Read Chapter 10: The Watcher

The kettle sang. Isla ignored it, standing at the kitchen window with the mug already cold in her hands. Below, the harbor was a postcard—calm water, gulls crying, Callum MacIver hosing salt off his trawler as if the sea hadn't nearly taken his son the night before.

"Tell me again," she said without turning.

Tam sat at the table, elbows on the wood, fingers laced together. He'd been watching her since she came in from the cove, his dark eyes tracking her like she was a seal he was trying to read. "I've told you three times."

"Then a fourth won't cost you anything."

A long breath. "I was with you. In the lab. You were transcribing the lullaby into your computer. The storm hit—I remember the lights flickering. You went to the window. I went to yours." He paused. "Then the boy. The scream. I was out the door before I knew I was moving."

"And after?"

"Nothing." The word sat between them, hollow. "Like the page was torn out. I remember the water. I remember the boy's weight in my arms. I remember the shore coming up under my boots. After that—"

"Nothing until you woke up in my spare room with Morag's hand on your forehead." Isla finally turned. "You didn't walk to the jetty. You didn't stand there watching the Morven get dragged ashore."

"Is that what Jamie says I did?"

She didn't answer. The kettle had stopped boiling. The silence in the kitchen felt heavier than the storm had been.

Isla crossed to the table and dropped the object she'd carried from the cove—wrapped in an oilcloth she'd found in the wheelhouse—onto the wood in front of him. The cloth fell open.

A knife. Seven inches of blade, rusted at the tang where it had broken off from a longer handle. What remained was stained and dark, wrapped in worn sealskin, the fur worn smooth in the grip's center, darkened to something nearly black.

Tam's face went pale. His fingers twitched, reaching, then stopped.

"That was jammed in the Morven's transom," she said. "Wedged deep. Whoever dragged my boat ashore wanted this found—or wanted it hidden."

"I don't know it."

"You're lying."

His jaw tightened. "I'm not. I've never seen that knife." But his voice cracked on the last word, and his hand hovered over the sealskin like it recognized something his mind wouldn't.

Isla pulled the knife back across the table. "The sealskin's worked. Stitched. That's not a hunting knife broken by accident—that's a tool. Ceremonial, maybe. The kind of thing a crofter's family would pass down three generations." She turned it in the light. "Or the kind of thing a selkie would carry to cut himself free."

Tam's eyes snapped to hers. "I didn't cut your boat loose."

"I know. You were with me." She set the knife down. "But someone was on my boat. Someone strong enough to haul a ten-ton research vessel up shingle by hand. And someone—or something—wrote in my logbook in my handwriting. A day I wasn't there. An entry I never made."

The word hung: *something.*

The kitchen door rattled. Both of them flinched.

Outside, the wind had shifted, coming off the sea with a bite that smelled of salt and cold stone. Isla's pendant pressed warm against her sternum through her fleece—had it been warm a moment ago? She couldn't remember. It warmed when he was near, she'd realized. And when the sea wanted her attention.

She looked past Tam, through the window over his shoulder.

A figure stood at the crest of the low ridge above the village, where the sheep path gave way to scree and heather. Hooded, dark oilskin against the grey sky. Still as a standing stone, watching the cottage.

Isla's breath caught.

"Don't turn around," she said, too late—Tam was already following her gaze. The hooded figure didn't move, didn't duck, didn't run. Just watched. Then, slowly, with a deliberation that raised the hairs on Isla's arms, the figure raised one hand and pointed.

At the cottage. At them.

Then it dropped below the ridge line, gone.

"Who was that?" Tam asked, and his voice had gone thin—not fear, but something else. Recognition he couldn't name.

"I don't know." Isla was already at the back door, yanking on her boots. "But I'm going to find out."

The ridge was empty by the time she scrambled up the sheep path, Tam a dozen yards behind, his bare feet sure on the wet grass where her boots slipped. No tracks in the mud—not that the wind and rain hadn't scoured them. But at the top, where the figure had stood, she found what she'd expected not to: a fresh cigarette end, still burning at the filter, crushed under a heel.

Someone had been standing there for a while.

"Fisherman?" Tam asked, catching up.

"Angus MacNeil smokes roll-ups, not tailor-mades." She pinched the filter between two fingers, studying the paper. No branding—plain, expensive, the kind sold in mainland tobacconists. "This is not from anyone on the island."

Someone knocked on the front door below. Jamie's voice, strained: "Isla! You in there?"

She pocketed the cigarette end and half-slid down the path, Tam close behind. Jamie was standing on the step with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, looking like he hadn't slept. Behind him, at the gate, Callum MacIver lingered, cap in his hands, refusing to meet anyone's eyes.

"You need to see this," Jamie said, and the look he shot at Tam was unreadable. "Morag's tied her washing line across the harbor mouth. Full moon's in three nights, and she's stringing charms—rowan, iron, hagstones—every foot of it."

"The old woman thinks she can hold back the tide with laundry," Tam said, and there was something new in his voice—not anger, but grief.

Callum stepped forward, cap twisting in his fists. "It's not just Morag." His voice was rough, scraped raw by the sea. "Vote's tonight. Angus called it. Whole village, the church hall, six o'clock." He finally looked up, at Tam, and his eyes were wet. "I owe you my boy. I'll speak for you if I can. But half the fishermen on this island think you brought the storm—and that knife you found in the cove?" He shook his head. "Angus already knows about it. Says it's proof. Says you broke it off the Morven's hull trying to cut her adrift before the tide took you."

Isla stared. "Angus wasn't at the cove. No one was. I found that knife an hour ago."

"Doesn't matter." Callum's voice dropped to a raw whisper. "He's got a witness. Says old man Sutherland saw you at the cove before dawn, Tam, standing over the boat with the knife in your hand." The fisherman shook his head slowly. "And he's got the boy's fear to back it. My own son says he saw you on the jetty that night, too—just standing there, watching the storm, doing nothing to stop it." Callum looked from Tam to Isla and back again, and the weight of what he was choosing sat heavy on his shoulders. "I don't know what to believe. But that boy's not a liar."

Callum turned and walked back toward the village, shoulders bowed, leaving the three of them at the gate in a silence that only the wind would fill.

Isla pulled the broken knife from her pocket. The sealskin handle felt warm in her palm—warmer than it should have been, warmer than her skin. Tam watched her, his dark eyes full of something she couldn't name, and the space between them felt like an ocean she couldn't cross.

"Three nights," she said.

He nodded.

And far out beyond the harbor mouth, beyond Morag's line of charms and iron and prayer, something dark broke the surface of the water and watched the island with eyes that never blinked.