The garden was warm for October. Late afternoon, the light coming through the birch trees in long slants. I was cutting back the roses along the south wall — the ones that had been my mother-in-law’s project, now mine, the way everything in this house becomes yours by inheritance. Lena was on the bench with her homework open, not doing it. She was watching a blackbird on the lawn.
“Mum,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can always ask me something.”
“Did you ever love someone before Dad?”
My shears closed on a dead stem.
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know.” She picked at the corner of her textbook. “Imogen’s mum told her she was engaged to someone else before Imogen’s dad. They were at uni together. I just wondered.”
I set the shears on the wall. Pulled off my gloves, one finger at a time. Sat down on the bench beside her.
“Yes,” I said.
She looked at me. The homework forgotten.
“His name was Rowan,” I said. “I was seventeen. And I need you to know, before I tell you the rest of it, that this is a story about someone I lost.”
The summer house at Hartland was white with blue shutters and it smelled like salt and old wood and the lavender my grandmother used to put in the linen cupboards. The floorboards creaked in the upstairs hall. The hot water took four minutes. The kitchen window had a crack in the corner that my father said he’d fix every June and never did.
I arrived in the last week of June with a suitcase, three novels, and the feeling of being released from something I couldn’t name. My parents followed in separate cars, which I noticed and didn’t ask about. Edward had just left for university. The house felt different with three instead of four — roomier and emptier at the same time, the way a table does when someone’s chair has been taken away.
My mother spent a lot of time on the phone in the bedroom with the door closed. My father went for walks that lasted three hours. They were polite with each other at dinner in the way that two people are polite when the alternative is saying the real thing.
I had the cove, and the cliff path, and more freedom than I’d ever been given, and for the first two weeks I did nothing with it except read on the beach and swim and eat toast standing at the kitchen counter and wonder if the feeling in the house was something I should worry about or something I should just let be.
The girl at the café had dark curly hair and a silver ring on her thumb and a laugh that carried across the harbour.
“That book’s shite,” she said, leaning over my table to collect a cup. “I mean, it’s well-written shite, but it’s shite.”
I looked up from *Wuthering Heights*. She was maybe my age, maybe a year older. Apron, coffee stains, a gap between her front teeth that made her smile look like a dare.
“It’s a classic,” I said.
“So’s smallpox. Doesn’t mean you want it.” She stuck out her hand. “Niamh.”
“Catherine.”
“You’re staying at the big white house on the cliff?”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s a small town, Catherine. I know what you had for breakfast.” She sat down in the other chair without being invited. “Porridge, by the way. Two mornings running. Live a little.”
She was from Dublin originally, raised in London, here for the summer with her aunt who owned the café. She was starting college in September. She wanted to study marine biology or English literature or both, she hadn’t decided, and she talked about the indecision with a cheerfulness that made it sound like an adventure rather than a problem. She knew everyone in the town — which boys had boats, which beaches had currents, where the parties happened, who was worth knowing and who was not.
“Come out tonight,” she said. “Bonfire on the south beach. Everyone goes.”
“I don’t know anyone.”
“You know me. That’s enough.”
The bonfire was enormous.
Driftwood and pallets and something that might have been a door. The flames were taller than any of us, orange and white at the base, sparks lifting into the dark and disappearing over the sea. People were sitting on the rocks and on blankets, standing in loose groups with cans and bottles. Someone’s car was parked at the edge of the sand with both doors open and music coming out of it, tinny and loud, bass rattling the speakers.
I stood at the edge of the light with Niamh’s drink in my hand — something sweet and strong that she’d mixed in a water bottle — and watched.
He was standing near the fire with two other boys. He was talking, gesturing with a bottle in one hand, acting something out — something about a boat, or a fish, or a man with a boat and a fish — and the other two were laughing, leaning back, and he was grinning at his own story with the unselfconscious delight of someone who didn’t know he was being watched.
He was thin. Dark hair, too long, falling across his forehead. A jaw that was all angle. His nose had been broken at some point and healed slightly off-centre, which should have made his face wrong and instead made it impossible to look away from. Not handsome. Not the word. His face moved. Every thought he had travelled across it without permission. He was incapable of hiding what he felt, and what he felt, standing by that fire, was alive.
Niamh followed my gaze.
“Rowan O’Rourke,” she said. “He’s mental.”
She said it with affection, the way you’d describe weather you’d learned to live with.
“Mental how?”
“Every way.” She handed me the bottle. “Come on.”
We walked over. Niamh said his name and he turned and his eyes landed on me and stayed.
“This is Catherine. She’s reading *Wuthering Heights* for the third time. Be nice to her.”
“Third time?” He tilted his head. The firelight moved across his face. “What happened the first two times? Did it end differently?”
“The same.”
“And you went back for more.”
“I like the moors.”
He laughed. It came from somewhere deep in his chest, surprised out of him, and his face opened up and I felt something shift — the feeling of a piece of furniture being moved in a room I’d lived in my whole life.
“I tried it,” he said. “Couldn’t get through it. Heathcliff’s an eejit.”
“That’s the point.”
“No, the point is Catherine — same name as you, by the way, which is either brilliant or a warning — the point is she knows he’s an eejit and chooses him anyway. That’s the point.”
He said my name in a way that I felt it in my sternum.
We talked for three hours. Or he talked and I listened and then somewhere in the first hour I started talking too and he listened in a way I’d never been listened to — not politely, not waiting for his turn, but leaning in, his whole body oriented toward me, as if what I was saying was the only thing happening on the beach. The fire shrank. The crowd thinned. People left in pairs and groups. The music from the car changed to something slower. The sky turned from black to a deeper black and I didn’t notice any of it because he was telling me about Nikola Tesla and why pigeons were underrated and how *Moby-Dick* was actually about capitalism and I was telling him about the paintings I loved and the places I’d never been and the way the light hit the water at the cove in the early morning and he said, “Show me,” and I said, “Okay.”
He quoted a Yeats line about treading softly on someone’s dreams and then tripped on a rock going to get another drink. He told me he wanted to do everything. He said it looking at the embers, and his face was lit from below, and I believed him completely.
I walked home along the cliff path at two in the morning. The stars were out. The sea was black and enormous beneath me. I could still hear his voice.
He had a dog. A brown terrier mutt named Captain who went everywhere with him — the car, the beach, once the roof of the fish market, which he wouldn’t explain no matter how many times I asked.
I watched him with Captain on the harbour wall one morning, early, before the town was awake. I’d come down to the café for the milk my father wanted and he was there, crouched on the stones, holding the dog’s face in both hands, talking to him in a low serious voice.
“I’m telling you,” he was saying. “The seagull situation is out of control. We need a plan.”
Captain looked at him with total trust. Rowan’s shoulders were soft. His hands were gentle on the dog’s ears. His whole body was different — the performance stripped away, the volume turned down, just a boy talking to his dog in the early morning light. The version of him that was least defended. I stood at the corner of the harbour master’s office and watched and didn’t announce myself because the thing I was seeing felt private.
Captain saw me first. His tail went and Rowan looked up and grinned.
“Caught me,” he said.
“I didn’t hear anything about a plan,” I said. “Officially.”
“Good. It’s classified. Dog-only clearance.”
I sat beside him on the wall. Our shoulders touched. He smelled like salt and the soap from the shop on the corner — something plain, blue packaging.
He held out a bag of crisps. He was always eating — crisps, chips from the van by the harbour, biscuits from the café, ice from his drinks, which he crunched with his back teeth, loudly, a habit that should have driven me mad.
“It’s nine-thirty,” I said.
“Crisps don’t have a schedule.”
I took one. Captain watched it travel from bag to mouth with the focused attention of an animal who has learned that patience is sometimes rewarded.
“My mam died when I was fifteen,” he said.
We were on the harbour wall, three days after the bonfire. Warm afternoon, the sun on our backs. He said it in the middle of a sentence about something else — the tides, or the boats — as though it were a fact about geography.
“Heart thing. She was hanging the washing and she fell down in the garden and that was it.”
He ate a crisp. He looked at the water. His face did the thing where it went very still, all the movement stopped, like a screen that had frozen.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t do it.”
He told me about the car. A blue Citroën, old, nothing special. His mother’s. His father had wanted to sell it. Rowan had fought him — screamed until the neighbours came. Kept the car. Taught himself to drive in the car park behind the pitch. Failed the test once, passed it the second time.
“If the windows are closed and the sun’s been on it, you can still smell her perfume in the seats,” he said. “It’s almost gone now. Another summer and it’ll be gone.”
He said this and then he looked at the bag and said, “These are stale,” and I sat beside him and held my own bag of stale crisps and didn’t know what to do with any of it — the dead mother and the car and the perfume and his face, which had unfrozen and was moving again, rearranging itself back into the boy I was getting to know. The one who hid the heavy things behind the light ones so quickly you could almost miss the switch.
The summer days opened up.
We’d meet at the harbour in the morning. Sometimes at the café, where Niamh would pour my tea and give Rowan a look that meant something I didn’t fully understand. Sometimes on the wall, where he’d be sitting with Captain, legs swinging, holding something out for me before I’d even said hello.
Swimming at the cove — the water cold enough to make me gasp, Rowan already in, already further out than anyone, floating on his back with his arms spread, calling to me to come on, come on, it’s fine once you’re in. Walking the cliff path, Captain running ahead, Rowan pointing out the seal colony on the rocks below, the peregrine nest on the headland, things he’d known his whole life and offered to me like gifts he’d just unwrapped. Driving — always driving — the blue Citroën on the coast road with the windows down and the one working radio station playing and his hand on the gearstick and the sea on our left.
He drove everywhere. To beaches further up the coast where the sand was white and the water was clear enough to see the bottom. To a ruined tower on a headland where you could see three counties and the wind was strong enough to lean into. To a village where the pub served anyone who could reach the bar and the barman called him “young O’Rourke” and pulled his pint without asking.
Niamh came sometimes, and his friends — Declan and Filip and a girl called Aoife who was going out with Declan. But more and more it was just us.
He fell asleep on the bonnet of the car one afternoon at the far beach.
We’d been swimming and the sun was warm and I was sitting on the sand drying off and I looked up and he was on the bonnet with Captain beside him, flat on his back, mouth open, gone. Not dozing — gone. Like someone who’d been running for days and his body just surrendered. His chest rose and fell. His hand hung off the edge, the fingers loose, the knuckles scraped from something he hadn’t told me about. Captain had his chin on Rowan’s hip and was watching me with one eye.
I sat on the sand and watched him sleep and it was the most intimate thing I’d experienced in my life. Not the sleeping itself but the trust of it — the total absence of guard, the vulnerability of his open mouth and his loose hand and his chest moving, the way his eyelids flickered, dreaming, the thin blue veins on the inside of his wrist.
Then he woke. All at once — eyes open, head up, fully present, looking around like someone had called his name. No transition between sleep and waking. Just off and then on, like a light.
“How long was I out?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Did I snore?”
“Horribly.”
“Liar.” He slid off the bonnet. Captain jumped down after him. He stretched, arms above his head, and yawned, and the yawn turned into a grin, and the grin turned into him grabbing my book from the sand.
“Chapter twelve,” he said, flipping to a random page. He held it up and did Heathcliff as a Kerryman — “Oi, Nelly, be a grand lass and tell Cathy I’ve been mopin’ on the moors again” — and I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe.
He told me the joke about the lighthouse keeper and the whale for the second time that afternoon. He didn’t remember he’d told it before. I laughed like it was new.
He tried to cook for me.
His house was a cottage at the end of a lane. Two bedrooms, a kitchen with yellow walls. I stood in the doorway while he banged cupboards open, looking for a pot that might or might not exist.
The kitchen had photos on the windowsill. A woman with dark hair and a wide smile, holding a baby. The same woman standing beside a man who must have been his father — younger, softer, his arm around her waist, his face open in a way I couldn’t square with the closed, hard-voiced man Rowan mentioned but never described. In the photo they were standing in the garden of this house and the woman was laughing at something and the man was looking at her and you could see — anyone could see — that she was the centre of his life.
The photos were dusty. The kitchen was clean but not cared for — the washing-up done, the surfaces not wiped. The garden cut but the edges not trimmed. I could feel the absence in the air. The missing person. Like a room where a clock has stopped and the silence has a texture you can almost touch.
“Spaghetti,” he announced. “My specialty.”
“Have you made it before?”
“Once. It was fine.”
“Was it?”
“Define fine.”
He burned the sauce. He undercooked the pasta. The kitchen filled with smoke and I stood at the window fanning it with a tea towel while he swore at the pot and Captain hid under the table. The smoke alarm went off — a high, hysterical beeping that Captain answered with a bark. Rowan climbed on a chair and pulled the battery out with his teeth, holding the alarm above his head with one hand like it was a trophy.
He served it on mismatched plates — one with a blue rim, one with flowers. We sat at the small table with the yellow walls around us and the dusty photos on the sill and ate it.
The pasta was crunchy. The sauce was charcoal.
“It’s good,” I said.
He looked at me across the table. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“You’re a terrible cook.”
He laughed. The sound filled the kitchen, bounced off the yellow walls, went out through the open window into the garden where his mother had hung the washing on a Tuesday and fallen down.
I thought: *this. I want this. This table, this terrible food, this boy, this kitchen where someone is missing and we’re both pretending we don’t notice.*
One afternoon he jumped from the high rocks at Cullen’s Point.
Nobody jumped from Cullen’s Point. Thirty feet, maybe more, and the water below was deep but you had to clear a shelf of rock on the way down. The local kids talked about it the way they talked about all the things you weren’t supposed to do — reverence and fear in equal measure.
He didn’t announce it. We were swimming below — me, Rowan, Declan, Aoife — and I looked up and he was gone from the water. I scanned the rocks and found him on the path above, climbing, getting smaller, his body a dark shape against the blue sky. He reached the top and stood on the edge with his arms at his sides. He looked down.
Declan shouted something. Filip, on the rocks, shouted something else.
He didn’t answer. He stepped off.
The fall took a long time. His body was in the air, arms out, and his shadow crossed the water beneath him and then the water took him and the surface closed and there were ripples and the sound of Declan swearing and nothing. Nothing.
I couldn’t breathe. The water was around my waist and my hands were flat on the surface and my lungs were locked.
Then he came up. Gasping, hair slicked back, grinning. He looked up at the cliff and then he looked at me and his grin widened and he swam toward me, fast, cutting through the water, and the relief hit me so hard that what came out was anger.
I hit his shoulder. Hard. The sound carried across the water.
“Don’t do that.”
His grin faded. He looked at me. The water between us. His chest moving, fast rise and fall.
“I’m grand,” he said. Quiet, like a secret.
“You could have died.”
“I didn’t, though.”
He said it like that was a complete sentence. Like the absence of death was an answer to every question.
He kissed me on the beach at the cove below the house.
Late July. We’d been swimming and the sun was low, the light coming in from the west in long gold bars that lay flat on the water. The rocks were warm. I was sitting beside him, close enough that our shoulders touched, and the salt was drying on my skin and I could feel it tightening.
He was telling me about a book he’d found — Kerouac, *On the Road*, a copy from the charity shop in town — talking about how Kerouac just went, just drove, just followed the road, how that was the only honest way to live. He was talking with his hands, the way he always did, and then he stopped. Mid-sentence. His hands dropped. He looked at me.
I looked at him.
The sea on the rocks. A gull turning above the cove. His eyes were brown with a ring of something lighter near the centre that I’d never noticed before, or had noticed and hadn’t let myself look at directly.
He kissed me.
His mouth was warm and tasted like salt and the beer he’d had earlier, and he kissed me carefully, which surprised me. Carefully, slowly, like I was something that could break. His hand came up and touched the side of my face. His fingers were cold from the water. I felt it go through me — not electricity, something slower, something that rearranged the order of what I knew about myself.
We pulled apart. His face was very close. I could see the scar on the bridge of his nose, the uneven line where the bone had healed.
“I’ve been wanting to do that since the bonfire,” he said.
“That was three weeks ago.”
“I’m slow.”
“You’re not slow at anything.”
He grinned. “I’m slow at the important things.”
I kissed him again. I leaned in and put my hand on his chest and his heart was fast under my palm, faster than I’d expected. His hand slid from my face to the back of my neck and his fingers were in my hair and the sun was on the water and the gull turned and turned above us and I didn’t think about anything. For the first time in my life I didn’t think about anything at all.
I woke up the next morning in the white house and the first thing I felt was the pull of him. Physical, directional, like a compass needle swinging north. I ate breakfast standing at the counter with the crack in the window and the sound of my mother’s voice through the bedroom door and the whole morning was just the distance between me and wherever he was.
I walked down to the harbour and he was on the wall with Captain and he saw me coming from a hundred metres away and his face changed — not a grin, something smaller, something in his eyes, a softening — and I thought: *he was waiting. He’s been sitting here waiting for me to come down the hill.*
He held out a biscuit. He’d bought them at the shop. Custard creams, the kind in the yellow wrapper, slightly crushed because they’d been in his jacket pocket.
“Breakfast,” he said.
“I’ve had breakfast.”
“Second breakfast.”
I sat beside him. We ate custard creams on the harbour wall and Captain got the crumbs. The morning was warm. The boats were rocking at their moorings. His knee was touching my knee and I knew that something had changed and that it couldn’t change back.
Niamh raised her eyebrows but said nothing. His friends absorbed me without ceremony. I was Rowan’s girl. I sat in the passenger seat. I held his jacket when he swam. I knew the way he took his tea — strong, no sugar, the mug held in both hands even when it wasn’t cold.
We drove to the far beaches and lay on the sand. His hand on my stomach through my shirt, the warmth of it. I’d lie still and feel his palm and his fingers spread flat and the heat coming through the cotton and the rise and fall of my own breathing under his hand.
Sitting on the harbour wall at night, his arm around my shoulders, his voice pointing out constellations. He didn’t know most of the names. He made them up. “That one’s the Dog. Obviously. Captain would be offended otherwise. And that one there, the bright one, that’s the Ashworth. Named after a very serious girl who reads the same book three times.”
“You can’t name a constellation after me.”
“I just did. It’s done. The International Astronomy People have been notified.”
I leaned into him and laughed and his arm tightened around me. The harbour lights were on the water and the boats creaked at their ropes and I thought: *if someone could stop the clock right now. If someone could just stop it.*
We were at the café. Niamh was behind the counter. Rowan and I were at the table by the window and he was looking at his phone, scrolling, and his face changed.
Not dramatically. His jaw tightened. His thumb stopped. He set the phone face-down on the table.
“Everything okay?” I said.
“Yeah.”
He picked up his coffee. Drank it. Put it down. Picked up his phone and put it in his pocket. His eyes had gone flat. The person who’d been sitting across from me had stepped out of his own face and left something behind that looked like him but wasn’t.
“Rowan?”
He looked at me. Through me.
“I need to go,” he said. He stood up. Chair scraping back. Jacket off the back of the seat. He was gone before I could answer — out the door, the bell ringing behind him, his shape moving past the window and down the street.
I sat with two cups on the table. Niamh came over with a cloth.
“Is he always like that?” I said.
She wiped the next table. She wrung out the cloth.
“His father calls sometimes,” she said. She looked out the window. “When his father calls, he goes like that.”
She didn’t say anything else. I looked at the place on the table where his phone had been and didn’t ask.
The next morning he was at the harbour wall with Captain. He was skipping stones across the water — side-arm, low, the way he’d done it a hundred times. He saw me coming down the hill and his arm dropped and he turned and his face was open and warm, the flat-eyed version gone, vanished, as if it had never been there.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said. “I was being weird.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not, though. You were just sitting there and I walked out.”
“It’s fine, Rowan.”
He looked at me. I could see him deciding whether to say more. The war behind his eyes — the part that wanted to explain and the part that wanted to seal it shut and never go near it. The second part won. He picked up another stone, flat, grey, and held it out to me. “Your turn. I’ll teach you. It’s all in the wrist.” Captain put his chin on my knee. And the morning opened up around us and I let it go.
We were lying on the headland one evening. Late. The sky was enormous — no clouds, the stars thick and close, the Milky Way a pale river across the middle. The grass was dry and warm from the day’s sun. Captain was asleep between us, his ribs rising and falling.
Rowan was quiet, which was unusual. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head and looked up and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Do you think when you die, it rushes at you?” he said. “Or does it go slow?”
I turned my head. He was still looking up.
“Like, is there a moment where everything just stops? Where you can see all of it? Your whole life, and it’s just there, and it’s beautiful, and then it’s gone?”
“You’re so morbid,” I said.
“I’m serious.”
“I know you’re serious. That’s what’s morbid.”
He smiled. Still looking at the stars. “I think it goes slow. I think there’s a moment where everything opens up. Like a door. And you can see every good thing that ever happened to you, all at once. And you think — oh. That was it. That was what it was.”
I reached over and swatted his arm. “Shut up.”
“What?”
“You’re seventeen. Stop talking about dying.”
He laughed. He rolled onto his side and looked at me. His face was very close and his eyes had the stars in them — two small points of light in each iris.
“Fine,” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Anything else.”
“What’s your position on cheese?”
“What?”
“Cheese. Broadly. As a concept.”
I laughed and the conversation moved on and the stars turned above us and Captain snored between our shoulders.
I was sitting in the garden, staring at the birch trees. I don’t know how long I’d been quiet.
“Mum?” Lena said. “What happened?”
I looked at her. The garden around us, the light going amber.
“I’m getting there,” I said. “I’m just — it’s been a long time since I said any of this out loud.”
She waited. The blackbird was back on the lawn, pulling at something in the grass.
August came and the light started to slant earlier. The evenings were cooler — not cold, but the warmth went out of them sooner, and the dark came on faster, and the feeling of the town started to change. The big houses on the cliffs went dark, one by one. The Prestons’ place, shuttered. The Bellamy house, locked up. The café got quieter. The harbour had fewer boats. Niamh started talking about London, about her course, about the flat she’d share with a girl from Manchester she hadn’t met.
Rowan didn’t talk about what came next. I tried once — sitting on the harbour wall, the evening cool enough that I’d put his jacket over my shoulders, the weight and smell of it around me.
“We could write to each other,” I said. “Or call. I mean, Vesper’s not that far.”
“The summer’s not over yet,” he said.
He said it looking at the water, not at me. His jaw was set. I started to say something else and he picked up a stone and threw it at the sea and it skipped three times before it sank and he said, “Three. Not bad. Your turn.” And I let him change the subject because the alternative was pressing and pressing meant pushing and pushing meant he might leave, the way he left the café, the way he left when the thing inside him got too close to the surface.
The cliff road.
He was driving. The music was up — the one station, a song with a drumbeat that matched the engine. The road follows the coast for twelve kilometres, rising and falling with the land, and in places the edge is just a low stone wall, maybe two feet high, and then nothing. Air. And then the sea, far below, blue and white where the waves broke against the base of the cliffs.
I was in the passenger seat. Captain was in the back. The windows were down and the wind was loud and the road was narrow and the Citroën was old and the steering pulled to the left on the curves — it always pulled to the left, he’d mentioned it once, said he’d get it fixed, hadn’t.
He was going too fast. I could feel it in my body before I could name it — the way the car leaned on the corners, the way the tyres sang on the tarmac, the slight drift at the apex where the road bent left and the sea opened up below us.
“Rowan.”
He didn’t answer. His hands were on the wheel. His jaw was set. Not grinning. Not performing. Driving the way a person runs when they’re not running toward anything — hard, blank, the speed itself the point.
“Rowan. Slow down.”
He looked at me. One second. And in that second the car was in the wrong part of the road and the wall was close — so close I could see the moss on the stones — and the sky was very blue through the windscreen and then he corrected and we were back in the lane and his foot came off the accelerator and the engine dropped and the car slowed.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s fine.”
It was not fine. My hand was on the dashboard and I could feel the vibration of the engine through my palm and my fingers were white where they pressed against the plastic. I took my hand off and put it in my lap and it was shaking.
He drove the rest of the road at normal speed. He didn’t say anything else. The song changed on the radio. The sea was far below us, flat and blue, and the sun was on the water and it was beautiful, and I didn’t look at it.
I was waiting for him outside the cottage. He’d said five minutes. I leaned against the garden wall with Captain at my feet. The evening light was warm on my arms. The garden was the same garden as in the photographs — the same patch of grass, the same line where the fence met the hedge. Where she’d fallen. I tried not to think about that. I thought about it every time I stood here.
The voices came through the open window.
Not words at first. Just the sound — the volume, the heat, two voices built from the same material, the same pitch, the same anger. Like two instruments playing the same chord, each trying to be louder than the other, and the chord was dissonant and ugly and it filled the small house and came out through the glass.
Then the words.
His father’s voice, rough, thick: something about being out at all hours, something about the car, something about the girl — me, I realised, the girl — and then something about responsibility, about what would happen in September, about the real world.
And then: “Your mother would be—”
Rowan’s voice. Louder than I’d ever heard him. Louder than I’d thought a person could be. “Don’t. Don’t you fucking use her. Don’t you dare use her.”
“I’m not using her, I’m telling you what she’d—”
“You don’t know what she’d say! You don’t know! You couldn’t — you couldn’t even —”
His voice broke. Not into crying. Into something worse — a raw, scraped sound, like metal on stone. I heard something hit the wall. Not thrown — hit, a fist, and then a sound that might have been a sob and might have been a word and the difference didn’t matter because it was the same thing, it was pain hitting the walls of a kitchen that was too small to hold it.
A door slammed. Something ceramic fell — a mug, a plate — and the sound of it breaking on the floor was sharp and final.
Then quiet. The kind of quiet that a house has after something has exploded, when the dust is in the air and nobody knows whether to pick up the pieces or leave them.
Captain was pressed against my shins, shaking. I put my hand on his head. My own hand was shaking.
The front door opened. Rowan came out. The door banged shut behind him. His face was white. His eyes were red and dry. His hands were fists at his sides. The right knuckle was split. A thin line of blood across the bone.
He walked past me to the car. He opened the driver’s door and stood there with his back to me and didn’t get in. His shoulders were rigid. His head was down. He was holding the top of the door with both hands and his arms were locked straight and he was breathing in short, harsh pulls, like a runner at the end of a race.
I went to him. Slowly. I put my hand on his back, between his shoulder blades, through the thin fabric of his shirt. I could feel the heat of his skin and the tremor running through him, constant, like an engine that can’t be turned off.
He flinched. Then he didn’t. He stood very still with my hand on his back.
I could feel it under my palm. The size of what was inside him. Bigger than the summer. Bigger than me. Bigger than anything I had the language for.
I was seventeen. Nobody had taught me what to do when someone you love is coming apart in front of you.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”
He got in the car. I drove. He sat in the passenger seat with his forehead against the window and Captain in his lap and didn’t say a word. I drove for an hour, up the coast and back. The road and the sea and the engine. I didn’t turn the radio on. I didn’t ask. I just drove, and he sat beside me with his face against the glass, and the light went out of the sky, and the headlights came on, and we drove in the dark along the coast road that I’d driven with him a dozen times before, and it felt like a different road.
When I stopped at the cottage, he sat for a moment. Then he looked at me. His eyes were swollen. The knuckle had stopped bleeding but the blood had dried in a dark line across his hand.
“Thanks,” he said. The word was small and rough.
“You’re welcome.”
He got out. Captain got out. He walked to the door and opened it and went inside. He didn’t look back. The door closed. The light in the kitchen went on. I sat in the car with the engine running and my hands on the wheel and I could still feel the tremor in my palm, the echo of it, the vibration of a boy shaking himself apart.
A few days later. The harbour wall, evening.
He’d been quiet all day. We’d met at the café and walked to the beach and he’d said the right things and smiled at the right times but the person behind the smile was somewhere else — further back, deeper in, a step away from the surface. I’d stopped asking when he was quiet because asking made him leave.
The water was dark below us. The harbour lights made the surface look like oil. His feet hung over the edge. Captain was at his side, chin on paws.
“Catherine,” he said.
He almost never used my full name. He called me Cat, or Ashworth, or once, at the beach, Heathcliff, which made no sense and which I loved.
“Yeah.”
“I need to tell you something.”
I waited. The harbour water against the stones. A boat rocking at its mooring, the creak of rope on wood.
He opened his mouth. I watched him try. His hands were on his knees and his fingers were pressing into the denim hard enough to whiten the knuckles. His jaw was working — I could see the muscle at the hinge, the tendons in his neck, the physical effort of trying to make words out of whatever was inside him.
“Sometimes I—” he said.
He stopped. He looked at me. Looked at the water. Looked at his hands.
“Sometimes you what?”
He shook his head. Slow, like clearing fog.
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Rowan.”
“It’s nothing. I’m grand.” He swung himself off the wall. Dusted his jeans. Captain jumped down. “Let’s drive somewhere.”
He walked toward the car. His walk — that loping, uneven stride, half swagger and half stumble, the walk of a boy always on his way somewhere and never quite arriving.
I sat on the wall and watched him go.
The door had opened. I had felt the air from the other side — something cold, something frightening, something real. And then it closed and he was walking away and I was sitting on the wall and the moment was over. I didn’t climb off the wall. I didn’t go to him and say *tell me, whatever it is, tell me, I’ll stay, I’ll listen, just tell me.* I was seventeen and I was frightened.
We drove. He put the music on. He smiled at me at a junction and the smile was almost right.
The last night was in September.
My parents were packing. We were leaving in two days. I hadn’t told him, or I’d told him and he’d nodded, and I’d let the nod be enough because talking about the end made it real.
He drove to the cove. Just us. No Niamh, no Declan, no bonfire. Captain in the back seat. The light was still in the sky — September light, golden and long, the kind that makes everything look like a photograph of itself. The cliffs above the cove were lit on one side and shadowed on the other. The water was green where the light came through it and dark where it didn’t.
We walked down the path to the beach. I’d taken off my shoes at the top and the sand was cold under my feet — the warmth of the day gone from the surface, only the deeper layers still holding it. The waves were small, barely waves, just the water breathing at the edge of the land.
He spread the blanket from the boot. The one with the cigarette burn in the corner. The wool was rough against the backs of my arms. Captain turned three circles and lay down at the edge and closed his eyes.
We lay on our backs. The sky was still blue, deepening at the edges, the first stars coming through — not the full display, not the headland sky, but the early ones, bright enough to hold their own against the fading light.
He put his hand on mine. His fingers closed around my fingers. I could feel the split knuckle — the scab, the ridge of it — against my palm.
“This,” he said. “Right now. This is the part I’d keep.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I got to keep one bit. Of all of it. This is the bit.”
I turned on my side and pressed my face against his shoulder. He smelled like salt and the laundry soap and underneath it, faintly, the car — the old upholstery, his mother’s perfume, the ghost of it, almost gone.
His arm came around me. I put my hand on his chest. His heart was under my palm, steady, doing the work that hearts do, keeping a boy alive on a beach in September while the sky darkened above him. I could feel each beat. I counted them without meaning to.
The stars came out, more of them, the sky turning from blue to dark blue to black. The water made its sound — the soft, repeating hush against the rocks. Captain’s breathing at our feet, slow and even. The wool of the blanket on my arms. The cold sand underneath, holding the last of the day’s warmth.
We didn’t talk. We lay there and the dark came down and I held onto him and he held onto me and the sea breathed in and out and I thought: *remember this. Every part of it. The wool. His heart. The way the dark smells at the edge of the water. The way his chest rises. The scab on his knuckle against your hand. Remember it because you’re leaving and this will end and you’ll need it later, you’ll need to come back here, to this exact moment, to the weight of his arm and the sound of the water and the feeling of his heart beating against your hand.*
He died on the cliff road three days after I left.
Niamh called the house in Greenvale and my mother answered and I heard my mother’s voice change in the hallway — a sound I’d never heard her make, a sound that wasn’t words — and then she came into my room and sat on the bed.
The car went off the road. The stretch past Cullen’s Point, where the wall is low and the drop is long. Afternoon. The sun was out. The sky was blue. No one else involved. No one else in the car. Captain was at the cottage.
I stopped. The garden was quiet.
Lena was still. The apple core on the bench. The light had gone long and amber through the birch trees, the shadows stretching across the lawn.
“I’ve thought about it for thirty-five years,” I said. “I’ve walked that road. I’ve taken every corner. I’ve felt the car pull and the wall and the way the road bends at the point.”
I looked at my hands. The same hands that had been on the dashboard. The same hand he’d held on the blanket.
“He asked me if it rushes at you or goes slow. On the headland, with the stars. And I swatted him and told him to shut up.”
I could hear the birch trees. The wind through the leaves.
“I think about the car in the air,” I said. “That’s the thing I keep coming back to. Not the crash. Not after. The car in the air.”
I stopped again. Lena didn’t say anything.
“It’s afternoon. The sun is out. The sea is below him. The cliffs. The sky. And the car is in the air and for a moment — for a moment everything is exactly the way he said it would be. Everything has stopped. Everything has opened up. And he can see it all.”
I was looking at the garden but I wasn’t seeing the garden. I was seeing the coast road and the blue sea and the low stone wall and the sky, the sky so blue it hurt.
“The fire on the beach. The chips on the harbour wall. Captain on the bonnet in the sun. The cove. The blanket. My hand on his chest.”
My voice was steady. I don’t know how.
“And his mam. Hanging the washing in the garden. Alive. Looking up and smiling because her boy has come home from school and he’s walking up the path and she’s got the washing in her hands and the sun is on the garden and she’s there, she’s there, she’s right there —”
I stopped. I pressed my hand against my mouth. The garden swam.
“And then the sea.”