Page 159 of Bonetide

And then he crosses the boat to me, carefully, mortally, one hand on the gunwale because he can drown now and we both know it, and he kisses me in the middle of the bright water, and there is nothing in the sea but fish, and nothing in the man but the man, and nothing in the kiss but us.

Chapter

Thirty-Five

The snow comes in the second week of December, which delights me because I’m one of those weirdos that love snow. But Alasdair seems to take the cold personally.

It’s not even proper snow; just a light dusting overnight, the kind that sugars the heather and lies in the seams of the drystone walls and is gone from the road by noon. But it’s enough that he stands at the back window with his tea, glowering at it like it owes him money, and announces, “It’s inside my feet, Iris. The cold. It’s gotten inside my feet.”

“That’s called poor circulation. Wear the socks I bought you.”

“I survived the bloody plague.”

“Not in this mortal body, you didn’t. Wear the damn socks.”

He wears the thick wool socks I picked up at the Torridon gift shop, and the second jumper I bought for him when we went to Inverness for a few days, and he’s developed a relationship with the wood stove that borders on courtship—feeding it, tending it, angling his chair toward it. Not to mention every single day this body of his presents him with some fresh outrage, like hunger at inconvenient hours, or a crick in his neck from sleeping wrong, and every single day he files his complaints with me like I’m his manufacturer. The thing is, he likes to complain. He delights in the action, but he also—secretly—delights in having a mortal body, even if he’s slowly turning into a grumpy old man.

Two weeks ago, he caught a cold. His first in centuries, picked up god knows where, the village, probably, the shop, some child’s sneeze in the queue, and you’d have thought from the gravity of him that it was the plague come back. He lay on the couch under two blankets with his nose running and his eyes streaming and said, in a voice of genuine wonder, “There’s no managing it. It just does what it does to you and you wait.”

And then he sneezed nine times in a row and I laughed so hard my pelvic floor barely held on, and he glared at me over the blanket with his red nose, this ancient terror of the western seas, the eldritch Lord of Drowning, and started laughing too, which turned into coughing, which set me off worse.

He’d never been sick before, least not since he was turned. But he’d never been better before, either. A week later the cold lifted, and he woke up clear and bright and lay there marveling. I got to watch a man discover recovery, the ordinary miracle of a body fixing itself, and he held my hand under the quilt and said, “It comes back. You go down and you come back,” like he’d worked out the whole point of the design. I couldn’t help but kiss him, the utter naivety of it all.

I found his first grey hair on a Sunday.

We were in bed, late morning, no reason to be up—there is shockingly little reason to be up, in December, on a sea loch, when you work from home, when you’re stupid in love—and the light, streaming through the curtains, caught his temple and there it was, one bright thread in all that black, and my heart did something so complicated I had to close my eyes for a second.

Because it’s working. That’s what the grey thread is. It’s the binding keeping its terrible promise, time getting its hands into him at last, the clock I started with a little black knife in October ticking where I can see it.

I didn’t say anything. I just touched it, lightly, and he caught my hand and held it there against his temple, and he knew. Of course he knew, he examines his face in the mirror every morning like a vain little beast.

“One,” he said, a warning tone.

“One,” I agreed.

“It suits me, I’d say. Gives me a distinguished, flair. A silver fox, as they call them.”

“It’s one hair, Alasdair.”

“Aye. And I earned it.” He kissed my palm and put my hand on his chest, over the heartbeat he’s stopped being startled by, and we lay there with all that hard-won time in front of us, spending some of it on nothing at all.

Winter keeps its thumb on me too, of course. December on a sea loch is not, it turns out, fibromyalgia’s favorite climate (who would have thought!?). The damp gets into my hips the way the cold gets into his feet, and there are mornings my hands wake up before I do, aching around nothing, and I have to run them under the hot tap before they’ll hold a pencil. But now, when I flare, instead of soldiering through it alone, there’s a man who’s learned my body’s weather better than his own, who has the hot water bottle filled before I’ve finished admitting I need it, who rubs my hands by the stove without being asked, and without making it a Thing, who simply adjusts the day around the bad days the way you’d adjust sail.

“The body has opinions,” he states, handing me my heat pad, quoting himself. Honestly, between the two of us and our complaining carcasses, this cottage is one ailment away from a convalescent home.

The work’s gone quiet with the season, the way it should. There’s not much to press this time of year since the moor’s gone over, the heather’s done, everything sleeping under the frost, and I’m glad now I gathered like a madwoman in August, because the flower press in the studio is full of summer: heather, and bog myrtle, and harebell, foxglove, wolfsbane, yarrow, flattened and waiting. I’m behind on the deadlines I’m always behind on, but the sketchbook’s filling anyway, studies of bare branches, the architecture of dead bracken, rosehips going wrinkled and brilliant on the bush by the gate. Winter botany is surprising and it turns out there’s plenty to draw once you stop waiting for things to bloom, which is either a discovery about illustration or about my entire life. Probably both.

The cottage is practically made for Christmas, like it belongs in one of those little ceramic town sets my grandmother had in her living room growing up.

I found Effie’s decorations in November, in a trunk in the mudroom filled with tissue-wrapped glass baubles, a tangle of lights that miraculously work, robins and tartan ribbon and a hand-stitched angel gone soft with handling. It was so wonderfully vintage Christmas kitsch, each item packed with nostalgia for eras I never lived in, that unpacking them felt like being handed one more inheritance, the gentlest one yet. The tree’s a small one from the lot outside Shieldaig, that got strapped to the roof of the runabout and dragged in the front door with a lot of swearing and needles everywhere, and it stands in the corner of the sitting room now wearing sixty years of Effie’s Christmases, and some evenings I catch Alasdair just looking at it with his tea. I don’t blame him. One of my favorite things to do is just drink whisky and stare at the tree and dazzling lights.

The runabout, for the record, is a fifteen-year-old beige Vauxhall, bought off a sheep farmer past Torridon. It rattles, it smells faintly of both dog and sheep, the heater has two settings—off, and surface of the sun—and I love it without reservation because it’s mine. The rental car went back to Inverness in November, taillight fixed, every trace of my old provisional life handed over the counter with the keys.

Constable MacRae himself waved me through the village last week, friendly as he ever is—which, I mean, isn’t saying much. Sinclair’s case went where cases go when the loch is involved—the file is open, the way Catriona Carmichael’s file is open, which is to say cold. The police came in late October, two of them, from the city, and sat at my kitchen table while I told them my one lie for the last time. They wrote it down and thanked me for the shortbread. Mhairi’s kept her side. I’ve kept mine. The loch keeps everything else.

I thought I’d carry it heavier than this, like I thought it would weigh me down with each minute, hour day. And maybe someday it’ll get heavy again. But the women are out past the headland where the sea takes what the loch can’t hold, and no one else will ever join them. And when I weigh the lie against that, the scale doesn’t even move. Not a wee bit.

Maddie calls on a Tuesday evening while I’m elbow-deep in mince pie filling, so Alasdair answers the phone.