Page 4 of Bonetide

And at that, she lifts her hand. It’s not a threat or a warning, but it is something. I find myself standing in the shop with my groceries hanging from one fist, trying to figure out what she meant.

“Drive safe back, hen,” she commands. “The light can go early when the clouds come down.”

I look out the window. The sky has gone the color of old pewter while I’ve been in the shop, though it is barely past four in the afternoon.

“Thanks, Mhairi.”

“Mind how you go.”

I drive home with the heater on high and the radio off. I don’t normally drive without some sort of music that quiets my thoughts, but the silence feels like the appropriate response to whatever just happened. I want to be able to hear myself think.

Mhairi knows something, I can tell. Why else would she have gone cagey? She knows something about that castle across the loch, and she chose not to tell me. Why? Am I too new, not yet a resident who is privy to local lore? Do I have to prove myself by doing something silly, like living in my aunt’s cottage for a year?

The road bends around the lower slopes and the loch comes up on my right, slate-dark in the failing light. The mountains across the water are losing their edges, and the clouds have come down low. It’s so wonderfully moody, so unmistakably The Highlands, that I wish I brought my paints with me so I could capture the scene.

Then, as I turn down my road and pass through the copse of Caledonian pine trees, I see it.

See him.

This time, he’s in the water.

Not on the far shore. Not across the bay. In the water, ten meters off the road, swimming a slow, even stroke parallel to my car.

I hit the brake harder than I mean to. The car lurches. The groceries tip in the passenger seat and the milk thumps against the door.

He stops swimming.

He treads water. I can see the small movement of his shoulders, the dark shape of his head above the surface. Then he turns to face the road.

To face me.

I can’t see his eyes from here thanks to the light, but I can feel them.

We stay like that for what is probably three seconds but feels like considerably longer, my foot still pressed heavily on the break. He’s not moving except to keep his head above the water, which he is doing efficiently, as if he knows exactly how much effort it costs him and won’t spend a calorie more.

Then he lifts one hand out of the water.

Not a wave. Nothing that friendly. He just lifts it, palm out, like he’s marking the spot. Like he’s saying here I am.

Hill-walker, my ass.

I take my foot off the brake.

The car rolls forward.

I drive the rest of the road with both hands on the wheel, my grip tighter. I’m not sure what it is about this naked swimming man that has me so on edge, but I’m strangely unnerved. Guess it comes with the territory when you’re a single woman living alone in an isolated cottage in a foreign country.

When I get inside the feeling lingers, so I quickly lock the front door behind me. Then I lock the back door, which I didn’t bother with earlier. I mean, what’s someone going to steal? A blue tin of sewing supplies?

I hang my coat, put the kettle on, then sit at the kitchen table.

The sketchbook is where I left it, still open. I look at it in the low light from the kitchen lamp.

I flip to a fresh page.

I draw him from memory.

I draw him as he was in the morning, on the far shore, distant and pale and unbothered. I draw the line of his shoulders. The hang of his arms. The angle of his head. I don’t usually draw figures—my work is botanical, the careful, particular spread of a petal, the veins of a leaf—but I have been trained, and the proportions are something I should be able to do without thinking. I draw for maybe ten minutes, then I sit back.