Page 23 of Christmas at the Borrow a Bookshop

‘Where would we be without our phones, eh?’ Tom was asking. ‘You’ll have a million messages waiting for you.’

Alex slipped the phone into her back pocket, aware that Magnús was watching her with an inscrutable expression. After years of reading about them in novels, she finally understood what ‘penetrating blue eyes’ looked – and felt – like.

Tom talked on. ‘Took the liberty of ringing my mate Charlie from Bideford. He’s a shipwright. Reckons he can sort that gunwale and get you watertight again.’

‘He can? How long will that take?’ Alex may well have managed the maintenance on her ferry but it had never before been damaged like this so she had no idea about timeframes. A small internal voice was chiming,let it be ages, let it be ages.

‘Depends what your insurance company has to say about it.’

‘Oh, of course.’ Her burning awareness of the phone in her pocket returned and she lowered her eyes, not wanting Tom to see her reluctance to rejoin the real world quite yet. Or indeed, ever.

It wasn’t the idea of being left on hold for hours with the insurers, or the inevitable paperwork and evidence-gathering that she minded. It was what would come along with it. These things couldn’t be sorted out remotely. She’d have to go home, back to her empty house where she had a horrible feeling all the policy documents were.

Magnús had wandered away around the boat to look at the damage and, seeing his chance, Tom took it. ‘Going to the donkey blessing tonight?’

‘Uh,’ Alex blinked. ‘The what?’

‘Up at the estate. Everyone’s going. Should be a laugh, at any rate.’ He paused, expectant, taking a draw on his cigarette.

‘I’d better sort this mess out, I—’

‘See how you feel later, eh?’ Tom seemed undeterred, but changed the subject anyway. ‘Isn’t your harbourmaster looking for you? Expecting you back?’

‘What?Oh…’ The panic she’d been swallowing down for days spiked viciously at the thought of Bryony Blackwell.

It was her job to monitor the comings and goings in the estuary, make sure nobody was moored up at the quayside who had no right to be, and generally keep an eye open for everyone’s safety, especially in bad weather. She must have watched Alex from her post, binoculars to her eyes, as she set out onto open water. She’d have been wondering what on earth she was up to. Bryony never missed a thing.

Of course, it was Alex’s boat to do what she liked with, and there was nothing stopping her leaving her ferrying for a while, other than the dogged sense of filial duty that had kept her at her dad’s post all these years. The other ferry operator, Lizzo, used to take her cruiser off around the headland and into open water whenever she wanted something from the big supermarket or when she visited her sister down at Greeb Point for a few days so it wasn’t unheard of for boats like theDagaliento leave the village, but at first she had worried Bryony would panic and alert the coastguard that she was acting out of character.

Yet, no calls had come in to her cell phone that first day and she’d heard nothing over the radio, so she’d assumed Bryony hadn’t thought much of her sudden sailing away, or, more likely, that she had heard about Ben and Eve and it had all made sense. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t be getting concerned about Alex and theDagalien’s whereabouts now, however.

Tom laughed, and the sound jolted Alex’s frayed nerves. ‘There isn’t a manhunt going on for you, is there? Where are you from, anyway?’

Struggling to retain control of her breathing, she pressed her hands to her stomach. It didn’t help. That was the problem with pretending your problems didn’t exist; the looking away made you afraid to look back, in case they’d got even bigger. ‘I don’t feel well,’ she said, her voice small and shaky.

‘Woah, OK!’ Magnús was suddenly by her side and reaching for her. ‘May I?’

She nodded, feeling the dizziness overtake her.

‘In you get,’ he told her, one hand clasping hers and the other on the small of her back, supporting her so she could climb up onto the trailer and over the gunwale. Once inside the boat, she sat down on one of the wooden benches the tourists sat on while being ferried.

Tom carried on with his task of unhooking the trailer from Minty’s Discovery, glancing back at Alex with a look of concern but obviously deciding against approaching the pair.

Magnús stood on the beach, only his head and chest visible to Alex over the side of the boat.

‘He asks a lot of questions,’ Alex whispered. Entirely valid questions, she knew.

‘Permission to come aboard?’ asked Magnús. ‘Is that what you say? I’m not a boat person.’

Magnús easily clambered inside theDagalienand sat beside her, keeping his eyes on the deep blue winter horizon. ‘Just breathe,’ Magnús said, so quietly Alex wondered if he was saying it to himself.

His closeness settled her anxiety, as did Tom shouting his farewells and climbing into the Land Rover. Alex called back to thank him for his help, but he didn’t turn around, only waving out the window as he drove away. Magnús let Alex settle into silence again.

She clasped her hands between her knees and looked at nothing at all, too many feelings circulating within her for comfort.

‘Let’s get your photographs,já?’ Magnús said in his soft, gruff way.

Without replying, she stood and made her way inside the cockpit alone. Magnús chose to keep a respectful distance, just like she somehow knew he would. Still, it was comforting knowing he was nearby.

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