Surfacing - Book One in the Swans Landing Series

Chapter 36

Chapter Thirty-Six

The next morning promised a day of bright sunshine. I rolled over on my mattress, blinking at the sunlight streaming through the porthole window.

The incident on the beach the night before had left me too exhausted to put up much of a fight when Lake led me away toward home. I had slept well. No nightmares had woken me and I couldn’t even remember dreaming.

A knock sounded on the ladder to the loft just as I’d changed into jeans and a sweater. “Are you up?” Lake called.

“Yes, come on up,” I said.

I sat down on the mattress, cross-legged, as Lake’s head appeared at the top of the ladder. Seeing me there, he climbed the rest of the way up, a shoebox tucked under his left arm.

“You okay?” He stood at the end of the mattress, looking down at me. The silver chain around his neck glinted against his skin, the pendant hanging over the center of his chest.

“I’m fine,” I said, picking at a piece of lint on the comforter. Hadn’t that been the same thing I’d been saying for the past year? Was I really fine? “Well, actually...my shoulder is a little bruised, but I’ll be okay, I think.”

Lake sat down next to me, stretching his legs out across the floor and setting the box between us. “Last night,” he began in a quiet voice, “when I saw you there with Mr. Connors holding onto you, I realized that there were a lot of things I hadn’t yet told you. And I imagined what it would be like if I never did get that chance.” When he looked at me, all I could see were unshed tears in his eyes. “I’ve always loved you, Mara. And I’ve never once stopped thinking about you or your mom.”

For the first time ever, Lake had come to me. He could have let me slip away last night, as he had always done ever since Mom first left with me, but instead he found me. And he didn’t let go.

“Why were you there?” I asked. “How did you know where to find me?”

“I didn’t,” Lake said. “Not for sure. But Josh and Miss Gale came looking for you and he said you’d had an argument. And when I told them what had happened, Josh said that maybe letting you leave was the wrong choice. We were all looking for you. Then Claire found me and told me what happened.”

He reached over, running a hand tentatively over my head. “I know I haven’t been the kind of dad you want me to be.”

I lowered my head to blink away tears. “I really could have used you for the past year,” I said, a slight edge to my voice. Even if I forgave Lake and understood him better now, there would always still be that ache inside for all that we had missed. It would take more time to heal those wounds. “It was hard, watching Mom die alone.”

Lake pressed his lips together in a tight line and nodded. “I know. It was hard watching her die from so far away. But you have to understand now that I could never have come after you. I’m tied to this island. Even going to the mainland that day to meet you at the ferry dock was a struggle. Finfolk are bound to the water and it always calls us back. The farther inland we go, the more we drown in the air.”

“Why hasn’t it affected me before now?” I asked.

“It has, with your cravings for salt. But before now, you’d never been in the ocean. You’d never had a chance to be truly finfolk. It will be different for you now. You won’t be able to leave the ocean without feeling like you’re dying.”

I wasn’t sure that I liked the idea of not being able to leave the ocean whenever I wanted, but then the thought of going too far from it filled me with a panic that made it hard to breathe. I had lived my life away from the water, always feeling the cravings in the back of my mind. Now that I could change, the water had claimed me.