The Anchor Hold

# Chapter One: April Returns

The rain had finished sometime before dawn. Iris knew this the way she knew the library's east windows would need wiping by noon — not because she'd checked, but because the knowledge arrived on its own, the way a word surfaces when you stop trying to remember it. The last drops had found the gutter above her bedroom window around four-fifteen. The clouds had thinned enough for the half-moon to press through at four-forty. She hadn't been awake for any of it.

She had felt it anyway.

Iris lay on her side in the half-dark, her cheek against the pillowcase Kes had sewn from a bolt of indigo cotton last Christmas, and let the morning find its shape. Rain-washed stone. The salt edge of low tide. Beyond the cottage walls and the garden fence and the three blocks of sleeping houses between here and Harbour Street, the ferry terminal was waking up. She could feel the dock pilings receiving the first vibrations of the engine warming — not a sound, exactly, but a hum in the bones of the town, the way you feel a cat purring when it's pressed against your ribs.

The ferry horn sounded. A single low note, more breath than brass, rolling up the hill from the waterfront. Iris flinched.

Brann's hand settled on her shoulder. His palm was warm, and his thumb found the soft place below her collarbone where the leather cord of the brass key disappeared inside her sleep shirt.