Chapter 16: The Hum

Lachlan's POV

I did not sleep.

Marnie slept on a pallet of blankets beside the slip with her hand in my hair, and I lay and counted her breaths.

Aggie snored in the loft above us, politely.

The hum rose in my chest every five minutes, as it has for eleven years.

I let it out low against the blanket and swallowed the rest.

Last night I had sung three notes, and she had said, I'm not scared of it.

No one has ever said that to me.

My mother used to say a song like mine should only be given to one person.

She said it fondly, and she was right.

When I was twenty I sang once, on the Rook headland, to call my sister in from a storm.

Four fishermen on the cliff path walked off the edge.

I have held the rest ever since.

I held it for eleven years, in tanks and in a brand shed.

I held it under a gaff hook that was meant to pull it out of me.

I held it because no one had asked me to give it.

Now someone had.

She had said "do it" in a voice with no fear in it at all.

I had sung, and my whole body had unclenched.

I looked at my wife's sleeping face.

It was a plain, freckled, stubborn face, with a crease between the eyebrows even in sleep.

I wanted to wake her and say thank you.

I did not know how to say it so it would not sound like a debt.

The light changed in the doorway.

A grey dawn was coming in over the cove, and something knocked against the piling under the dock, once.

I eased out from under her hand.

She frowned, and turned over, and slept on.

I slid into the water by the slip door and swam out under the planks.

A little skiff sat in the shadow of the dock, with a man in it.

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