Page 51

“He is awake enough to be annoyed?”

“Aye. He’s grand. According to him, at least.”

“You do not believe him?”

Mal grunts as he frees the Sirona from her mooring and I know him well enough to leave him be for a while.

I pilot us out of the cove and into the main harbour, and then out to sea. Mindful that warm weather changes the rules, when we reach the lobster pots, I take a break to rehydrate and check the tape protecting the monitor on my arm from the elements is still in place.

Mal needs to drink too.

I pass him a bottle of the high carb electrolytes I need to consume these days when I’m working in the sun. Offer him a snack he accepts only after he’s surreptitiously checked I have enough to share. “Is Sol okay?”

“You haven’t spoken to him?”

“Not since this morning. He said he was going to bed.”

Mal nods. “That’s where I left him—all of them, actually. I’m the only idiot who can’t sleep these days.”

“Don’t be unkind to yourself. Sol and Skylar are more used to Jack’s seizures.”

Mal just sighs and again, I let him sit with his feelings and go back to work, hauling pots in a familiar stretch of water, where the cliffs sit high and green above the ocean and the sea moves below us in Cornish blue ripples and waves.

It takes me a few hours to haul all the pots. Enough time for Mal to settle and reset. To pitch in and help me, though I don’t really need it.

He doesn’t say much. Until we stop again and the silence I fall into as I wrestle with the high numbers on my watch screen gives him the room to talk about what happened last night.

“I thought I’d see it coming. A big one. But it was like a bomb going off.”

“There are signs sometimes.” I keep my eyes on the graph rising lazily—like it wants to annoy me—and absently rub my stomach as something phantom twists there, more memory than a tangible ache.

Cold water.

Salt in my eyes.

Impossible pressure and pain that wrenched me apart while bright lights blurred overhead and Skylar’s voice kept me breathing.

My hand stills. The recollection is uninvited, but it fades as quickly as it arrives, leaving only a slow echo behind.

I take a breath, aware I have perhaps dissociated in a moment where Mal needs me to be present. But when I look at him again, all I see is a friend who’s moved closer to me, because he knows how it feels to have your body and mind cling to something you would rather forget.

My jaw has tightened. I relax and fix my numbers. Mal doesn’t say much more about last night, but I see how shaken he is. It’s why, as I navigate us home, I don’t mention Dav Bosanko working on Poet’s land, even though the information seems to grow teeth the longer I keep it to myself.

Sol knows. Of this, I am certain. But has he told anyone else? Like he promised he would if his father’s return to Porth Luck disrupted his life in any way whatsoever? Sol is not a liar, but Dav…

Smoke in the sky derails my train of thought. We are rounding the headland before we reach the harbour and I scowl at the grey ribbons staining the blue as though it’s been painted there in toxic oil.

My stomach reacts, twisting again, harsh and irrational.

I ignore it and step out of the wheelhouse, frowning at the pollution hazing the sky above my son’s home and Poet’s land.

Mal narrows his eyes against the sunlight too. “The fuck is that?”

“Burn pile.”

“Where?”

“I do not know.” And it bothers me. Offshore, distances compress. The plume that seems to be rising directly over Hanna’s house could just as likely be farther inland, and the uncertainty has me narrowing my eyes at the smoke until I can’t tell if it’s over Poet’s fields or in the next town altogether.