“If you bring flowers to the bonfire, I will put you in the lake.”
“Don’t tempt me with a good time,” he says with a wink, and heads for his truck, his dark head disappearing into the evening.
I stay on the porch for another moment. The lake murmurs at my feet, its low, private sound, only for me. It knows something has shifted in the evening air, the way water always knows, the way I always know.
Later, I tell it, the way I always do.After the bonfire, I’ll come down and let you hold me for a while.
There’s a bonfire to perform at. There’s a packed schedule tomorrow, and three more booked after that, and a summer that was perfectly, carefully, deliberately arranged to leave no room for things like this.
There’s a fake relationship to maintain with my best friend, which is the kind of sentence I would not have predicted for this Tuesday.
And somewhere in Harmony Glen, there is a selkie who left four years ago and apparently wants to know if I’m still here. Who asked about me at the store.
Who hasnerve, as Mr. Calloway said. The nerve of someone who chose to go and is now choosing to return, like the sea, like the tide, like people always do when they’ve decided the leaving was enough.
The thought gives me a sharp, satisfying, slightly vicious thrill.
Underneath it, softer and more dangerous and buried as carefully as I can, is the ache of something that wasn’t finished.
Some wounds, I know from long experience, are like sirena songs. They linger in the bones long after the last echo leaves the water.
CHAPTER 2
MUIR
The town looks exactlythe same.
Four years away and Harmony Glen has simply continued being itself. Same painted storefronts, same hand-lettered signs, same hanging baskets of petunias that the business association puts up every June and debates removing every October.
The lake flashes between the buildings as I come down the main road, silver-blue and enormous. The lake looks the same too.
Of course it does. I’m the one who changed.
I find a parking space on Lakeview Avenue, cut the engine, and sit with my forearms on the wheel. The drive in took the better part of two days, which is probably more time than I should have had alone with my own thoughts. I used most of it going over the things I planned to say and the things I planned not to. Reminding myself why I’m here and what I’m not expecting.
I’m here to make amends. To be better. To see the lake and the town and the people I left and do the work of facing that honestly.
I’m not here to walk back into Cora San Pedro’s life and expect anything. That door is almost certainly closed. Closed doors deserve to stay closed. I made my peace with that somewhere over the Atlantic.
You’re here to be better. Not to win anything. Just to be better.
Except she won’t answer. Three emails over the past month, each one more carefully worded than the last. Two voicemails left on a number I wasn’t even sure was still hers. Text messages that were probably undelivered because I’ve been blocked.
Or worse: read and deliberately ignored.
I told myself it was fine, that silence was an answer in itself, that I had no right to expect her attention after four years of absence.
But I needed to see her. Needed to know if the silence was protection or indifference, needed to understand why she wouldn’t even let me apologize.
That’s part of why I’m here. Not just to be better in some abstract sense, but to stand in front of her and say the things she won’t let me say from a distance.
I’m still telling myself this is a reasonable plan as I run errands for the day. The Green Glen Cabins are a nice place to stay for a bit, but I’m in need of supplies. I push open the door of the Mack’s Snack Pack.
It’s one of those cheerfully ramshackle general supply stores that stocks everything from fishing tackle to rosemary sprigs to whatever specific size of carabiner you need at eight o’clock on a Tuesday.
A woman behind the counter glances up as I enter, nods, and goes back to scrolling through something on their phone.
I take a basket from the stack by the door.