Present day
2026
When I close my eyes, I see the ocean.
I’ve never told this to anyone. But it’s always there. Always within reach.
My last client leaves just as the sun tilts copper and metallic against the Seattle skyline. Rain has been falling for most of the day, and my client, a nine-year-old boy grieving the loss of his father from pancreatic cancer, had a hard time focusing on my questions. His eyes kept straying to the large Victorian-era window that looks out onto Elmhurst Street, the rain spilling down the wavy glass like the clear veins of some watery sea creature. I usually close the curtains when I have clients in the room; they tend to watch the street for any sign of their parent’s or grandparent’s or nanny’s car pulling up in front of the old house I rent in the Queen Anne neighborhood of north Seattle. But in late afternoon, the sun shone a little, and I like the way it casts my home office in the softest, diffuse light. So, I left the curtains open.
Most of the children who come to sit in my office don’t want to be here. They have a vacant look in their eyes, sadness that they keep tucked away. But eventually a door inside them will crack open just a little, enough for me to see the loss, the depression, the bullying, aneating disorder, a family separation that feels like their world is caving in around them—all the same unavoidable shit we deal with as adults. But I understand the suffocating weight children sometimes carry—I too felt outcasted as a young girl, not just by my peers at school, but by an entire community, a whole town.
I finish writing out my chart for the young boy—he’s making progress, slowly; there’s no timeline for grief—then leave my office and walk back into the kitchen. Cracked linoleum floors and sad blue wallpaper—dulled to the color of dishwater—greet me like ghosts of another era. It’s the only room untouched during the remodel that happened just before I moved in, four years back. But it doesn’t bother me, I like seeing the history of a place—the traces of all the lives who lived here before me.
I empty the silty dregs of tea from my mug into the sink, then stare blankly out the kitchen window. It’s Friday, and I feel as tired as I usually do by the end of the week, craving a warm shower, a glass of Malbec, and a bad romance novel to wipe away the voices of my patients—timid and shy and often hesitant—still vibrating through my thoughts.
On the kitchen table sit the leftovers from last night. The plates are cleared; James washed them before he left, but our empty wineglasses sit like stained reminders of the way he pushed back from his chair, how his face had the slightest tug of sadness, rejection, maybe even anger. I spin the gold band around my left ring finger. “Just see how it feels,” he said. “It doesn’t have to mean anything, but maybe it’ll start to feel right.” I want it to feel right, I really do, no bullshit. He’s what my neighbor Marisol—who’s ten years older than me and smokes menthols on her front porch each night—calls a keeper. He looks like a young Robert Redford, he talks in his sleep, whispers really, mostly nonsense, but the sound of it soothes me, reminds me of the sea when I was young. He kisses me like he means it, like I am something he couldn’t possibly live without. He cooks for me and makes me laugh and tolerates my silence.And I love all these things, I love him. And yet, the ring he gave me last night feels like a thorn pressing against the arch of my foot. Like a bird who’s lost a wing.
I try to imagine myself as a wife, no longer Ellie Mills, but Ellie Carmichael. Wife of James Carmichael, owner of a small French bistro only a few blocks from my house. He spent two years in Paris after college, the understudy to some famous French chef whose name I can’t even recall—which is also the point. I feel disinterested in the details, in the framework of his life, and I know that’s wrong. After he returned to Seattle, he opened the café with money he got when his mother passed. And now he spends seven days a week at the café; he’s passionate, a little obsessed even. And I like that about him too. His dedication, his ambition. But in the last two years that we’ve been dating, we haven’t even moved in together. I’ve always said I wasn’t ready. And some nights, when he’s standing in my kitchen, I don’t want him here at all. Not him exactly. I just want to be alone. My own empty house. My own life. So last night when he held out the gold ring in the palm of his hand, smiling impishly at me like a little boy—as if he’d found it on the playground under the seesaw—his brown eyes filled with an impossible hope, my whole body closed up. Even my eyelids wanted to pinch shut, blacken out the ring, the moment, and him.
“Just think about it,” he said, knowing how timidly he has to approach these things with me. Knowing that panic is my default response.
I grab the two wineglasses and set them in the sink, rinsing them quickly.
There’s no rush, I tell myself. And he’s probably right. Maybe wearing the ring, testing it out, is the gradual introduction to a proposal that I need. One, two, three, and soon enough you’ll be ready for marriage. Because maybe I’m not the kind of woman who will ever be able to say an immediate yes with unwavering certainty.
I peer at my reflection in the window above the sink, the silhouette of my face—long chestnut hair the color of dried leaves, trimmedblunt at the ends; hazel eyes like my mother’s; skin that craves the sun but hasn’t felt it in too long. I look like a woman who’s all sharp edges, who you don’t dare touch or you’ll draw blood. Tired, overworked, I look like someone I don’t even want to be. Certainly not the woman I ever dreamed of becoming. I always imagined myself a nomad, a wanderer, never stuck in the same place for longer than a few days—body sun-kissed and strong from hiking monuments in India, beach walks in Bali, weeks spent camping on remote stretches of Canada’s western shores.
The longer I face myself in the window, the more I hate the woman looking back. Sallow and spineless. I grew roots here in Seattle, and I don’t even remember why. I turn for the stairs. I need to slip into the shower, sink into bed, when my phone buzzes from the side table in the front hall.
It’s likely a patient’s parent calling to reschedule. Possibly a new client wanting to set up a first appointment. Or, it could be James, suggesting he come over and cook me a late dinner—apologize for handing me a ring without any warning—all soft smiles and comforting words, always knowing what to say, his strong hands at the small of my back.
But when I pick up the phone, it’s a number I don’t recognize. Out of state. Normally I wouldn’t answer; I’d let it go to voicemail, but my finger slides to the flashing green button and I bring the phone to my ear.
“Hello?”
The woman on the other end clears her throat, like she wasn’t expecting an answer. “Hi, uh, shoot, sorry—” Her voice is soft, young, and I expect her to say that she has the wrong number. But she asks, “Is this Eleanor Mills?”
“Yes,” I answer, mustering a professional tone. So it is a new parent, using my full name—the one on my website, on my diploma—calling to describe how despondent her child has been, how they’ve been treated unfairly in school, how they won’t talk during dinner andonly want to stare at their cell phone all weekend. But her next words are all wrong.
“Is this the Eleanor Mills who encountered Saltwell Island off the coast of Maylarch, Nova Scotia, back in 2007?”
I almost drop the phone. I almost hang up. But her words hook into me like rusted fishing lures:encountered. As if it were merely a sighting, as if I saw the island just before it vanished into the mist. As if I didn’t stride onto that island and meet a man named Clay Lockhart.
“Ma’am?” the woman on the other end asks. “Are you still there?”
I make a sound that isn’t a word at all, painful and strangled and tight.
“I’m sure it’s been a long time since you’ve talked about this. But I’m hoping you might tell me a little about your experience, just a few details, I can even come to Seattle and meet you in person if that’s better… more convenient, I mean.” She pauses, clears her throat again. “You tell me what works for you.”
“Who are you?”
I hear papers being shifted on the other end, folded maybe. “I’m sorry, I should have said that up front. I’m Helen Ashcroft, I host a podcast calledThe Other Grim. We explore mysteries and legends that haven’t yet been solved, and we’re doing a whole season on Saltwell Island. We’ve already interviewed several fishermen and even Captain Elliot of the USSConstance, who spotted the island back in 2016, if you remember that report.”
I do remember it. I remember sitting at my desk in front of my laptop, watching a YouTube clip of Captain Elliot recounting his sighting of the island somewhere in the southern Atlantic. But I couldn’t finish the interview—a well of anxiety began to rise in my throat, and I had to switch it off, escaping outside into the rain, where I walked for three whole hours through the gray, flooded streets.
“But no one else has ever claimed to have stepped foot on the island, and to have met Clay Lockhart himself. Your story—” She pauses,begins again. “Your account of what happened is incredibly important… and rare. We’d love to talk to you, hear what happened.”
“I—” My voice evaporates, and I feel for the wall with one hand, to keep myself upright, from pitching to the floor. “I can’t,” I choke. “I don’t like to…” I press my back to the wall, a heaviness in my chest like my lungs are slowly being filled with concrete. “It’s not something I talk about.”
