Stitch and Swim

I came to the coast three years ago, which sounds shorter than it feels. I was twenty-nine now, and I had spent the first half of my twenties in that grey flat on the mainland, working jobs that ate my weekends and left me nothing. The lighthouse job came by accident. A friend of a friend knew Faye needed someone for the gift shop, and I had a sewing machine and nothing else going on, so I drove up on a Tuesday and never really left.

The shop sat on the ground floor of the lighthouse itself, stone floors and one old radiator that clanked at odd hours. I did the till, restocked the tea towels, and in the back room I hemmed things for the locals who asked nicely. Faye paid me more than the work was worth. She never said why. She just left envelopes in the till drawer with a little extra folded in, and once, when my car died on the coast road, she lent me hers for a week and pretended it was no trouble at all.

She was fifty-five and had been widowed for twenty-seven years. Her husband had died when she was twenty-eight, and she had run this place on her own ever since. I did the maths once and it bothered me, how much of her life had been spent alone in that building. She never talked about it. She talked about weather, tourists, the tide times, the order of fudge that never sold.

So when she called me into the back room one Thursday and shut the door, I noticed. Faye did not shut doors. The shop was too small for secrets.

"I need your sewing," she said, and she set a paper sack on the cutting table like it weighed a hundred pounds. Inside were potatoes. Brown, lumpy, ordinary-looking potatoes, maybe forty of them, dusted with dry earth.

"They're from Orkney," she said. "A rare variety. Almost extinct. There's a man up there who grows them and nobody knows, and I've been buying from him for two seasons now." She smoothed the sack with her hand. "I want pouches. Linen, drawstring, with a label. Heritage stock. I can sell them for eight pounds a bag if they look right."

I looked at the potatoes. They looked like potatoes. But Faye had been kind to me in ways I could not repay, and the maths of that ran ahead of the maths of the potatoes, so I said I would do it.

I made fourteen pouches that week. Cream linen, red thread, a little stamped label I designed myself with a thistle on it. They did look good. They looked like eight pounds. I told myself the story about Orkney was probably mostly true, and I stacked the finished pouches in the back room and thought no more about it until Saturday.

Saturday I drove into town for groceries, and Ryan was at the garden centre.

Ryan was my ex, from my first year on the coast, when I was twenty-six and he was twenty-eight. We had lasted eight months and ended badly, mostly because he could not stand me having friends, and we had been skirting each other in town ever since with a sort of tired politeness. He worked for his family's farm now, doing their market garden, and he had a truck full of seed stock he was unloading at the centre when I walked past.

I would have kept walking. He was the one who called out.

"Alba. You still up at the lighthouse?"

"I am, yes!"

"You want to tell your boss her supplier's a liar, then." He hoisted a sack onto his shoulder. "That's our seed. Ordinary Maris Piper, out of our own barn. My dad sold it to her in October for pennies. She told him it was for a kitchen garden."

I stood there with my basket and felt my face go hot. "Maybe she's got the wrong end of it," I said, which was a stupid thing to say and we both knew it.

"Maybe," Ryan said, in a tone that said he did not believe it and did not care to argue. He tipped his cap, which he had never done before, and went back to his sacks.

I drove home along the coast road and did not think about it much, or I tried not to. The thing I kept snagging on was not the fraud. It was that I could not picture Faye doing it. And the thing underneath that, which took me longer to admit, was that I would not have exposed her anyway. Not because she had been kind, exactly, though she had. Because when I pictured the conversation, telling her I knew, I felt something closer to panic than to justice. That should have told me something. It did not, for a while.

* * *

It was a Friday in late March when I stayed late to finish an order of table runners. The shop closed at five but I had the keys, and by half past six the light was going blue over the water and the radiator had gone quiet. I came down the back stairs with my coat half on and stopped, because the shop light was on and Faye was there.

She was behind the counter with all fourteen pouches laid out in front of her in two neat rows. She was not working. She was just looking at them, her hands flat on the counter on either side, and she did not hear me at first, or she pretended not to. I put my coat back on its hook instead of saying anything.

I sat on the stairs in the dark a while, which I can see now was its own kind of cowardice, and then I went in.

"You're here late," I said.

"So are you." She straightened one pouch that did not need straightening. "Go home, Alba. It's cold and you've done your hours."

"It's my shop too, in a way." I came around the counter. "Faye. They're Ryan Henderson's family's seed. Maris Piper. He told me last Saturday."

She did not look up. Her hands stayed flat on the counter, and I watched her fingers press down against the wood, and I understood, before she said anything, that she had been waiting for this for a week. Maybe longer. Maybe since she handed me the sack.

"I know," she said.

We stood there. The lighthouse ticked behind us the way old stone buildings do, settling