“I’m serious.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed both eyes. “Mr. Gallagher, that place is not fit for residence.”
“I didn’t ask if it was fit.”
“The currents are dangerous. Storm access is impossible half the year. The cabin should be condemned. There’s no electricity, no clean water, no soil worth planting, and no emergency service close enough to matter.”
“Good.”
He stared at me then, really looked. Not at the jacket, not at the scar near my jaw, not at Titan’s damaged ear. At the sleeping bag strapped to my pack. At the boots worn uneven from my bad leg. At the look men get when they have stopped caring whether a place is safe by other people’s standards.
“Why?” he asked.
The question almost angered me.
Because nobody can knock on the wall. Because nobody can tell me to move along. Because no landlord can reject me. Because no one will ask if I’m employed, stable, sober, married, normal, grateful. Because I am tired of being watched like a problem waiting to happen.
“I want quiet,” I said.
Trent swallowed. “There is one issue in the deed.”
“There’s always one issue.”
“A holding company retained subterranean rights in the 1960s. Apex Logistics. It was common in some old mineral surveys. Granite, quarry speculation, nonsense like that.”
“Does it affect the cabin?”
“No.”
“Does it affect the surface?”
“Not practically.”
“Then I’ll give you forty thousand today.”
His hand froze over the file.
“Cashier’s check,” I added.
A strange thing happened then. Relief flashed across his face so quickly he almost hid it. Almost. He moved like a man trying to get rid of a loaded weapon. Papers appeared. Stamps thudded. His signature shook. Mine did not.
When he slid the deed across the desk, he would not meet my eyes.
“Mr. Gallagher,” he said, “there are places that stay empty for reasons people stop saying out loud.”
I folded the deed and tucked it inside my jacket.
“Then it’ll suit me fine.”
Two days later, I bought a secondhand aluminum skiff from a lobsterman named Elias Cobb, who tried to talk me out of the island while taking my money.
“You ever wonder why nobody bought that rock?” he asked.
“No.”
“You should.”
Titan sat at the end of the dock, eyes tracking gulls. The air smelled of diesel, bait, salt, and old rope.
“People say it’s cursed,” Elias said.
“I don’t believe in curses.”
“Neither do I,” he replied. “But I believe in places men avoid because something worse than superstition taught them to.”
I loaded the skiff with water jugs, canned food, tarps, tools, kerosene, medical supplies, dog food, rope, batteries, and a used marine radio. I kept my Ka-Bar on my belt, not because I expected trouble, but because a man who has lost everything keeps one familiar weight close.
Elias watched me push off.
“Storm turns,” he called, “you won’t make it back.”
I looked over my shoulder. “I’m not planning to come back.”
The crossing took two hours and felt like being punched by the Atlantic. Rain came sideways. The motor coughed. My leg screamed every time the skiff slammed down into a trough. Titan braced at the bow like a carved figurehead, nose lifted, eyes narrowed against the wind.
Then the island rose through the fog.
Cutler’s Folly did not look like land. It looked like a warning.
Black rocks ringed the shore in jagged teeth. Driftwood lay tangled in pale heaps. Dead pines crowded the high ground, their branches stripped and twisted. The cabin leaned near the center, roof sagging, one wall patched with something that might once have been plywood.
I dragged the skiff above the tide line and stood breathing hard, hands on my knees.
The silence hit me first.
Not true silence. The ocean was loud, endless, alive. Wind moved over rock. Somewhere, loose metal knocked softly against the cabin. But beneath all that, the human noise was gone.
No engines.
No sirens.
No voices.
No footsteps above me.
Titan pressed against my left leg. I looked down at him and felt something inside my chest loosen by a single painful notch.
“We made it,” I whispered.
The cabin was worse inside. Rat droppings. Mold. A rusted stove. One broken chair. A mattress blackened by damp. I dragged everything rotten outside and burned what would catch in a pit between stones. I swept until dust filled my lungs. I boarded the broken window with driftwood and tarp. By sunset, I had a sleeping bag on the floor, Titan’s blanket beside it, and a lantern burning on an overturned crate.