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He’s set them to burn and tells me so. “Want me to light ‘em up?”

My gaze drifts to the neighbouring farm. They’ve been burning for days, staining the summer skies grey every evening. Smoke lifts from their fields now, curling into the few wispy clouds blowing in from the ocean, and it stills something inside me. The same sensation I feel when the rains fall too hard on the fenlands back home and I see the ditches break before it happens.

The smoke climbs with energy too casual to be benign. Bending in the wind with delicate grace. I shift my stare to the next field along. To the barley so gold and beautiful.

Beautiful and dry.

Iggy moves closer, seeing what I see. Feeling what I feel, instinct older than thought, and definitely older than me.

“No,” I say before he can. “We’ll wait for rain.”

If Dav has an opinion on that, he keeps it to himself. We leave him to his late lunch and amble back to the farm. Iggy is going for dinner at Folk’s before driving home in the morning. He wants me to come. I don’t want to go, and suddenly I’m fifteen again and he’s trying to convince me I don’t need the fruit trees and hedgerows to protect me from silence.

“Go.” I hug him. “I’ll send Mum some photos later.”

Of my own fruit trees. Apple. Damson. Cherry. And the single hazelnut sapling I found in a broken bucket the first time I came here.

He leaves and I keep my promise. Then I spend the rest of the daylight harvesting elderflower to infuse the job lot of gin Iggy brought with him alongside the bed. The smoke from next door drifts higher as it dawns on me I’ll be sleeping on a bona fide mattress tonight, as if the land is whispering to me again, but this time I’m not sure what it’s saying. All I’m certain of is that I’ll be sleeping alone, and the trees and the earth don’t seem to like it.

10 OSCAR

Poet never asked when I’d hand over any money he makes from the plants I take to the pop-up. I get the feeling it doesn’t occur to him Sol and I will sell them all.

We do sell them all.

But I don’t deliver anything that night, cash, leftover plants, or otherwise.

I can’t.

Jack has a seizure upstairs in the Joker and it’s bad enough to need every man who lives there. So I do the only thing I can for them and run the bar. Then I close the pub with the seasonal staff, and by then I’m so tired I need to eat and rest before I fall down myself.

It’s past dawn before I feel stable again.

Hanna takes Aras to school. I need to catch the tide, but I walk up the hill anyway, to give Poet his money, and…

Because I want to see him. Because I like how I feel as I approach his farm. I’ve yet to make sense of what blooms and grows between us, but the thought of going to sea without laying eyes on him first does strange things to me. Stranger than his body draped over mine and his hands on my cock. Memories that leave me dizzy every moment I let them.

Which hasn’t been that often in the past twenty-four hours. Maybe that is why they land with such intensity as I reach the gate and hop it with little conscious thought. As though I belong here as much as Poet Whitlock does.

A feeling that lifts me a few steady paces until I spot a lone figure in the distance. One as recognisable to me as Poet has become, but far less welcome in my life.

Dav Bosanko.

I stop without realising, disquiet settling in my chest, the way it always does when I cross paths with Sol’s father. He’s halfway up one of Poet’s farthest fields, cap low over his brow as he drags branches into a heap, working as if he’s a man who does not take every short cut offered to him. As though taking isn’t all I’ve ever known of him.

He makes me angry. I have tried to be a better human, but there is no other word for how I feel. For how I have felt over so many years of watching Dav hurt Sol, and Sol wait with such grace for him to stop.

Dav reaches for another branch and glances up, lifting his cap to wipe sweat from his forehead.

It’s a moment where he might see me.

I turn away, Poet’s money a dead weight in my pocket, because I already know I cannot leave it here. Because Poet is not here, I feel it in my bones, and I will die before I trust Dav with a penny.

The Sirona is waiting for me. I leave Poet’s farm and walk back into town with every intention of setting sail immediately, to take my bad mood into the waves and drop it there. To sail alone, for the first time in a while—Sol is not coming to work today.

But when I reach the boat, I find Mal already onboard and readying her for a calm day at sea. At least, I hope so. I’m still tired from yesterday, but it’s nothing to the emotional fatigue I see in Mal’s face. “Why are you here, my friend? Not that I am complaining.”

Mal glances up from the ropes in his hands, his expression flat enough to fool most people. “I was annoying Jack, so I figured I’d make myself useful.”