Read Chapter 38: The Gulls Return

The fog had burned off by nine, leaving a sky the colour of Morna’s prized Wedgwood saucers. Imogen stood at the kitchen window of the Saltwater Inn with a mug of tea warming her palms, watching the gulls wheel above the boathouse roof. Their cries bounced off the slate and mixed with the low hum of the espresso machine Tara was coaxing back to life in the dining room.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Toby said from the stove, where he was sliding eggs onto a plate that had once belonged to her grandmother.

“What thing?”

“That thing where you look at the sea like it owes you an apology.” He set the plate down, kissed the back of her neck, and stole a sip of her tea. “It’s been a year, love. You can forgive it now.”

She smiled, and meant it. “I’m working on it.”

The dining room was already set for the reunion. Long tables pushed together, mismatched chairs hauled up from the cellar, a vase of sea thrift that Imogen had gathered from the cliff path at dawn. The villagers had arrived early, drifting in with casseroles and questions about the winter’s repairs, as if they’d been coming to the Saltwater for decades instead of months. In a way, they had. The co-op had been formally ratified at the spring council meeting, sealed with a brass plaque that now hung beside the front door: *Saltwater Inn — Community Trust Est. 1987.* Imogen had argued for the date of the original building permit instead, but Tara had insisted. “We’re not rebuilding the past,” she’d said, “we’re starting something that lasts.”

Her father arrived at half past ten, looking smaller than he had at Jasper’s funeral, but brighter. He came alone, carrying a jar of honey from a neighbour in Truro, and stood in the entryway for a long moment, running his fingers over the grain of the oak banister. Imogen watched him from the doorway and did not hurry him.

“She used to wax this with beeswax,” he said quietly. “Every spring. I remember the smell.”

“The smell’s mostly mould now,” Imogen said, and laughed when he shook his head.

They ate at noon. Crab linguine from Toby’s kitchen, soda bread from Betsy Grange, a honey cake that Tara had made with the jar her father brought, because she’d insisted on it. At the head of the table, a brass frame held a photograph of the inn from the thirties, all bare boards and hopeful faces. Imogen’s father sat beside Tara, their heads bent together over something she was showing him on her phone — old family snaps from Morna’s album, digitised and annotated by Mrs Halloway’s granddaughter.

“Your grandmother had your eyes,” Tara told him. “Same way of looking sideways at a thing before she trusted it.”

“She passed that to Immy, then.”

Imogen caught his eye down the table and raised her glass. He raised his in return. It wasn’t forgiveness in full, but it was a start, and she had learned to take starts when they came.

After lunch, the tide of guests receded, leaving the inn humming with quiet. Toby had taken a handful of the younger villagers down to the boathouse to test the new chalkboard menus he’d designed for the Christmas Eve soft opening, and Tara had walked her father to the cliff path to watch the seals. Imogen stood alone in the hallway with the radio on the windowsill, its brass case warm in the late-afternoon light, when she remembered the attic hatch.

She had intended to clear it out months ago. But the winter had been a blur of repairs and paperwork, and the summer a tide of bookings that had swept her from dawn to dusk. The attic was the only corner of the inn she hadn’t touched. She pulled the ladder down from the ceiling, climbed it with a torch between her teeth, and found the room much as it must have been in the sixties — dust-sheeted trunks, a moth-eaten blanket, three leather cases labelled in Morna’s hand: *Frances — baby clothes*, *Letters — read again*, *Do not open until I’m gone.*

She opened the third one.

Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, lay a small box of polished driftwood. Imogen lifted the lid. The photograph was of her grandparents at the harbour, sometime in the early fifties. They were young, her grandfather’s arm slung round Morna’s shoulders, her grandmother’s head tipped back with laughter, the gulls scattering behind them like thrown confetti. On the back, in Morna’s cramped handwriting, a date — *June 1952, the day we bought the Saltwater* — and beneath it, three lines:

*When they told me I couldn’t love this place and you too, I didn’t believe them. I was right not to. The sea doesn’t ask permission. Neither should the heart.*

*A house is only walls until someone loves it. The heart is the truest harbour.*

Imogen read it twice, then a third, and when she was finished she was crying, though she couldn’t have said exactly why. She tucked the photograph into her jumper and climbed down the ladder, leaving the attic door open behind her.

She found her father on the bench outside the front door, watching the gulls wheel over the boathouse roof. He glanced at the photograph in her hands. “Where was that?”

“Morna’s box. In the attic.” She handed it to him. He looked at it for a long time, tracing the glass with his thumb, and when he handed it back his expression had gone soft around the edges.

“She loved him,” he said. “Broke her heart when he died. But she stayed. She always said the building kept her tethered, but it wasn’t the building.” He nodded at the photograph. “It was the harbour. The people in it. The ones she kept.”

Imogen carried the photograph inside and propped it on the sideboard in the entryway, where it caught the low evening light, beside the ceramic dish of harbour keys and the handwritten booking ledger that had begun on the first of January. She straightened it once, twice, and then stepped back.

Toby came up the path, wiping his hands on his jacket, and stood beside her to look at it. “Good photo,” he said.

“She wrote on the back that the heart’s the truest harbour.”

He put his arm around her waist, warm and solid. “I’ll take that as her blessing.”

Imogen laughed, and let her head rest against his shoulder. Out the window, the gulls were settling on the roof ridge for the night, one row of white shapes against the deepening blue, the way they must have done for a hundred years. A year ago she had stood in this house as a stranger with a lawyer’s letter and a plane ticket back to London. Now she stood in it as its keeper, its resident, its home.

She smiled.

The gulls came back, as they always do.