Synopsis
*LIMITED FIRST EDITION COMES WITH A STAMPED CASE AND ILLUSTRATED ENDPAPERS*
A new adult novel from New York Times bestselling author Shea Ernshaw, in which a woman rediscovers the mythical island she stumbled upon as a child—and the man she once met who apparently hasn’t aged.
The night Clay Lockhart’s wife dies, a violent storm tears their home—and the eight hectares of land beneath it—away from the Scottish coast, sending it adrift into the Atlantic. Thirty years later, twelve-year-old Ellie Mills discovers the fabled floating island off the coast of Nova Scotia and finds Clay still living in the weatherworn farmhouse perched on its highest hill.
When the island vanishes overnight, Ellie is left questioning whether it ever existed at all. But decades later, the island resurfaces—and Ellie, now in her thirties, returns, determined to uncover the truth. What she finds is even stranger: Clay hasn’t aged a single day.
Faced with the impossible, Ellie learns that some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved—and that a life shaped by wonder may hold more promise than one bound by certainty.
With her signature atmospheric, lyrical prose, Shea Ernshaw offers us an original work of folklore with a masterful modern touch. A haunting tale, Habits of the Sea spans centuries and coastlines, journeys through time and memory, and redefines the very meaning of love itself.
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About the Author
Shea Ernshaw is a #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of The Wicked Deep, Winterwood, A Wilderness of Stairs, Long Live the Pumpkin Queen, and A History of Wild Places. Her books have been published in over twenty countries and repeatedly chosen as Indie Next Picks. She lives in a small mountain town in Oregon and is happiest when lost in a good book, lost in the woods, or writing her next novel. Visit her online at SheaErnshaw.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One CHAPTER ONE
2007
Nova Scotia rose up from the Atlantic as if it were a clot of broken teeth, forced from the maw of a giant mouth. I hated it that first summer, arriving by train, Grandma June standing with a hand over her eyes to shield the dull afternoon sun. Her skin was bronzed and rough from her days spent wandering the shoals and tidepools along the outer rim of eastern Nova Scotia, and her eyes still had that dewy sapphire quality, like she could see across the entire ocean to the coast of Ireland on a clear day.
I hardly knew her that first year.
She was merely a collection of stories told to me by my mother.
It was only supposed to be temporary. A couple months at most, Mom had said when she kissed my forehead and ushered me onto the Amtrak train car that would take me through the forested, craggy backbone of eastern Canada. I’ll write soon, she called out to me, eyes watering, the mournful gray of the Ohio skyline sinking away behind her as the train inched down the tracks. Mom had found a job out West, in Silicon Valley, and once she was settled into an apartment, she would send for me.
But over the next four months, her letters and phone calls became more infrequent. She met someone, a man at the company where she was working as an executive secretary. He already had three kids, and a house that was surely big enough to accommodate me as well—her only child. But she never asked me to come. She’d send postcards addressed to Eleanor Mills—the last name we would soon no longer share, now that she was engaged to be married. A first name I no longer wanted.
It was Nana who started calling me Ellie.
She said Eleanor was too long, not easily shouted over the crashing waves when we were out searching the shoals at low tide.
So Ellie became my summer name. A name that made me feel like someone else.
A name Mom didn’t even know. But she kept sending her letters, telling me that she missed me and thought of me whenever she looked out at the sea and imagined our two oceans touching, the Atlantic and Pacific meeting at the rugged Cape Horn in South America. And this made her feel not so alone.
Yet, she didn’t miss me enough to send money for a ticket so I could come live with her in her big new house overlooking a valley of tinseled, tech-funded lights.
I was no longer my mother’s daughter. I was a memory she was trying to stuff into her past, tamped down good. Maybe it was the reminder of my father she was trying to escape—a colossal fucking mistake, I heard her whisper to Nana once over the phone. A one-night stand. A man she never saw again after that singular encounter—when a cluster of eager cells began dividing in her womb. He was a donor, not a father. Nothing more.
After a whole year at Grandma June’s, she let me paint the walls of my room a warm buttercream yellow, and insisted I call her simply Nana. She enrolled me in the local middle school at the other end of town, and I knew: It was no longer temporary. I was staying for good on the harsh, rain-splattered coastline of Nova Scotia.
I made a handful of friends, not the kind of friendships that would last a lifetime, but the fleeting kind—names I wouldn’t recall in adulthood. And each day after school, I walked home up the slick, salty bayfront, counting the fishing boats chugging back into the harbor from open waters. I’d gather seashells and smooth rocks from the shoreline in front of Nana’s house, and when I got home, I’d spread my books and homework out on the picnic table on the back porch while Nana brought me Earl Grey tea and salted apricot scones she’d baked that afternoon.
It was an easy, untroubled way to plod through my middle school years.
Until the autumn after my twelfth birthday.
A storm had picked up steam on the outer cape and roared against the mainland. I lay in bed—counting the paper stars I had cut from matte-black construction paper and hung with navy-blue string from my ceiling. Twenty-seven in all. Usually the counting helped me sleep, but that night the rain was thundering against the metal roof, the wind screaming in from the bay, thudding the half-broken shutter outside my bedroom window. I was used to storms by then, of sleeping so close to the ocean I learned to measure the tide just by sound. I could hear its heavy roll when it rose up the beach in front of Nana’s house, and its soft shush, shush when it slid back, retreating as if it were water down a bathtub drain. But that night, the storm made a different sound.
A deep-bellied scraping.
The grating, grinding wheeze of metal on rock. Of a ship coming aground, its bow tearing apart against the shallow boulders just off the cape.
A ship had wrecked itself against the rocks in front of our home.
I was certain of it.
Rising from bed, I could just make out a bit of light across the bay: a wet, distant orb swaying back and forth in the rain and wind. At the back door, I yanked on my boots and navy-blue raincoat, then went down the shore toward the light. Rain poured from the sky. The air smelled of rotten fish and something else. A faraway scent I didn’t recognize—like fresh mango, coconut maybe, or some unfamiliar aroma I didn’t yet have a word for. My gut told me something was odd about that storm, about that night, beneath those dizzying stars barely visible through the clouds.
Still, I waded into the sea up to my ankles and stared out at the single light flickering in the wind. No shouts of distress, no horn signaling to whoever was on duty at the lighthouse that a ship needed assistance. I should have run back to the house and woken Nana.
If I had, everything would have been different.
But I was willful, intrepid in those years. And there was something about that light, the otherworldly nature of it, that spurred a curiosity inside me I couldn’t shake.
I slid Nana’s small, single-prop fishing boat down the sand and into the water. The engine sputtered to life after two pulls of the cord. Nana rarely used the boat; she no longer kept crab pots out in the deep waters just past the rocky inlet. In recent years, she had begun gathering clams from the tidepools each morning once the water receded. It was easy work, and she sang as she walked, luring in the soft-bodied mollusks. The clams seemed to throw themselves into the pools in front of the house, as if they wanted to be caught.
The tiny boat thrashed against the driving waves, but I had been out in worse weather. Nana had begun allowing me to take the boat out on my own, after my homework was done, letting me motor out to the cape, where I’d kill the engine and watch the waves roll in, daydreaming of something I couldn’t identify. A thirst, a nostalgia for a time that hadn’t happened yet.
It took a good ten minutes to meet the rocky outer edge that formed our natural harbor, the wind at my face. But I eased the boat up against the rocks, then stood, looking back to the mainland. I could no longer see our house or the small stretch of beach. But I could see the town of Maylarch a half mile down the shore, several lights gleaming through the rain, boats tucked safely into the marina for the night, away from the worst of the thrashing waves.
I spun around, peering up the rock jetty toward the faint, flickering light. It took a moment for my eyes to settle, to adjust to the rain and the formation of what I thought had been a ship.
But it was not a fishing vessel run aground—men scrambling to free themselves before the punctured hull began to take on water—it was a house, white walls and dark windows set atop a high mound of rock and soil.
The thing that had thrust itself against the jetty was not a ship at all.
It was a whole island.
I should have taken Nana’s fishing boat back across the harbor and slipped into bed, pretended I hadn’t seen a thing. I should have left and never looked back.
But that’s not what happened.
I scrambled over the rocks, my hair soaked through with rain, eyes stinging, and when I reached the place where the island met with the jetty, I waded through two feet of seawater before stepping onto Saltwell Island.
I would regret it later.
I would dream about it, wondering if the things that happened that night were only in my head. If the police and the therapists were right, and it had all been some wildly lucid dream—the midnight imaginings of a twelve-year-old girl who slipped into the ocean and came back not quite the same.
But what it couldn’t explain, what it couldn’t make right, was why it felt like I had been on the island for only a single night, a few hours at most. Yet when I returned, sitting on Nana’s porch steps with an itchy wool blanket wrapped over my shoulders, my body trembling from the cold, a policeman crouched in front of me—his head bald, his closely trimmed mustache the color of seagull feathers—and he said, in a voice reserved only for traumatized children, that I had been missing for a whole week.
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