Chapter 1
I didn’t tell anyone I was going to England. Not because I was being mysterious about it, but because there wasn’t really anyone who would’ve cared enough to ask questions. My mother would’ve worried about me driving on the wrong side of the road. My friend Danny would’ve asked if I was running away from something. I would’ve said no and he would’ve known I was lying, and that whole conversation felt exhausting before it even happened. So I booked the flight, packed light, and left.
I’d picked Cornwall off a map, almost literally. I’d been sitting at my kitchen table at two in the morning with my laptop open, the kind of restless that sleep doesn’t fix, and I just started clicking. I wanted somewhere that didn’t look like anywhere I’d ever been. Somewhere that didn’t have a version of my life in it. I’d done the cities — London twice, Paris once, a long weekend in Barcelona that I don’t talk about for reasons that have nothing to do with Barcelona. Cities were easy. Cities let you disappear into noise and movement and the comfortable anonymity of being one more body in a crowd. I didn’t want that. I wanted somewhere quiet enough that I’d actually have to sit with myself, which was either a healthy impulse or a deeply masochistic one. I hadn’t decided yet.
Cornwall came up and I looked at the pictures — the cliffs, the grey water, the little stacked stone villages that looked like they’d grown up out of the ground rather than been built — and I thought, yeah. That’ll do. I didn’t read reviews or make a plan. I found a cottage to rent in a village called Port Isaac, booked two weeks, and closed the laptop before I could talk myself out of it.
The flight was fine. The drive from the airport was the kind of experience that rearranges something in your nervous system permanently. I’d been warned about driving on the left and I thought I’d been adequately prepared. I was not adequately prepared. The roads narrowed as I got further into Cornwall until they stopped being roads in any sense I recognized and became more like suggestions — single lane channels cut between hedgerows so tall and dense they blocked out the sky, with passing places every quarter mile where you pulled in and hoped whoever was coming the other direction had better spatial awareness than you did. I white-knuckled it for about forty minutes, had a brief spiritual experience when a tractor came around a blind corner, and arrived in Port Isaac with a new appreciation for my own mortality and a genuine respect for anyone who had ever navigated this place before GPS.
Port Isaac was smaller than I expected, which is saying something because I hadn’t expected much. The road into the village itself narrowed further until I was genuinely concerned the rental car and the stone walls on either side of me were going to have a disagreement I couldn’t afford, and then it opened up and there it was. Boats in the harbor. Whitewashed cottages climbing the hillside like they were trying to get a better look at the water. The smell of salt and something faintly fishy that I decided I liked.
I parked and just stood there for a minute with my hands in my jacket pockets.
It was the kind of place that made you feel like you’d interrupted something. Like the village had been getting along perfectly fine for several hundred years before I showed up and would continue to do so long after I left. I found that comforting in a way I couldn’t fully explain. Nobody here knew me. Nobody here had any version of me in their head that I had to live up to or live down. I was just a guy with an American passport and a rolling suitcase on cobblestones, and that was enough.
I found the place I was renting without too much trouble — a small stone cottage up one of the narrow lanes that climbed away from the harbor. The woman who handed me the key was somewhere in her seventies, built like she’d weathered a few storms and hadn’t found any of them particularly impressive. She had the kind of Cornish accent that took me a full thirty seconds to decode and spoke with the efficient warmth of someone who liked people fine but didn’t feel the need to perform it. She told me there was a good pub at the bottom of the hill, that I should try the crab, that the shower took a minute to get hot and I shouldn’t rush it, and that if I needed anything I could knock on the door of the house two up the lane. Then she handed me the key and left me to it. I liked her immediately.
The cottage was small and low-ceilinged and smelled like old stone and something faintly floral, lavender maybe, and it had a window seat in the bedroom that looked out over the rooftops toward the harbor. I dropped my bag. I sat on the edge of the bed. I looked out that window at the slice of grey water visible between the chimneys and the gulls turning slow circles in the white sky above it.
Three years. It had been three years since Marcus and I ended and I was still doing this — still picking up and pointing myself at places that had nothing to do with anything, hoping the distance would finish whatever work time had started. Danny wasn’t wrong. I was running. I just preferred to think of it as moving, which felt more intentional and less sad. There’s a version of that reasoning that’s actually healthy, I think. Getting out, changing your environment, refusing to let grief calcify into furniture. I’d made that argument to myself enough times that I almost believed it.
The truth, if I was being honest in a way I generally avoided, was that three years felt like a long time to still be measuring things against a person. Marcus wasn’t measuring anything against me. Marcus had moved on with the kind of clean efficiency that I had always envied and resented in equal measure, was apparently very happy, and had not thought about me in any meaningful way since about six months after we ended. I knew this not because we were in contact, we weren’t, but because mutual friends existed and. people talked and sometimes information arrived whether you wanted it or not. He was fine. He was better than fine. I was in a cottage in Cornwall at thirty-one years old having booked an international flight at two in the morning to avoid having a conversation with my friend about whether I was okay.
I was fine too, mostly. I just hadn’t figured out what came next.
I gave myself about thirty seconds more of that before I stood up, grabbed my jacket, and went back outside. Self-pity has a shelf life and I’d hit mine.
The village rewarded wandering. There wasn’t much else you could do with it, honestly — Port Isaac wasn’t built for itineraries. It was built for fishing and for looking at, and I was happy enough to do the looking. The harbor sat at the bottom of everything, the natural center of gravity, and the village arranged itself around it in the haphazard way of places that had grown according to necessity rather than plan. Narrow lanes ran in every direction, climbing steep and doubling back, opening unexpectedly onto small level spaces with benches or a postbox or a garden wall with a cat on it. Half the streets had names and half of them didn’t seem to bother.
I walked down to the harbor first. The tide was out and the boats sat at angles in the mud, patient and unbothered. A man in weathered orange gear was working on one of them with the focused unhurried patience of someone who had been doing the same thing for forty years and expected to do it forty more. He didn’t look up when I passed. The water beyond the harbor walls was grey-green and restless, the kind of sea that looked cold even in summer and didn’t apologize for it. I stood at the edge of the quay for a while and watched it.
I’d grown up on the East Coast. Water wasn’t new to me. But the Atlantic off the coast of Cornwall felt different from the Atlantic off the coast of anywhere I’d been before — older somehow, which I knew was not a rational thing to think about an ocean, but the feeling was there anyway. Like it had more history in it. Like it had been looked at by more people for longer and had absorbed some of that weight. I stood there probably longer than was normal for a person just looking at water, but nobody seemed to be keeping track.
From the harbor I went up. That was mostly how Port Isaac worked — you went up or you went down, and up led to more of the village and eventually to the clifftops where the land ended and there was nothing but air and sea below. I took a lane that climbed steeply past cottages with window boxes and painted doors, past a small chapel that looked like it had been there since people first decided this was a place worth having a chapel, past a garden wall where an old tabby cat regarded me with the specific contempt that cats reserve for people who want to pet them but haven’t been formally introduced. I didn’t try to pet it. I’d learned.
The lane leveled off onto a small open area with a bench and a view back down over the village and the harbor below. I sat. The wind had picked up a little and it came off the sea cold and clean and I pulled my jacket tighter and didn’t mind it. Below me the village was small enough to take in all at once — the slate rooftops, the boats, the quay, the handful of people moving around at the unhurried pace of a place with no particular agenda. A gull landed on the wall beside the bench, looked at me sideways, and then flew off again as if I hadn’t met whatever standard it was applying.
A dog came eventually. Medium sized, some kind of terrier mix, moving with the confident purposefulness of a local who knew the neighborhood. It came and leaned against my leg for about forty-five seconds — not asking for anything, just making contact — and then wandered off without ceremony in the direction it had been heading. I watched it go. I thought that was a pretty good interaction honestly. Clear, uncomplicated, nobody expected anything they didn’t get.
I sat there for a while longer. The light was doing something good over the water, the kind of flat grey coastal light that makes everything look slightly cinematic, and I thought about how I’d been to more beautiful places than this in some objective sense — coasts that were warmer and more dramatic, villages that were better preserved or more picturesque — but something about Port Isaac was settling in a way those places hadn’t. Maybe it was the scale of it. Maybe it was that it wasn’t trying to be anything. It was just a fishing village on a Cornish cliff that had been here longer than anyone currently in it and would be here long after, and it didn’t need me to find it charming or profound, and I found it both anyway.
By mid-morning I was hungry and ready for coffee, and I’d been running on airline food and a service station sandwich since the previous afternoon, so the situation had some urgency to it. I made my way back down into the village and walked the main lane slowly, looking. There was a pub that wouldn’t open for a few hours yet. A small shop with newspapers in the window and buckets and spades hanging outside on hooks, optimistic about the weather. A couple of places that seemed to be more gift shop than anything else, selling pottery and postcards and fudge in flavors that seemed designed more for tourists than anyone with opinions about fudge.
And then the cafe. I’d noticed it earlier on my way through — small, set back slightly from the lane, with a handwritten menu board propped in the window and a couple of small tables outside that two people were currently using despite the temperature, which told me either they were locals accustomed to it or tourists committed to the aesthetic. The door was open. From inside came the sound of a coffee machine doing its work and something that smelled like baking, warm and buttery and immediate.
I stopped in front of it and read the menu board. Eggs. Toast. Something called a hog roast roll that I didn’t know if I was emotionally prepared for at ten in the morning but filed away for future consideration. Coffee in several forms. A handwritten addition at the bottom in different ink that said today: crab soup and I thought about what the woman at the cottage had told me and decided the universe was being fairly unsubtle.
I went in.
