Page 124 of Bonetide

And while those things are there, there’s also something else.

Three fucking dead women, standing in the shallows at the foot of my spit where the water goes knee-deep at low tide.

Just standing and staring right at me. Their hair is dark and weighted and hangs around their faces in long wet lines, and their shifts are grey with age. Their faces are sunken in, one looking far older and more decomposed than the rest.

I nearly scream and drop my mug. I definitely almost pee my pants.

I feel Alasdair’s presence behind me, silent but heavy and strangely reassuring.

I don’t turn around. “Alasdair…”

“Aye, foxglove.”

“There are three women in the shallows.”

“I know.”

“They’re the drowned wives.”

“That they are.”

“What are they doing? Why are they staring at us?”

“They’re waiting.”

Waiting?

“For what?”

A long beat. “To see if you’ll be one of them, lass.”

I close my eyes, open them. They’re still there. The smallest is closest to shore, her face tilted up at the cottage windows, and I can’t make out her eyes at this distance, but I’ve got the strong feeling she can see mine.

“And what decides,” I ask, my voice shaking slightly, “whether I’ll become one of them?”

He comes closer and stops just behind me, his front near my back without touching, his chest at the back of my head, the cold of him coming through my robe.

“I decide,” he declares quietly. “And they’re not getting you.”

I exhale.

The drowned women continue to stare.

He puts his hand on my shoulder, turns me gently away from the window, and walks me back into the warmth of the kitchen, pulling the curtain across the window over the sink.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I have to face a fact, which is that I’ve nearly stopped being afraid of him, least not like I was when he first broke through the wards and came in through my window in the night.

Back then I was a woman split open and holding the halves of herself together with both hands. Now I’ve placed both hands together, and maybe that resembles hands during prayer, but I think I’m coming to terms with how scary, bizarre, and fucking impossible everything is.

Turns out humans adapt. That’s what we’re good at, and we can adapt at incredible speeds, to circumstances that have no business being adapted to. Because in my case, the alternative is going mad in the kitchen, and going mad in the kitchen doesn’t make the deadlines or get the groceries or let me sleep.

So I drink the coffee and watch the bay and make my sketches of fading fall flowers, and I let the monster who killed dozens of women across this last century, and who knows how many more, pour my second glass of wine, and somewhere around what I think is the ninth or tenth day that we’ve been playing house, I notice I’ve started wanting him again the way I wanted him at the rocks, the way I wanted him before I knew anything at all.

That’s what the accommodation does. It comes back around to wanting. Not just with my body, has never stopped craving, who perhaps only desires him more, but with my heart, too. My poor heart, that has been through so much these last few years, and somehow still wants to take another beating, so to speak.

Which is how I find myself, late on what must be the Tuesday of the second week, putting my pencil down at the kitchen table over a sketch of wolfsbane—or monkshood, but wolfsbane has always sounded more witchy to me—that I haven’t finished drawing in seven days. I walk to the sitting room, where Alasdair is in Effie’s chair with a book of old Gaelic poetry open in his hands.

He doesn’t look up. “You’ve been at the table a long time,” he says, his thumb turning a page. “And the pencil has not moved.”