And he is my husband.
“Mo ghràdh,” he murmurs against my flesh. My love. My darling. My everything.
We make love on an island we have no name for. We bind ourselves together. And there is something reverent about the way his fingertips search my flesh, looking for home. The way his body seems to know mine, inch by inch. Every gasp from my lungs as he pushes deeper inside me, desperate to claim this land as his own.
I speak his name, and let myself be remade. He is mine—Viking blood in his veins—a man built for battle, resilient and unbreakable. A man built for me.
My core tightens in surrender, and his mouth shudders against mine. We promise to see this through to the end, wherever the sea takes us.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The grave is marked by a smooth gray stone. There are no names, no dates carved into the rock. But I know this place, because it’s the only square of land on the island that I avoid.
It belongs to Clay. Not me.
A sacred place that I have no right to step foot on.
But I settle onto my knees, facing the stone, and my mind imagines the bones underneath. A woman whose hips had widened with the force of labor. I’ve never seen a photo of Alice Lockhart, yet I wear her clothes, and I know she was smaller than me, slight, narrow-shouldered. And I picture her this way now. Petite, delicate, two smaller collections of bones nested beside her. The children she lost.
I’ve avoided this place, not only because it felt wrong, but because I felt guilty. I have trespassed into her life. Her home. And now, her husband.
My hands press to my knees, legs folded under me. “I’m sorry… for what happened to you,” I begin, then pause, biting the inside of my cheek. I don’t know how to speak to the dead, I don’t know how to make amends, to apologize, for this life I have stolen. I know I am a thief. But after last night on the beach, after we vowed ourselves to each other, I woke in the morning and my first thought was of her: Alice. My legscarried me here without much forethought, as if she was beckoning me, demanding an explanation. One wife to another.
I close my eyes. “I love him,” I admit to her, and saying the words aloud feels like an incantation, a secret cast out into the wind. “I love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone.” Tears squeeze past my eyelids. “And I promise not to hurt him, I promise to keep him safe. He won’t be alone anymore. Neither of us will.” I pull in a breath, and a cool wind slides over the island, so strong that it coils my hair out behind me.
My eyes lift, seeing a blue heron—just like the one from my dreams—rising up from the shore, winging over the island and circling above me. I crane my head back, wiping the tears from my cheeks, and watch it turn away, flapping out over the water—toward the open ocean. Toward nothing.
I’m sure it’s just a bird.
But somehow… it feels like goodbye.
Like Alice Lockhart is finally letting go—of the house, of the island, of what could have been. Letting go of her husband.
Leaving it all to me.
I want it to be true.
I touch the soil, this hallowed ground, as more tears fall. “Thank you,” I whisper. Maybe the bird was nothing at all, no omen from the dead. But it feels like relief, like atonement.
Acceptance.
What she has given up, I now inherit.
And in many ways, it feels like she’s saved me—gifted me a life that feels like a second chance.
I walk back to Clay in the garden. He’s at the fence, a shovel in his left hand—he must have seen me at the grave—and he watches me approach. I sink into his arms, his hands folding around me. He doesn’t ask what happened at the grave, the words I spoke. Maybe he already understands why I was there. I wanted permission to have this life. To have him. And now, with the salt air in my lungs, his fingers wiping away the tears, I feel a calm in the center of my ribs.
Like one story has ended, so another can begin.
A life that is all mine.
“What do you think happened to it?” I ask. “The resort—why was it abandoned?”
I’m sitting at the edge of our bamboo raft, legs dangling in the water. Clay tugs on the fishing rod in his hand, adjusting the line. We found it in a supply closet at the resort, and he’s already caught three fish since yesterday. I’m hoping for a fourth today.
“Maybe a hurricane,” he answers, tilting his eyes to the beach. “Like the one that blew us here.”
I swirl the warm, salty water with my leg, then sink back onto the raft, a hand over my eyes to block the sun.
