Joel shrugged. ‘I don’t really like music.’
Flora went up to him. Music was in the lifeblood of everyone on Mure. Before the ferries and the aeroplanes came, they’d had to make their own entertainment, and everyone joined in with enthusiasm, if not always too much talent. Flora danced well and could just about play a bodhrán if there wasn’t anyone better around. Her brother Innes was a better fiddler than he let on. The only one who couldn’t play anything was big Hamish; their mother had just tended to give him a pair of spoons and let him get on with it.
She put her arms around him. ‘How can you not like music?’ she said.
Joel blinked and looked over her shoulder. It was silly, really, a small thing in the endless roundabout that had been his difficult childhood, that every new school was a new chance to get it wrong: to wear the wrong thing; to like the wrong band. The fear of doing so. His lack of ability, or so it seemed, to learn the rules. The cool bands varied so widely, it was absolutely impossible to keep track.
He had found it easier to abdicate responsibility altogether. He’d never quite made his peace with music. Never dared to find out what he liked. Never had an older sibling to point the way.
It was the same with clothes. He only wore two colours – blue and grey, impeccably sourced, from the best fabrics – not because he had taste, but because it seemed absolutely the simplest. He never had to think about it. Although he’d gone on to date enough models to learn a lot more about clothes: that was something they had been helpful for.
He glanced over at Flora. She was staring out at the sea again. Sometimes he had trouble distinguishing her from the environment of Mure. Her hair was the fronds of seaweed that lay across the pale white dunes of her shoulders; her tears the sprays of saltwater in a storm; her mouth a perfect shell. She wasn’t a model – quite the opposite. She felt as grounded, as solid as the earth beneath her feet; she was an island, a village, a town, a home. He touched her gently, almost unable to believe she was his.
Flora knew this touch of his, and she could not deny it. It worried her, the way that he looked at her sometimes: as if she were something fragile, precious. She was neither of those things. She was just a normal girl, with the same worries and faults as anyone else. And eventually he was going to realise this, and she was terrified about what would happen when he realised that she wasn’t a selkie; that she wasn’t some magical creature who’d materialised to solve everything about his life … She was terrified what would happen when he realised she was just a normal person who worried about her weight and liked to dress very badly on Sundays … What would happen when they had to argue about washing-up liquid? She kissed his hand gently.
‘Stop looking at me like I’m a water sprite.’
He grinned. ‘Well, you are to me.’
‘What time’s your …? Oh.’
She always forgot that Colton’s plane left to their schedule, not an airline’s.
Joel glanced at his watch. ‘Now. Colton has a real bug up his ass … I mean … There’s lots to do.’
‘Don’t you want breakfast?’
Joel shook his head. ‘Ridiculously, they’ll be serving Seaside Kitchen bread and scones on board.’
Flora smiled. ‘Well, aren’t we fancy?’ She kissed him. ‘Come back soon.’
‘Why, where are you going?’
‘Nowhere,’ said Flora, pulling him close. ‘Absolutely nowhere.’
And she watched him leave without a backwards glance, and sighed.
Oddly it was only during sex that she knew, one hundred per cent, that he was there. Absolutely and completely there, with her, breath for breath, movement for movement. It was not like anything she had ever known before. She had known selfish lovers and show-off lovers, and purely incompetent lovers, their potential ruined by pornography before they were barely men.
She hadn’t ever known anything like this – the intensity, almost desperation – as if he were trying to fit the whole of himself inside her skin. She felt utterly known and as if she knew him perfectly. She thought about it constantly. But he was hardly ever here. And the rest of the time she wasn’t any clearer about where his head was than when they’d first met.
And now, a month later, it wasn’t so dark, but Joel was still away, busy on one job after another. Flora was travelling today but nowhere quite so interesting, and alas, she was back in the farmhouse.
There was something Flora felt as an adult about being closeted in the bedroom – in the single bed she grew up in, no less, with her old highland dancing trophies, dusty and still lining the wall – that made her irritable, as well as the knowledge that however early she had to get up – and it felt very, very early – her three farmworking brothers and her father would already have been up milking for an hour.
Well, not Fintan. He was the food genius of the family and spent most of his time making cheese and butter for the Seaside Kitchen and, soon they hoped, Colton’s new hotel, the Rock. But the other boys – strong, dim Hamish and Innes, her eldest brother – were out, dark or light, rain or shine, and however much she tried to get her father, Eck, to slow down, he tended to head out too. When she had worked down in London as a paralegal, they had joked that she was lazy. Now that she ran an entire café single-handedly, she’d hoped to prove them wrong, but they still saw her as a lightweight, only getting up at 5 a.m.
She should move out – there were a few cottages to rent in Mure town, but the Seaside Kitchen wasn’t turning over enough money for her to afford to do something as extravagant as that. She couldn’t help it. They had such amazing produce here on Mure – fresh organic butter churned in their own dairies; the most astonishing cheese, made by Fintan; the best fish and shellfish from their crystal-clear waters; the rain that grew the world’s sweetest grass, that fattened up the coos. But it all cost money.
She immediately worked out in her head what time it was in New York, where Joel, her boyfriend – it felt ridiculous, she realised, calling him her boyfriend – was working.
He had been her own boss, sent up with her to work on some legal business for Colton Rogers. But being her boss was only a part of it. She’d had a massive crush on him for years, since the first moment she’d set eyes on him. He, on the other hand, spent his life dating models and not noticing her. She hadn’t ever thought she could get his attention. And then, finally, when they had worked together last summer, he had thawed enough to notice her: enough, in the end, to relocate his business to work with Colton on Mure.
Except of course it hadn’t quite turned out like that. Colton had assigned him a guest cottage, a beautifully restored hunting lodge, while the Rock was preparing to officially open, which was taking its time. Then he’d shot off all round the world, looking after his various billionaire enterprises – which seemed to require Joel with him at all times. She’d barely seen him all winter. Right now, he was in New York. Things like setting up home – things like sitting down to have a conversation – seemed completely beyond him.
Flora had known theoretically that he was a workaholic; she’d worked for him for years. She just didn’t realise what that would mean when it came to their relationship. She seemed to get the leftovers. And there wasn’t much. Not even a message to indicate he was aware she was going to London today, to formally sign her leaving papers.