Read Chapter 17: The Scarred Truth

The cottage's single lamp cast long shadows across Tam's bare back as Isla traced the raised, ridged tissue with a forefinger. The burn scar ran from his left shoulder blade diagonally to his spine—an arc of ruined skin, mottled like the surface of a storm-worn rock. She'd seen photographs in the missing person file Fergus had smuggled to her from the police archives. The angle had been awkward, the boy twisting away from the camera, but the shape was unmistakable. Same curve. Same placement. Same irregular border, like a splash of acid frozen mid-air.

"This is Ewan's mark," she said, heart hammering against her ribs. "I've seen it, Tam. In the case file. The birthmark was on his back, left side, exactly where you feel the burn now."

Tam turned, pulling his shirt over his shoulders with deliberate care. His eyes were flat, unreadable—the same look he'd worn when he'd thrown the coat back to her on the shore. "I told you what I am, Isla. I am seal-kind. I passed through the water as a youngling and wore this shape only since the woman stole my skin. Ewan MacIver was a human child. A different creature entirely."

The words were calm, certain. She wanted to shake him.

"Then why does your body carry his scar?"

"Because the sea sometimes leaves its own marks on those who answer its call." He touched his back, fingers finding the burn without looking. "This is where the net cut deepest. It healed crooked in the transformation. That is all."

Isla swallowed the frustration rising in her throat. In the three days since the trial began, the village had watched them with hawks' eyes—Morag appearing at the market to offer thinly veiled warnings, Angus tracking Tam's movements from his fishing boat, old women murmuring at the chapel door. The trial demanded Tam remain bound to land for one full lunar month, night and day, witnessed. He'd agreed without hesitation, as if the terms were meaningless to him. As if he'd already decided what the outcome would be.

She crossed the room and pulled the file from her desk drawer. The photograph had been taken at the MacIver family gathering, three summers before Ewan disappeared. The boy stood at the edge of a bonfire, shirt lifted to wipe sweat from his face, exposing a pale strip of back. In the grainy print, the mark was unmistakable. She held it beside Tam's face, comparing the jut of his jaw, the line of his brow.

"Your bone structure matches," she said. "Your height. The way you tilt your head when you're thinking. I didn't want to believe it either, but—"

"Stop." His voice cracked for the first time. He pressed his palms flat against the table, knuckles whitening. "I am not that boy. I am not the son of Callum MacIver. I have no human father."

"Then what do you remember of the net?"

He closed his eyes. The forgetting spell had cracked but not shattered—he remembered the cold tightening of mesh around his chest, the panic, the woman's red hair glinting in torchlight. But before that? Nothing but an echo of salt and currents, a sense of having always been water.

"I remember the sea taking me in," he whispered. "I remember belonging."

Isla's chest ached with the weight of his denial. She stuffed the photograph back into the file and shoved it in her bag. "Stay here. Don't let anyone see you leave."

The village records office was a damp stone room behind the church hall, its shelves sagging with leather-bound ledgers stretching back two centuries. Mrs. Kincaid had given her the key with a knowing look, pressing it into her palm without a word. Isla lit the oil lamp and began with the church register, running her finger down baptismal entries. MacIver, Ewan Callum—born November 12, fifteen years ago. Mother: Morag. Father: Callum. The names sat side by side in neat black ink, no annotations, no curious additions.

She pulled down the MacIver family bible from a higher shelf, its spine cracked and shedding gold leaf. Births, marriages, deaths—all recorded in a cramped, fading hand. Ewan's entry was there too, but beneath it, in pencil so light it was nearly illegible, someone had added: *child of the shore, marked by water.*

The entry wasn't signed. But the handwriting was distinctive, slanted and hurried, and Isla recognized it from the doctor's prescriptions she'd reviewed during her fieldwork clearance. Old Dr. MacLeod, now retired to a croft above the bay.

She was reaching for another ledger—this one titled *Annals of the Parish, 1890–1960*—when her fingers caught a loose journal wedged at the back of the shelf. The cover was cracked sealskin, weathered until it felt like bark. She opened it carefully, and the pages smelled of salt and peat smoke.

*October 3rd, 1927. The boy came again at dawn, asking after the gray seal that lies wounded on the north strand. I told him she would die if the tide took her, that only a miracle of the old kind would save her. He laughed and said the miracles were not dead, merely sleeping. He is a strange child, that one—half of the sea, I suspect, though his mother swears he was born in her own bed. They say the seals know him. They say he sings to them and they answer.*

The next entry was dated three weeks later:

*The seal healed. The boy is gone. His mother will not speak of it, and the doctor will not confirm, but I saw the child slip into the water with the full moon, and I saw a young seal swim beside him, breaking the surface as if to say farewell. There are those who take one shape and those who take many. The old tales call them skin-walkers, but I think they are something rarer. Something that does not know its own beginning or end.*

Isla flipped forward, scanning for more entries about the shape-shifting child, but the journal changed subjects abruptly—crop failures, a funeral, a quarrel over grazing rights. Whoever had written it had treated the boy's story as an aside, a curiosity, not a secret worth guarding.

She tucked the journal into her bag and slipped out into the grey afternoon. The village was quiet, the fishermen still out, the women indoors at their mending. The trial did not permit Tam to walk abroad unaccompanied, so she found him in the cottage garden, turning over soil with a borrowed spade. He looked up as she approached, and for a moment—just a moment—she saw the boy in the photograph, not the selkie who insisted he belonged to another world.

"What have you found?" he asked.

She pulled the journal out and opened it to the October entry, pointing to the passage about the boy who took many shapes. Tam read it slowly, his lips moving over the old script.

"An old wives' tale," he said at last. "Written by a superstitious landlady."

"Or a record of truth," Isla countered. "What if you're not one thing or the other, Tam? What if you're both? What if Ewan MacIver was born human, and the woman who stole your skin didn't take a selkie from the sea—she took a human boy and made him forget he'd ever been anything else?"

Tam's spade hung idle in his hands. The wind off the Atlantic lifted his hair, and the whistle Mrs. Kincaid had given him peeked from his shirt pocket—an old brass thing, worn thin at the mouthpiece. He hadn't once blown it.

"If I was born human," he said slowly, "then my whole existence is a lie. Every memory I have of the sea, of the deep currents, of singing with my kin—all of it false. I cannot accept that, Isla. The sea is the only truth I've ever known."

Isla stepped closer, her boots sinking into the turned earth. "Then let's find the one man who might know the rest of it."

She turned toward the road that wound up the hillside toward Dr. MacLeod's croft. Tam followed, his footfalls heavy behind her, and the seal-skin journal hung warm against her ribs like a second heart.