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)
The last bundle is the one with the newest linen.
“Becca Rhys,” he says, and then nothing else, because there’s nothing he can say about her that isn’t an indictment, and he knows it. He holds the bundle and he looks at me—the only other person on this earth who knows the truth of her, the woman I lied to two police officers about, the name I’ve been carrying like a stone since the morning the phone rang—and something passes between us across the boat that isn’t forgiveness, because some things don’t get forgiveness. It’s just the truth, held in the open air at last, between the two people responsible for it being hidden.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her bones, because it’s the least I can do for my role in all of this. “The sea will hold you now. I’m so sorry.”
She goes down through the depths like all the rest.
And then the bags are empty, and the boat rides a little higher from the waterline. Alasdair looks at the water with a frown. “There’s words for it. There should be words. Something should be said. A prayer.” Then he straightens and starts reciting in the old language. I can’t understand a word of it, but after some time he stops, frustrated, because apparently neither can he.
“I’m sorry,” he says, giving me a tired look. “I can’t seem to remember any prayers for this situation or…I don’t know what to say that seems fitting.”
“I do,” I say, and pull a folded piece of paper out of my coat pocket.
He stares at me dumbfounded.
“I figured something like this might happen,” I explain, waving the paper. “Or that there’d be a…I didn’t know what the protocol was, okay, there’s no book for this, so I looked some things up and I wrote out something. It’s a bit Celtic blessing, a bit sea burial, a bit that I pulled from my witchy books. It’s probably wrong but it does feel kind of right.”
He’s still staring at me. “You looked some things up?”
“I googled it, Alasdair. While we were walking back from the castle and you made a joke about me having two different sets of eyes.”
A long pause. The boat lifts and settles on the open swell.
“Googled,” he repeats, tasting the world.
“Yes. Welcome to the real world. Do you want the words or not?”
“Aye, foxglove. Say the words.”
So I say the words, which sound pretty and hope mean something more.
“Go out with the tide and not back with it. What was taken from you, the taking is ended. What was kept of you, the keeping is done. No name of yours is held in any stone, no bone of yours in any well; the bay forgets you, the sea receives you, and the door is open. Go home by the western water. Be done with us. Rest with love.”
The sea breathes under the boat.
And I swear the water lightens, like a cloud comes off the sun, and the whole field of the water around the boat goes one degree brighter, clearer. The swell flattens a little and far off toward the headland, where the loch’s mouth opens, something like a long exhale moves across the surface and is gone.
Alasdair makes a sound I’ve never heard from him.
I look over and he’s bent forward over his knees, his hand pressed flat to the middle of his chest. For one lurching second, I think, heart, mortal heart, something’s wrong, he’s having a heart attack. But then I see his face and it’s not pain, not physical anyway.
He’s…crying. For real. Shoulders going, the way someone cries when the crying has been waiting longer than the body’s been able to hide it, a cry I know too well. The weight is coming off him, centuries of it, shelves of it, and a well full of it. All of that weight now gone, sinking to the depths with the bones of his victims.
“They’re away,” he manages with an astonished gasp. “Iris. I can’t feel them. The bay’s been full my whole…the whole expanse of my monstrous existence. There’s always been the weight of them in the water, like stones in a coat, and it’s…” He lifts his head, tear-streaked and absolutely wrecked, and light. “It’s just water. It’s just water now.”
I shuffle along on the boat and wrap my arms around him, holding him, and the boat rocks under us, and he cries into my shoulder in the middle of the bright empty sea. I look out over his shoulder at the place where the women went down and the place beyond it where Skye stands blue and the Hebrides lie like damp breath on the horizon, and I say nothing at all, because witness is still the job, and I think I’m pretty good at it now.
We don’t start the motor for a long time. There’s no reason to. The day stays warm and the swell stays kind and the boat drifts and Alasdair comes back to himself little by little, washing his face with a handful of the cold sea. Away from the looming mountains that make up the western Highlands, things feel open and bright and we share the tea from the thermos I brought and the chocolate from my pocket, and the silence between us is full and comfortable.