Read Chapter 31: The Confession

The wind had shifted. Isla could smell rain coming off the sea, that cold metallic tang that meant the weather would turn before nightfall. She stood at the kitchen window of Mrs. Kincaid’s cottage, watching Tam and his mother move about the garden—her showing him where the rhubarb grew, him crouching to touch the leaves like a man who had never seen a plant before. Perhaps he hadn’t, not in this way. Not as a son.

The second pulse came again. Lower this time. Sharper. She pressed her palm flat against her belly and told herself it was the kettle's steam curling against her skin, the anxiety of the cave at low tide tomorrow, the exhaustion of weeks that had stretched her thin as fishing line.

She knew better.

The door opened. Tam stepped in, shaking salt from his hair. “She wants to bring blankets. Says the cave will be cold even in summer.” He smiled—that crooked smile she had grown to love, the one that still held wonder in it. “She keeps trying to mother me. I don’t know what to do with it.”

Isla’s throat tightened. *Mother.* The word lodged beneath her ribs.

“Tam,” she said. Her voice came out strange, too flat. “We need to talk. Before tomorrow.”

His smile faded. He crossed the room in three strides and took her hands. His palms were warm, rough from the sea. “What is it? Is it the ritual? Did Cleary—did something change when he—” He looked down at himself, as if checking for cracks.

“No. It’s not you. It’s—” She pulled her hands free and turned to the window again. Mrs. Kincaid was still in the garden, gathering herbs into her apron, humming something old and wordless. Isla thought of the pendant, that glass-and-kelp heart, and what it could do. What it could erase.

“Isla.” Tam’s voice was quiet. “You’re scaring me.”

She laughed, and it came out broken. “Good. Then we’re even.”

The confession did not want to leave her mouth. It had been sitting there for days, a stone she had swallowed, growing heavier with every beat of her strange second pulse. She had told herself it was exhaustion. She had told herself the healing nights—those fevered, half-remembered nights when she had pulled him from the depths of his own pain and held him until dawn—could not have consequences she wasn't ready to face.

But her body had known. Her body had been telling her for weeks.

“When you were sick,” she said, still facing the window. “After the ritual. Before. Those nights I stayed with you, when you were burning and I thought you might slip away—” She pressed her hand harder against her belly. “I didn’t think. I wasn’t careful. We weren’t careful.”

Tam went very still behind her. She heard him exhale, a long slow breath like a wave pulling back.

“Isla.” His voice was barely a whisper. “Are you saying—?”

She turned to face him. Her eyes were wet, and she hated that. Hated the weakness of it, the vulnerability. She was a scientist. She dealt in data, in seals, in measurable things. Not in this. Never in this.

“I’m pregnant, Tam.” The words fell between them like stones into still water. “I felt it before. The second pulse—I dismissed it. But it’s been getting stronger. More regular. I’m a marine biologist, I know biology. I know my own body.” She shook her head. “I went to the clinic in Stornoway when you were with your mother yesterday. I told them I needed a blood test for sea-sickness medication. They confirmed it.”

Tam stared at her. The wonder in his eyes had not left; it had only shifted, transfigured into something larger, more terrified. “A child,” he said. The word sounded foreign in his mouth. “Our child.”

“Your child,” Isla corrected. “Which means it carries your blood. Your selkie blood. The gene—whatever the pendant can rewrite in you, it was only ever meant to change one bloodline. One strand of DNA.” She pressed her fist against the base of her sternum. “I don’t know if it will inherit the pelt. I don’t know if it will carry the tide-chain. I don’t know anything, Tam. And we’re going to that cave tomorrow to find your mother, and you were going to decide whether to let the pendant make you human, and I—I can’t let you make that choice without knowing what it means for *them.*”

Tam moved toward her, reaching for her, but she stepped back.

“No. Not until you understand.” Her voice cracked. “If the pendant rewrites your genes, it might rewrite the child’s. Or it might not. Or it might affect them in ways we can’t predict. The mechanism was never tested. It was built by a desperate woman using a dead man’s science. And I—” She choked on the word. “I cannot lose this child, Tam. I have already lost my father to this sea. I will not lose a child to it. So if you choose the pendant, choose it knowing that the price could be our baby. And if you choose the sea, choose it knowing that I will follow you to that cave and beg your mother for help, even if she is a myth, even if she is a ghost, even if she tried to make you human because she feared the tide-chain would take you too soon.”

The silence that followed was so complete Isla could hear her own heart.

Tam did not move. The wind rattled the window. Somewhere, a gull screamed.

“You’re afraid,” he said finally. “You’re standing there, threatening to be brave, and you’re afraid.”

“Of course I’m afraid.” She laughed again, hollow. “I’m a scientist. I know exactly how many ways this can go wrong.”

He closed the distance between them and took her face in his hands. His thumbs brushed the tears from her cheeks—gentle, like he had once touched the burn scar on his pelt. Like it was something holy.

“I came out of that sea with nothing,” he said. “No name. No past. No knowledge of what I was, only that I was not entirely human. And then I found you. You gave me a name. You gave me a self.” His voice dropped. “You are the only thing that has ever made sense to me in this world, Isla MacRae. If this child is half of you—if it is even a tenth of you—then I would burn my pelt on the shore myself before I let any choice of mine harm them.”

“Tam.” She grabbed his wrists. “You can’t promise that. You don’t know what the tide-chain will do. You don’t know what’s in that cave. You don’t know what your mother—what that woman who gave birth to you has waiting for us.”

“Then we go together,” he said. “And we find out.”

Isla wanted to believe him. She wanted to fold herself into the warmth of his certainty and let the future be something they could simply walk toward. But the second pulse beat in her belly again, and she felt a deeper truth.

Her child would not be safe here.

Her child would not be safe anywhere.

And tomorrow, at low tide, they would walk into a cave that the sea had carved for reasons older than human memory—and they would find not just Tam’s mother, but the answers to questions Isla had not yet known to ask.

The rain began to fall against the window.

Behind her, Mrs. Kincaid opened the door, herbs damp in her apron. She looked from Tam to Isla, and her face—old and searching and full of a mother’s grief—told Isla she had heard everything.

“There’s a storm coming,” Mrs. Kincaid said quietly. “It will hit before dawn. The low tide tomorrow will be lower than it’s been in fifty years.” She paused. “If we’re going to the cave, we go tonight.”

Isla looked at Tam. The pendant burned cold against his chest.

“Then we go now,” she said.