Epilogue
brYNN
Five months later
Betty sits in the harbour like she belongs there.
Because she does. Finally.
I stand on the quay, coffee in hand, watching the early morning light catch her hull. Fresh paint – not the garish colours I’d first imagined, but a deep navy with her name picked out in gold. Classic. Timeless. The kind of boat my grandfather would have been proud of.
It’s taken me six months to finish her. Six months of sanding, varnishing, replacing rotted timber, rebuilding the engine piece by piece. Four months of early mornings and aching shoulders and splinters in places I didn’t know splinters could go.
Worth it. Every bloody splinter.
‘She looks good.’
I don’t turn. Don’t need to. I’d know that voice anywhere.
Jude appears beside me, his own coffee steaming in the September chill. He’s let his hair grow out a bit – it suits him. Makes him look younger. Less like Reuben.
‘She looks better than good,’ I say. ‘She looks perfect.’
‘Modest as ever.’
‘I’ve earned the right to be smug.’
He laughs. Slides an arm around my waist, pulling me against his side. I let him. More than let him – I lean into it, into him, into the solid warmth of a man who spent five months proving he meant what he said in that Bristol garden.
It wasn’t easy. I didn’t make it easy. But he showed up, again and again, even when I pushed back. Even when I tested him. Even when I needed to be sure he wasn’t going to bolt the moment things got hard.
He didn’t bolt.
‘Nervous?’ I ask.
‘Terrified.’
‘Good. You should be. University’s full of bright young things who actually remember how to study.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’
‘I’m just saying. You’re going to be the old man of the cohort.’
‘I’m twenty-eight.’
‘Just,’ I correct, thinking back to his recent birthday when we surfed until our muscles ached and then ate pasties dusted with sand snuggled under a blanket in the cove. Then I grin and add, ‘Practically ancient.’
He pinches my hip and I squirm away, laughing.
It still surprises me sometimes. The laughing. The ease of it. After everything that happened – the hospital, Bristol, the weeks of careful rebuilding – I didn’t know if we’d ever get back to this. To a life that feels like it contains so much joy I don’t know how to handle it without exploding.
But here we are.
‘What time’s your train?’ I ask.
‘Eleven. Kit’s driving me to the station.’
‘And you’ve got everything? Books, laptop, that ridiculous amount of stationery you bought—’
‘Brynn.’ He turns me to face him. Both hands on my waist. ‘I’m going to Plymouth, not the moon. I’ll be back every weekend.’
‘You’d better be. Someone needs to crew the lifeboat and I’m not trusting Bill with her when Cal isn’t on shift.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it. Kit’s back now, anyway, he’s deputy.’ His shoulders relax, easing as he remembers the pressure that suffocated him only a few months ago is no longer his burden alone.
He kisses me. Slow and warm, tasting like coffee and salt air and the future we’re building together.
When he pulls back, his eyes are soft. ‘Thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For pushing me. For not letting me hide behind duty and obligation and all the excuses I made for staying stuck.’ He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. ‘I’d still be on the Mary Jane if it weren’t for you. Still pretending I didn’t want more.’
‘You’d have figured it out eventually.’
‘Maybe. But you made me brave enough to actually do something about it.’
I don’t have words for that. So I kiss him again instead.
The sign above the boat shed still makes me smile.
Trelawney & Harding Marine Services
It was Kit’s idea. After everything came out – the affair, the letters, the decades of lies – he’d sat me and Jude down in Nina’s café and laid it out like a business proposal.
The Trelawneys had the shed, and I definitely have the skills.
The Hardings had the boats, the contacts, the fishing crews who needed repairs done.
‘Trelawneys and Hardings have always been competition,’ Kit said. ‘Maybe it’s time to try being partners instead.’
I’d expected Jude to resist. He’d not want me to be tied in with the legacy of another family business.
But Jude had just looked at me. At the shed through the window. At the future waiting to be built.
‘Partners,’ he’d said. And that was that.
Reuben had opinions, of course. Reuben always has opinions.
But Reuben’s opinions don’t carry the weight they used to.
He’s still in the cottage. Still recovering, though he’s stronger now – strong enough to walk to the harbour most days, to sit on the bench by the sea wall and watch the boats come and go.
He spends time with Maisie and the community he’s always lived in, although he doesn’t consume as many pints of Cornish ale as he once did.
Isla, when she came back from New York, only a couple of weeks after Kit and Maisie, put him on a strict regime of tofu and green juices.
He complained, but he drinks the juices.
We don’t talk much. But we talk.
He nodded at me in the harbour last Tuesday. Said ‘Morning,’ and I said it back. For Reuben, that’s practically an embrace.
It started about a month after Bristol. Jude came back from visiting him one evening, quiet and thoughtful, and when I asked what happened he just said, ‘He apologised. For the letters. For lying about Mum.’
‘Did you forgive him?’
‘I don’t know.’ Jude had stared out the window for a long time.
‘He was wrong. What he did was unforgivable. But he was also… He was hurt, Brynn. She cheated on him. She was leaving him for another man. And instead of falling apart, he just … hardened. Turned all that pain into a cruel protective mechanism.’
‘That doesn’t excuse it.’
‘No. It doesn’t.’ He’d turned to look at me then. ‘But it explains it. And I think I needed to understand before I could figure out what comes next.’
What comes next, it turns out, is messier than forgiveness but more honest than pretending.
Jude visits him twice a week. They talk about the boats, the weather, the fishing quotas – safe subjects, neutral ground.
Sometimes Kit joins them when he’s in town.
Helen hasn’t seen him, isn’t ready for that, and Reuben hasn’t asked.
Maybe he never will. Maybe some bridges stay burned.
But last week, when Jude told him about the university acceptance, about finally pursuing marine biology, Reuben had gone quiet for a long moment. Then he’d said, ‘Your mother always said you were too clever for fishing.’
It was the first time he’d mentioned Helen without bitterness.
It’s not much. But it’s a start.
Helen’s coming for Sunday lunch.
It’s become a thing – once a fortnight, sometimes more.
She drives down from Bristol, stays in the spare room at mine and Jude’s place (because yes, we have a place now, the cottage that used to be my grandfather’s, almost fixed up and warm with summer sun, and finally feeling like home).
She brings wine and stories and the kind of maternal fussing that still makes Jude go quiet sometimes, overwhelmed by having what he spent twenty years missing.
Lily comes too, when she can. She’s started at Bristol Uni – marine biology, of all things, which made Jude laugh until he cried when she told him. ‘Must be genetic,’ she’d said, and he’d hugged her so hard she’d complained about her ribs.
It’s strange, having a sister. Strange and wonderful and occasionally infuriating, because Lily has opinions about everything and she’s not shy about sharing them. But I wouldn’t trade her for anything.
The boat launch is next weekend.
I’ve invited everyone – Helen, Lily, Kit and Isla and Maisie if they can make it. Nina’s doing the catering. Tom’s promised to keep his opinions about seaworthiness to himself. Even Cal and Cass are coming despite the lack of sleep they are suffering from baby Ellie.
Jude’s deferring his first week of lectures to be there. ‘I’m not missing this,’ he said when I told him the date. ‘I’ve watched you build that boat from a wreck. I’m going to watch her sail.’
‘She might sink.’
‘She won’t sink.’
‘She might. First voyage. Anything could happen.’
‘Brynn.’ He’d taken my face in his hands, the way he does when he wants me to really hear him. ‘That boat is not going to sink. You know why?’
‘Why?’
‘Because you built her. And you don’t do anything by halves.’
I’d kissed him then. Partly because I wanted to, partly to hide the fact that my eyes were stinging.
Turns out I’m not as tough as I thought I was.
Turns out that’s okay.
The sun’s fully up now. The harbour’s coming to life – fishermen heading out, tourists starting to trickle down to the beach, Nina opening the café with a clatter of chairs and a wave in my direction.
Jude’s phone buzzes. He checks it, smiles.
‘Kit. He’s on his way to pick me up.’
‘You’d better go, then. Don’t want to miss your train to your fancy university.’
‘Plymouth is not fancy.’
‘It’s fancier than anything I ever did.’
‘You restored a boat from scratch. I’d say that counts as an education.’
I walk him back to the cottage and watch him grab his bag, check his pockets three times for his keys, do all the nervous rituals of someone about to start a new life.
At the door, he stops. Turns.
‘I love you,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I say it enough. But I do. I love you, Brynn Trelawney.’
‘I love you too, Jude Harding.’
‘Even when I’m an idiot?’
‘Especially when you’re an idiot. Gives me something to feel superior about.’
He grins. Kisses me one last time. And then he’s gone, jogging down the lane toward Kit’s waiting car, toward Plymouth, toward the future he should have had all along.
I stand in the doorway and watch until the car disappears over the hill.
Then I turn back to the cottage. To the boat shed. To the life I’ve built in this village.
Funny how things work out.
Six months ago I came to Sea Salt Bay with no idea what would await me here.
All I owned was a suitcase full of anger and a lonely shadow that followed me wherever I went.
I never expected attachments, complications, falling in love with a cheeky fisherman who didn’t know how to ask for what he wanted and hid his pain under his hoodies and flip-flops.
Now I’ve got a business, a boat, a sister I never knew existed, and a man who’s learning – slowly, imperfectly, but genuinely – how to build a life for himself instead of just maintaining what someone else started.
It’s not the life I planned.
It’s better.
Betty rocks gently in the harbour, waiting for her maiden voyage. The sign above the boat shed catches the morning light. Somewhere in Bristol, Helen is probably already planning what to bring for Sunday lunch.
And me?
I’m home.