The Ocean
A young girl staring blankly into the sea, wondering how life would have been if her parents were alive, she has always wondered why she comes to the same sea that took her parents years ago. Nadia had grown up listening to it. In the years before she understood what loss meant, before the word orphan had attached itself to her life like a second skin, she used to believe the sea was telling stories. That somewhere beneath all that grey restless water there were voices that had simply run out of places to go.
She still believed that. She just didn’t tell anyone anymore.
It was barely past six in the morning when Nadia pulled her worn jacket tighter across her chest and made her way down the coastal path toward the lower shoreline. The mist was thick and low, sitting on the water like something that hadn’t decided whether to stay or leave. Her boots were old — the left one had a crack along the sole that let the cold in — but she walked quickly, the way she always did, like the day was already running ahead of her and she had to catch it.
She had three things to do before eight o’clock. Pick up the vegetables Mrs. Hargrove had ordered from the market on the hill. Drop Lily’s medication off at the house before her sister wakes up and panic not finding it on the bedside table. Then circle back and help old Mr. Fenwick move the boxes from his store room before his back gave out completely. She had learned to stack her mornings like that task over task over task because a full morning left no room for the kind of thinking that made her chest heavy.
The town would be awake soon. And with the town came the eyes.
Cresthaven was not a cruel place, not entirely. It was just small. And small places had long memories and short patience for anything they couldn’t explain. Nadia had become one of those things they couldn’t explain. She had arrived in the Hargrove home at nine years old, quiet and hollow-eyed, holding her four-year-old sister’s hand like it was the only solid thing left in the world. Two months later, the fishing boat belonging to the Hargroves’ eldest son capsized in a sudden storm. A year after that, their neighbour Mrs. Pelley lost her grocery shop to a fire. Then the drought came and ruined half the season’s market crops. None of it had anything to do with Nadia. She knew that. The Hargroves knew that. But the town needed somewhere to point, and she was already standing outside the circle, so they pointed at her.
Jinx. The word had followed her for so long now that it almost didn’t sting anymore. Almost.
She had reached the lower path, the one that curved along the belly of the coastline where the rocks jutted out into the water like broken teeth. The mist was thicker here. She almost didn’t see him.
There was a man at the water’s edge. Face down. Half his body still caught in the shallow pull of the tide, the waves washing over his legs with complete indifference. For one terrible second Nadia stood completely still, her mind doing the thing it always did in a crisis going very quiet and very fast at the same time.
She scrambled down the embankment, her boots slipping on the wet rock, her jacket catching on a jagged edge as she pushed through the low mist toward him. He was large and broad across the shoulders, tall even lying down. She grabbed his shoulder and pulled. He was heavy. Heavier than she expected, and completely limp in the way that made her stomach turn cold. She braced her feet against the wet sand and pulled again, dragging him further from the water’s reach, and when she finally got him fully onto dry ground she dropped to her knees beside him and pressed her fingers to his neck.
She turned him onto his side the way she had learned from the first aid poster on the wall of Cresthaven’s tiny community clinic. His face came into view and she stopped breathing for just a moment not because of the gash above his left brow, dark with dried blood and fresh sea water, not because of the bruising already blooming along his jaw but because even like this, wrecked and unconscious and broken by whatever had happened to him, the man was strikingly, almost unfairly, handsome. Sharp jaw. Dark lashes fanned against high cheekbones. A face so structured it looked like it had been carved with intention.
Nadia pressed the back of her hand to his cheek. Cold. Too cold. She looked around. The beach was empty in every direction. The mist swallowed the path behind her. There was no one coming.
She looked back at him.
“Alright,” she said quietly, more to herself than to him. “I’ve got you.”
