Air sputters from my throat.
I lift the oars from the water, gasping, the storm pushing me deeper into the dark Atlantic. I close my eyes, the salt wind on my lashes.
Maybe the current will carry me to another shore—Ireland, perhaps. Or Iceland. And when the tiny boat scrapes against some foreign coastline, I’ll feel only the hollow ache of regret. This mistake I’ve made—leaving the place I spent my whole life trying to find. I shake my head, in disbelief, in anger. Why did I climb into the boat? Why did he let me go? A cold certainty sinks through me. Even if I survive. Even if I reach land. I won’t return to James. The woman wholeft Seattle all those months ago is gone. What’s left… is someone else entirely.
Tears leak from my eyes, disappearing into the rain. My body begins to shake. I couldn’t see what I had become. I couldn’t see that the old me was long gone—she drowned at sea the moment I left the Faroes and swam toward the island. She died a watery death, and I became someone else when he carried me up from the shore to the house, placing me in his bed.
And there’s no going back to my old life.
I scream into the rain, into the storm, hating it for carrying me away from the island. Why would it let me wash up onto its shores, only to rip me away so easily? But my anger turns into terror—and now I beg.
“Take me back,” I whisper, I plead, tears streaking my face.
I remember once, standing in the living room, watching the rain stream down the windows from the wet Seattle sky. James had come up behind me, hardly making a sound, but he didn’t touch me. Like he knew I was somewhere far away.“You think about it, don’t you?”he asked.
I knew he meant the island. I knew he could see when my mind carried me back to that night. I didn’t like to talk about it, but in my silence, I was always remembering.
He exhaled, was quiet a moment, then said,“That island will take you away from me one day.”
He had said it so swiftly, as if it were nothing at all. A whisper in the dark. Then he turned and walked back into the kitchen, like he hadn’t said a thing. But the memory surfaces now, and I think he always knew—I would leave him one day, I would go in search of the island. And I likely wouldn’t come back.
After that first night, after I stepped onto the island, I became bound to it, tethered. And everywhere else would always feel wrong. Even my own heartbeat ached against the relentless rush of each second, each hour I spent on the mainland—a painful cadence that moved much too fast. I craved the drag and lull of every slow minute on the island,every second that stretched into lifetimes. That long, endless pause that calmed my thoughts.
In Seattle, I struggled to remember how to breathe, how to think, how to sleep, while my body resisted the swift pace of a clock that didn’t feel like home.
I longed for a place I couldn’t forget. A steady, deliberate rhythm I once knew.
Just like Clay said, anything taken from this place will always return.
I wipe away the rain from my eyes, and the ocean settles a moment. A brief calm, the wind stilled. I lean forward against my knees, peering across the black surface of the sea, and there, in the distance, a tiny, almost imperceptible mass. A dark shape rising from the water, as if the sea itself were surfacing for air.
The island.
I almost laugh. I almost tilt my head back and let out a howl of relief. But instead, I tighten my grip on the oars and drive them back into the water.
I row hard, knowing I can’t lose sight of it again, using the last of my energy to pull the little boat forward. But unlike before, the tide seems to carry me, as if it never wanted me to leave the island after all. With each wave, the boat skids toward the island, faster than I can row. I cover the distance in half the time it took me to row away. And in another few strokes, the belly of the boat scrapes up over the lower rocks, and relief—disbelief—shudders through me.
I made it back.
On shaky legs, I drag the boat partly up the embankment, then drop it in the sand. I no longer care about the boat. The waves can take it away. I don’t give a shit.
I scramble up the shoreline, my clothes heavy with rain and seawater.
Scanning the island, I don’t see Clay. He’s not in the garden, or at the barn. I follow the dirt path to the house, banging up the steps and pushing through the front door.
I’m about to shout his name when he appears at the doorway into the kitchen—his eyes raw and red, betraying him.
“I couldn’t leave,” I whisper, breathless, hair dripping down my shoulders.
“Yer drookit,” he says, a word I now know to meansoaked to the bone. But I hear the tremor in his voice. Something soft and distant.
My heart bangs against my ribs, uncertainty pushing against my vocal cords, but I force myself to say what’s been inside me for too many days. “I don’t want to go back to Seattle, back to James. I want to stay here. With you.”
He doesn’t speak, doesn’t smile. In his eyes, there is only silence—turbulent and unnamable. I don’t know what he’s thinking, and I feel the tears coming. I need him to say something, tell me I’m crazy, I’m wrong.
But he steps forward, closing the gap between us. Boots against the wood floor.
The seconds pound in my ears. Blood drains down to my toes. And then—he lifts his hand, careful, deliberate—touching my cheek with his palm. He is warmth and relief, the scent of him like salt air and woodsmoke against my skin.
