‘What is your strong suit?’
He’s quiet for a moment. Looks out through the shed doors at the water, then back at me. More open than I’ve seen him.
‘You mean other than being a wannabe surf bum?’
There he goes, hiding behind a joke.
‘For someone who dresses like a surf bum, I haven’t actually seen you surf.’
‘Watching me closely, Trelawney?’
Damn. ‘Someone’s got to watch the stupid. Make sure it doesn’t get out of control.’
He huffs a laugh, gaze travelling out to the horizon where dark indigo stretches for miles.
‘I like the science side of it, actually. The environmental stuff. Understanding the ecosystems, the fish populations, how it all connects.’ He scrapes the toe of his boot across the concrete. ‘Sounds stupid when I say it out loud.’
‘It doesn’t sound stupid.’
‘It sounds like something a Harding shouldn’t care about.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because Hardings pull fish from the water. That’s what we do. That’s what we’ve always done.’
I lean against Betty’s hull, studying him. ‘So you’re in the family business of pulling fish from the water, but secretly you want to give them all the kiss of life and set them free?’
He rolls his eyes. ‘Now you’re just being ridiculous.’
‘Ooh, Harding. It’s a brave man that calls me ridiculous.’ I fight the grin and focus on the seriousness underneath. ‘Am I, though? Or am I right?’
He puffs out a slow breath and I hate the fact I’m noticing the dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose. Or the strand of lighter hair that sits proudly within his sandy waves.
I hate that I notice anything about him.
But I do. And there’s no denying it.
‘I’m not against fishing,’ he says eventually.
‘I just think we could do it better. Smarter. Sustainably.’ He says the word like it tastes strange in his mouth.
‘Peter was working on conservation corridors, rewilding the inlet margins. Making sure there’s still fish to catch in fifty years, not just next season. ’
My stomach drops at Peter’s name. At the echo of his notes, still spread across my workbench. Notes that Jude, from the sound of it, would understand, even enjoy.
‘I know,’ I say quietly. ‘I’ve read his research.’
Jude looks surprised. ‘You have?’
‘It’s in the shed. Nina said she wanted someone to look at it.’ I pause. ‘He had good ideas.’
‘He had brilliant ideas. And nobody listened.’ There’s an edge now. Frustration. Old anger, maybe. ‘Dad called it hippie nonsense. Said Peter was trying to put us all out of business.’
‘Was he?’
‘He was trying to make sure we still had a business in twenty years. But try explaining long-term thinking to a man who can barely see past the next catch.’
The bitterness surprises me. Not because it’s there, but because he’s letting me see it.
‘So why aren’t you doing it?’ I ask. ‘The environmental stuff. If that’s what you care about.’
His expression shutters. Just for a second, but I catch it.
‘Because I’m a Harding.’ He puts on a voice – deeper, booming, an exaggerated Reuben. ‘Harding boys are fishermen, always have been, always will be.’
The impression is so accurate it startles a laugh out of me. But underneath the comedy, there’s this trapped suffocation that leaches into his tone. And shit, if it doesn’t make my chest contract.
‘That’s a shit reason,’ I say. Meeting his gaze.
‘It’s the only reason I’ve got.’
‘No it isn’t.’ I set down my coffee, turn to face him properly. ‘You’re what, twenty-seven, twenty-eight?’
My gaze meets his, and of course I remember we were the same age all those years ago. I remember all of it. The sandcastles, the rock-pooling, the sandy pasties and the call from my grandad that it was time to come home for the day.
It aches. All of it.
So I wash it all away, pull it down with the tide by rolling my eyes and pulling a cry-baby face at him. I’m pretty sure I used to do that way back when too.
‘So you’re a grown man. With your own brain. Your own opinions. You don’t have to be what your father tells you to be.’
‘Easy for you to say. You didn’t grow up in it.’
‘I didn’t grow up in anything. That’s the point.’ The words come out sharp and bladed.
Jude’s quiet. I can see his brain working behind those green eyes.
‘So I kept moving,’ I say, ‘because staying was never an option. The work moved, so I moved. Taunton, Bristol, Southampton, Plymouth. Bedsits and boatyards and garage shifts. I wasn’t running from anything, Jude.
There was nothing to run from. There was nothing at all.
’ I look at him. ‘You stay in one place your whole life – you can’t imagine what it’s like to have nowhere that’s yours. ’
‘And now you’ve stopped.’