Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
“Goodnight, Iris,” he murmurs.
His voice is very quiet, and very close.
Then he is gone.
I hear his footsteps on the stone path and on the gravel where the path meets the moor, and then I expect to hear a car door slamming shut or the crunch of tires on the shoddy driveway, but I don’t hear any of that.
I don’t hear anything at all.
And I don’t want to open my door to check.
So, I stand in my front hall.
I put my back against the door, and slide down it slowly, because my body refuses to do things any other way, until I am sitting on the floor with my legs out in front of me.
I realize I never told him my name but, somehow, he knew it anyway.
Chapter
Three
Iwake up thinking about him.
Honestly, it’s embarrassing.
I had the kind of night where I was both unbelievably tired and unable to sleep, where my body was lead-heavy on the mattress, but my brain kept replaying the way he said my name. Goodnight, Iris. In the dark, lying in bed with the duvet pulled up to my chin, I held the words on my tongue and turned them over and tried to figure out what about them made my body do what it was doing, which was the kind of low, warm pulse I haven’t felt since well before the divorce. I haven’t even slept with anyone since then, but that also includes myself. The dust on those particular shelves is impressive, to say the least.
When I wake up at dawn the next morning—too early thanks to lingering jet lag—and see grey, pearlescent half-light coming through the bedroom window. I’m sore in the usual places and a few unusual ones, so I try to replay the events of last night, try to get a read on him and figure shit out.
My new neighbor is a man named Alasdair who came to my door in the dark and wouldn’t give me his last name. He’s a man Mhairi pretended not to know of but actually does, which means there’s context here I’m not privy to. He’s also, by his own account, the only other resident on this bay who shouldn’t exist, because Mhairi told me the castle’s been empty for years.
Not to mention Effie had written not to let him in. Of course, she didn’t say who the “him” was, but regardless, I should be more freaked out than fucking horny.
The fact that I’m not is a thing I’ll need to think about later, when I’ve had coffee. I think I need a whole vat in order to get my fuzzy cotton-ball brain into working order.
I climb out of bed, slip on my robe and slippers, and pad toward the back door, opening it to let in the fresh morning air. The bay is gone, or, rather, the bay is still there, but it’s been swallowed. The water close to the rocks is visible, dark and slow, but everything past about ten meters out is pale grey and indistinct. The mountains across the loch are completely gone, as is the castle on the spit. The whole opposite shore has folded itself into the fog as if it was never there to begin with. As if I dreamed the whole place.
The cottage is wrapped in damp; the kind my bones aren’t a fan of. The air smells like wet stone and salt and the particular green smell of bracken when the night has been long and wet. Somewhere a curlew is crying, the call so liquid and lonesome it makes my heart twinge with sadness.
I make myself coffee and drink it while leaning against the frame, looking at the fog of nothing and reveling in it. The cottage has the kind of silence that has its own weight. I can hear the faint slap of water against rock below me and, very far off, the muffled lowing of a sheep. The world has narrowed to about thirty feet in every direction.
It occurs to me that this is a fantastically moody day to put on my boots and go for a walk.
The other thing that occurs to me is that I’m going to do that walk on my own—or, perhaps, soon-to-be own—property, where I can see the cottage at all times, because I’m not stupid, either.
I pull on my hiking boots and warm clothes, grab my sketchbook and a pencil, and head out first to the boat shed, which I’ve only looked inside briefly when the solicitor gave me the tour on the first day.
The boat shed sits about fifty feet from the cottage, down a slope of tussock and gravel toward the water. Walking down to it through the pale wet grass, I notice it the way I haven’t before, the slate roof gone soft with lichen, the stone walls hugged by a tangle of late honeysuckle, the whole structure looking like something that grew out of the ground rather than something built. The door is wooden, weathered, fastened with a wrought-iron latch the same blackened color as the horseshoes on my cottage doors, but there is no horseshoe above the door.