I sleep most of the day, dreaming of the sea, of drowning. I wake layered in sweat, then stagger to the window to check the shoreline. But see nothing. No sign of land.
Day five, I move slowly downstairs. Tired of the small, dusty bedroom. Of the constant gray light through the curtained window.
He leaves the house after sunup, and I watch him from the kitchen window repairing the roof on one of the smaller sheds, carrying buckets of fresh water out to the sheep’s trough. He stays outside until the sun sets, purposeful, tireless.
I remain in the warmth of the house, adding wood to the stove, the bruise on my hip fading, the pain softening until I hardly feel it at all. I only leave to use the privy, as he calls it, a wooden outhouse a few yards from the back kitchen door. It isn’t as bad as I’d feared—tidy and clean.
But when it rains, I dread the wet march through the mud, and the howling winds.
Time passes like an itch against my skull.
We barely speak.
I know he doesn’t want me here. His tone is always rough, quick, as if he could cast me aside like a useless stone out to sea. I am an unwanted guest in his home, on his island, and I know he’s hoping a slip of land will appear just as desperately as I want it to.
But even for all our wanting, it does not come.
He catches fish in the evening, hauls in crabs from the shoreline. He tills the wet soil in a patch of rectangular land beside the existing garden, then pulls up yellow squash and carrots and other hardy root vegetables. We eat together in the kitchen, mostly silent, and I feel like a ghost. A passing shadow. A burden eating his food and sleeping in his bed while he contorts himself on the couch each night.
We can’t go on like this.
Rain streams down the kitchen windows where I’m peeling potatoes, like he showed me, using a small wood-handled knife, the blade sharp and precise, then drop the peelings into a metal bucket that will be taken outside to the square compost pile behind the house. But after the last potato—which he called a tattie—sits naked in a pot of water, ready to be boiled on the fire, I stare out the window, the sea thrashing against the shore, and a feeling of unease starts to crawl up from my toes into my rib cage. Anxiety that turns to panic.
Almost like claustrophobia.
I shouldn’t still be here.
In this kitchen. This drafty, battered farmhouse that I swear tilts and sways in the constant wind.
There must be a way out of here.
I find a pair of rain boots in the hall closet—about my size—and a black rain slicker that’s three sizes too big, and I head out into the downpour.
He’s in the garden, pulling up weeds.
“There must be a boat,” I shout through the rain. “A way off.”
He doesn’t lift his head. “No boat.”
“Spare wood, then, supplies to build something. A raft, fabric for a sail.”
He flashes his eyes up at me. “Ye know how to build a boat?”
“No,” I say. “But you must.”
He resumes his work, moving down the row of tomatoes, snipping off the dead leaves with his thumb and forefinger. His hands are used to being in the dirt. His arms and shoulders are muscled and strong beneath the cotton of his rolled-up sleeves. “Ye know how to sail?” he asks.
“No, but I could learn.” He keeps working, doesn’t reply. “Please!” I shout at him. “I know you don’t want me here, so help me find a way off.”
He exhales, shifts back on his heels, irritated, but his eyes fall to my feet, to the boots I’m wearing. “Where’d ye get those?”
“What?”
“The boots.”
“In the hall closet.”
He stands up, wiping his palms against his legs. “Take them off.”
