The Shirt She Remembered

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“Did you stop Finn seeing me?”

Her father was putting away Mags's cups. He placed one carefully on the shelf before answering.

“You were injured.”

“That isn't what I asked.”

Isla held out the letter. Tom looked at the handwriting, then away.

“I thought it would help you leave.”

For nine years, she'd carried the memory of Finn's absence like a stone beneath her ribs. She had measured other people's affection against it. If someone hesitated, she expected abandonment. If someone stayed, she wondered when the bill would arrive.

“You thought a lie would help me?”

“I thought distance would.”

“He came to the hospital.”

“Owen was in the next ward learning whether he'd walk properly again.”

“Don't use Owen to answer for you.”

Her father's face hardened. That expression had once been enough to stop her. At twenty, she had mistaken his certainty for knowledge.

At twenty-nine, she could hear the fear underneath.

“You and that boy brought out the worst in each other.”

“That boy is thirty-two.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. I know what you've always said.”

Tom pushed the cupboard shut.

“Ask him why he didn't tell the truth when it mattered.”

“What truth?”

“He knows.”

Isla waited. Her father picked up his jacket.

“That won't work anymore,” she said. “You don't get to drop half a sentence and leave me frightened enough to obey.”

He paused at the door.

“I was trying to keep you safe.”

“And I was trying to be loved. Apparently neither of us was doing it very well.”

After he left, she stood beside the sink until Bea came in and silently handed her a biscuit.

“Is this a family emergency biscuit?” Isla asked.

“Two of them, technically.”

Isla ate both.

Before leaving, she opened an email from her former employer in New Zealand. They still wanted her to develop a short training course for new instructors. Six weeks, later in the summer. She had wanted that responsibility for years.

Now she glanced around the club and felt guilty for wanting anything beyond it.

Mags would have called that nonsense. Her father would call it abandoning the family again. Isla closed neither the email nor the possibility. She marked it to answer after the opening, when she could hear her own wishes above everyone else's.

At dusk, she went to the lifeboat station. Finn was washing mud from his boots outside. The ordinary intimacy of the sight unsettled her more than a dramatic reunion would have.

She had once known what he ate when he couldn't sleep. Now she didn't know whether someone waited for him at home.

“Do you have a minute?”

He turned off the hose.

“For you? More than a minute.”

“You don't get to say things like that yet.”

“All right.”

They walked to the bench above the harbor. The water below it was darkening. Isla sat at one end. Finn left a careful distance between them.

“My father admitted it,” she said.

Finn's shoulders lowered, but he didn't look triumphant.

“I sent messages after you left.”

“I changed my number.”

“I know. Mags told me you wanted a clean start.”

“I did. I thought you'd decided I wasn't worth the trouble.”

He looked out at the water.

“I thought you couldn't bear to look at me.”

The answer was so simple, so stupidly human, that she wanted to laugh and cry at once.

“Did neither of us consider getting on a train?”

“I considered it every week.”

“And?”

“You'd moved countries. Your father said you'd asked him to keep me away. Then Mags said you were happy. I wanted that to be true more than I wanted to make you explain yourself.”

“I wasn't happy.”

“Not all the time?”

She thought of clear New Zealand mornings, students finding their confidence, friends who had loved her without knowing either family name.

“Sometimes I was,” she admitted.

“Good.”

He meant it. That was almost worse.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Anyone now?”

He turned toward her.

“No. Not for a while.”

“Me neither.”

The air between them changed. Nothing moved, but everything felt nearer.

Finn rubbed a thumb along the bench's weathered edge.

“Your father wasn't responsible for everything.”

She remembered Tom's warning.

“What do you mean?”

“I was angry after the accident. I said things I shouldn't have.”

“To me?”

“About you.”

The warmth receded.

“What things?”

“That you pushed too hard. That you didn't always listen.”

She stared at him.

“Did you believe that?”

“At twenty-three, I believed being frightened gave me the right to be cruel.”

“That isn't an answer.”

“No. It isn't.”

He drew a slow breath.

“Sometimes you did push too hard. So did I. I took what was true about both of us and made it sound true only about you.”

She got up. He didn't follow.

“Thank you for telling me that much,” she said.

“Isla.”

She stopped, hating how quickly her body answered her name in his voice.

“I don't expect the letter to fix us.”

“Good. Because there isn't an us.”

Back at the Blue Room, she found a note from Mags tucked into the biscuit tin.

Not a message from beyond the grave. A shopping list. Butter. Tea. Light bulbs. Finn's birthday, remember cake.

Isla sat down with it and cried for her aunt at last.

The next morning, she decided the opening party would happen indoors on Saturday, whatever the weather. The club needed income. More importantly, she needed one evening that belonged to her future.

Bea approved the plan, then pointed to the broken speaker above the counter.

“It makes everyone sound like an angry kettle.”

“I'll hire a system.”

“With what?”

“Optimism.”

Finn arrived at lunchtime carrying a toolbox and two speakers.

Isla looked at Bea.

“I asked him,” Bea said. “You can argue afterward. Preferably while something gets fixed.”

Finn set the equipment down.

“If you'd rather I leave, I will.”

She wanted him gone. She wanted him to stay until she understood every new line in his face.

“The left socket crackles,” she said.

He smiled without showing his teeth.

“I'll look.”

For two hours, they worked at opposite ends of the room. Isla strung small lights along the windows. Finn tested cables.

He found a photograph beneath the speaker stand and held it by the edges.

“You?”

Isla climbed down. In the picture, she stood beside three new instructors on a New Zealand beach, all four laughing into the wind.

“Their first course.”

“Which one were you teaching?”

“All of them.”

He looked again, more carefully.

“I kept imagining you somewhere I knew.”

“Convenient, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” he said. “It was.”

She took the photograph. His fingertip brushed hers before he let go. Such a small contact; such an unreasonable amount of heat.

“The woman on the left nearly withdrew. She thought she sounded foolish explaining things.”

“What did you tell her?”

“To stop trying to sound like her last instructor.”

Finn smiled at the picture.

“She looks pleased with herself.”

“She earned it.”

“So did you.”

Isla set the photograph beside the till, facing into the room. She had packed it away with invoices and forgotten it was there.

“That's where it belongs,” she said.

Finn returned to the cables. This time, when she caught him looking at her, she held his gaze before turning back to the lights.

When music finally filled the club, the song was an old one Mags had loved.

“Absolutely not,” Isla said. “She tortured us with this.”

“She called it education.”

“She called a lot of terrible things education.”

Finn stood on a chair to straighten a speaker. His shirt lifted at his waist, revealing a narrow strip of skin.

Isla looked away too late.

“Careful,” he said.

“With what?”

“The lights. You're tying them to your sleeve.”

She glanced down. She was.

Rain arrived before they finished. It blew through the open door and soaked her as she wrestled the outside sign inside.

Finn handed her a clean sweatshirt from his bag.

“I can find my own clothes.”

“Of course.”

She took it anyway. It smelled faintly of soap and him. Pulling it over her head felt more dangerous than standing naked would have.

When she emerged, he was looking at the floor.

“That bad?”

“No,” he said. “That's the problem.”

She forgot the next thing she meant to say.

A key scraped in the front door. Her father stepped inside, saw the sweatshirt, and stopped.

“Oh, Isla.”

The disappointment in his voice turned her stomach.

“Don't,” she said.

Tom looked from her to Finn.

“Has he shown you the newspaper?”

Finn went completely still.

Her father nodded toward him.

“Ask him what he said when the reporter asked who was to blame.”