Page 78 of Bonetide

I look at the foxglove, as if daring it to bow its head.

“I’m going back to him, though.”

The foxglove doesn’t move.

“I’m going to give him what he’s asking for, and I don’t care if he breaks my heart. I’m going to do the thing you spent your whole life not doing. I’m going to open the door you kept closed with Eachann.”

I sit with that for a beat.

“And I came here because I’m scared, Effie. But not the way you would think, not in the way I should be, because he’s a person of interest when it comes to the missing women and the last thing I should be doing is engaging with him, let alone sleeping with him. It’s funny because I’m not scared of him. I am scared of not having him.”

I sigh and feel a tear tickle my face. I wipe it away with the heel of my palm.

“I don’t want to be you, Effie. I’m sorry. I know that sounds bad to someone who’s dead and can’t answer, although maybe you can answer and have been trying to. Anyway, I mean it the way a woman means it when she is looking at her own future in another woman’s gravestone. You lived alone here for sixty odd years. You wrote him letters you didn’t send. You kept your wards. You died in that cottage and there is one foxglove on your grave and no one has brought you any flowers.”

The wind picks up again, bringing a chill off the bay and smelling of rain. I sniffle.

“I don’t want that for myself. I’ve lived my life trying to do the right thing, trying to be normal and responsible, and, I don’t know, behave, and it never felt right, never felt like I was living for myself. I mean, I was already married and I lost that fairy tale. Now you, this land, it’s presented me with a new one. With Alasdair. I want him. I want that chance to start over. And yeah, maybe this is exactly what he was warning me about, maybe he knew I’d start to get in my feelings, maybe I’d think of him as more than a rebound. Maybe any guy in his right mind would worry that I would do something like sit here and tell you that the two of us are a fairy tale. But at the same time, I have to risk it.”

I sit up. I take my hand off the stone.

“Tell me how to do it differently, Effie. Tell me how to want him and not end up…here.”

The foxglove at the base of the stone moves once in the wind.

She doesn’t answer me. She can’t.

I sit at the grave for a long time. The afternoon goes amber, then grey with the coming clouds. The birds in the field beyond the wall call to each other. The shadow of the church creeps across the stones, reaches Effie’s grave, and passes over us.

I don’t get an answer.

But I get the thing I came here for—which is the thing I have known the whole time—that I’m going back to him tomorrow.

Not in spite of the warning.

Because of it.

Because the version of me that walks away from him tonight is the version of me that ends up in a stone like this one—beloved by no one enough to bring her flowers.

I stand up.

I put my palm on the top of the stone one more time.

“Thank you, Effie.”

I walk back through the kirkyard, unlatch the gate, close it carefully behind me, and get into the car.

I sit in the car for a long moment before I turn the key.

I cry all the way home.

Chapter

Sixteen

The wind picks up just before sundown.

I’m at the kitchen table, with the kettle going and the feeling of the kirkyard still on me, when I hear it: the soft repetitive bang of wood on wood from somewhere outside. The boat shed door. I left it closed when I worked in there last, but I had also oiled the fuck out of those hinges as per Alasdair’s suggestion, and now I think it’s working against me.