Chapter 31

     June drifted in quietly, carried on the back of the lingering mist from the storm, and for the first time in months, there was... nothing. The land had settled, the rot was retreating, and Ava’s madness seemed like a half-forgotten dream. The heather grew, small and fragile, but persistent, digging its roots into the earth as if determined to hold on to the life we’d given it. And me? I was still here. Still standing. Still waiting for something to happen.

     But nothing did.

     July followed close behind, hot and lazy, the days long and heavy, stretched out like a yawn that never quite ended. The marshes, once teeming with tension, had grown still. The people in town went about their business, barely noticing the changes that had come and gone like a passing storm. The world moved on, as it always did, and I found myself floating—adrift in a sea of silence, waiting for something to break.

     Gulfs abut.

     That’s what it felt like—gaps, spaces between what had happened and what was still to come. I was caught in the middle, floating between worlds, between stories. The land had chosen life, but what did that mean for me? For Tony? For everything that had come before?

     I wasn’t sure. But as the days slipped by, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something. That the space between events—the gulf—wasn’t just empty. It was... something else. Something waiting to be filled.

     Huh?

     It didn’t make sense. But then again, not much did these days. Two months of nothing. Two months of silence. It was enough to drive a man mad. And maybe that was the point. Maybe the world needed quiet after all the noise. Maybe I needed it, too.

     I leaned back against the rough wooden post outside the small house I’d taken up in since everything had gone down. The sky above was bright and cloudless, the heat pressing down like a weight on my chest. I closed my eyes, letting the silence wash over me, but it wasn’t long before the familiar itch returned. That old feeling, the one that told me I wasn’t done yet.

     Because I wasn’t. Not by a long shot.

     “Sid Jangler,” I muttered aloud, testing the sound of the name in the stillness. It felt strange on my tongue, like an old suit that didn’t quite fit anymore, but it was mine all the same. I hadn’t used the name in years. Not since... well, not since things had gone sideways.

     I wasn’t the hero type. Never had been. Heroes were for stories, for books, for movies where the guy in the hat got the girl and everything tied up neat at the end. That wasn’t me. Not by a long shot. But sometimes life didn’t give you a choice. Sometimes it threw you into the fire and you either burned or crawled out with the scars to prove it.

     And I had plenty of those.

     At float hit tot.

     That’s what they used to call me—Sid Jangler, the float who hit. I had a reputation for drifting from place to place, for getting involved in cases that didn’t seem to have any answers. The kind of cases that other detectives turned down because they didn’t make sense. But that was my specialty. I floated between the cracks, between the gaps in people’s stories, and somehow, I always found a way to hit something. Even if it didn’t always make sense.

     But then something changed. I stopped floating. I stopped hitting. I disappeared. Went into hiding, some said. Others figured I’d burned out, maybe hit the wrong thing one too many times. But the truth was simpler than that.

     I’d gotten tired. Tired of the same old cases, tired of the same old stories that never seemed to end. So I stopped. Took myself out of the game. But you can’t hide forever. Not when the world keeps moving. Not when the gaps between stories start to fill themselves in whether you like it or not.

     So here I was, Sid Jangler, back in the game whether I wanted to be or not. The float who hit, trying to make sense of the spaces between, of the gulfs that abut. And there were plenty of those. More than I cared to admit.

     “Huh?” I muttered, shaking my head as if to clear the cobwebs. It didn’t matter. Not now. The land was healing. The storm had passed. And whatever was waiting out there in the gulfs, I’d deal with it when the time came.

     For now, I’d float.