El's Chronicles: Shadow Island // Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The ferry groaned as it docked, as if it couldn’t believe this island even existed. The biting wind clawed at my jacket and tangled itself in my hair, tearing strands loose across my face. Overhead, the gulls circled, watchful and territorial, their cries thin and distant.

The island sprawled ahead, a patchwork of rocky cliffs and windblown trees, shrouded in the gray haze of late February. This wasn’t the bright, postcard-perfect summer haven I’d seen in magazines. It was raw, cold, and empty. Perfect for freezing my existential crisis into submission.

The driver of the island shuttle barely looked at me as he loaded my single bag into the back. Clearly, he’d reached his off-season tourist quota well before my arrival. 

We started driving, and it felt like we were heading toward the edge of the world. Massive cliffs rose along the coast, casting long shadows on the narrow, winding road bordered by wild brush and scattered boulders. Below, waves crashed against the rocks, sending bursts of white foam into the air. 

For the first time in years, I remembered how to breathe. Not the shallow breaths I rationed in the city, surrounded by people who measured my worth by how well I counterfeited normalcy. In the city, breathing had rules. It had posture. It had to be palatable, soundbite-sized, woven between meetings, duties, deadlines and lawyers, bankers, doctors who made eye contact with their computers instead of me. This breathing filled every corner of my lungs with sharp, salted air until it hurt just enough to remind me I was alive. Each inhale loosened the script I’d spent too long reciting: resilient, capable, resilient, capable. That holy loop. 

The shuttle moved without urgency, as if it too felt no need to rush.

I reached into my parka pocket and curled my fingers around the phone, which was showing zero reception. Out of habit, I opened the messaging app and glanced at Fyo’s last text, the one I’d gotten earlier as I boarded the ferry. “Don’t worry about me, Mom. Be safe, okay? Hope the island isn’t too creepy. Love you.”

I read it twice, then tucked the phone away, my smile slowly fading. 

When the shuttle stopped, I stepped out onto a gravel driveway, my boots crunching against the loose stones. 

The house stood before me, a weathered, gray structure perched precariously close to the cliff’s edge, like it had been holding its breath for years, waiting for the ocean to claim it. The cedar shingles were streaked with dark stains from rain and ocean spray, and the windows glared like empty eyes, reflecting the overcast sky. If melancholy had a postal code, this house would be its longest-standing resident.

I turned to the driver, clinging to a small, irrational hope that this wasn’t the right address. I opened my mouth to crack a joke, but he just gave me a nod, his face blank. “Keys are in the mailbox. Be careful out here. The wind’s worse than it looks.” With that, he climbed back into the shuttle and drove off, leaving me alone with the sound of the waves and the creaking groan of the house as the wind pushed against it in a way that was just dramatic enough to make me question my life choices. 

I stood there a moment longer, still scanning for any sign that this wasn’t my rental. Then I saw them. A few cardboard boxes with the food delivery service logo sat stacked on the porch, half-hidden behind the railing. One was torn open, revealing medium-sized pumpkins. Since February wasn’t exactly peak gourd season, they were unmistakably mine. Any lingering doubt I had evaporated with the ocean mist. This was the house.

I pulled the keys from the mailbox and paused at the door. The knob was worn smooth, likely from years of hands. It felt heavier than it should have, like turning it meant agreeing to something I hadn’t quite decided on. But then, commitment and I had been distant acquaintances for years, rarely on speaking terms.

And yet, when I stepped inside, a strange familiarity settled over me as though the house had been waiting, and I was just finally showing up.

The house smelled of salt and old wood, a faint mustiness clinging to the air. The hardwood floors were scuffed but solid, and the walls were painted a pale white. A steep staircase rose to the second floor, its banister smooth and dark, and the small living room to my right was anchored by a stone fireplace. To my left, the dining room flowed into the small kitchen. There were no photos on the walls, no art, no warmth, no signs of anyone else’s life left behind, just emptiness.

The wind rattled the window panes, a low, hollow sound, almost like a whisper. I shivered, pulling my jacket tighter as I wandered into the kitchen. It was small and practical, with white cabinets and an ancient gas stove that looked like it had seen better days. I ran my hand along the countertop, smooth and cold under my fingers. 

At the far end of the countertop stood what appeared to be a brand-new coffee maker. It looked oddly out of place in the otherwise bare kitchen. It was the same kind of machine I had back in the city: European, with a single button, and beautifully stubborn in its refusal to complicate coffee. I loved mine. This one looked freshly unpacked, the cord still looped with a twist tie, the instruction manual lying untouched beside it.

I opened the cabinets to find most of them nearly empty, holding only a handful of mismatched plates and lonely mugs. One cabinet, however, had been stocked with bottled water and an alarming but practical army of canned soup, all with expiration dates comfortably far in the future. 

The tour of the rest of the house didn’t take long. It was a modest three-bedroom with creaky floors and large, drafty windows. Upstairs, the same emptiness carried from room to room, though someone seemed to have made an effort to prepare the largest bedroom for my arrival. The bed had been made with plain new sheets, their folds too sharp to pretend they had been there long. A heavy gray wool blanket lay at the foot of the bed beside a single neatly folded towel, while a compact electric space heater stood nearby, its cord still tightly wound.

I settled on the smallest bedroom, which felt cozier, happened to have the best view, and would, I figured, be the easiest to keep warm. I unpacked my bag and remade the bed with the new sheets, pillows, and the blanket from the larger room.

Then I found myself drawn back to the window. Beyond the glass, the ocean stretched out beneath the heavy sky, and I stood there listening to the waves break against the rocks below. There was nowhere else I had to be, and for once, that felt like a relief.

I had come here to get away from the unbearable stillness of my city apartment. I needed four walls that didn’t know me or my thoughts, a different sky, a reset. With Fyo overseas for a semester at a boarding school in Europe, the quiet at home had become unsettling. This was the first time Fyo and I had been apart for more than a few days, and the emptiness left in his wake was sharper than I’d anticipated. 

Missing Fyo was only part of what had brought me here, though. I needed to figure out what to do with my business, a venture that had grown too fast and beyond anything I’d imagined. It was a glittering success story born out of sheer desperation and an unshakable allergy to polyester. 

It all started three years ago, on the first of January, when I woke up in an entirely new body. Not metaphorically. I was standing in front of the mirror, slowly unwrapping medical dressings, trying to recognize myself and failing in a very practical way. My body had changed since the last time I saw myself naked, and I remember thinking, with a kind of detached clarity, that this was going to require adjustment, in ways I was not prepared to itemize.

In front of that mirror, I found myself wondering whether I had once made some frivolous New Year’s wish about waking up more amply endowed than before and then, with admirable discipline, forgotten all about it. It seemed possible. Not likely, but possible. Memory is selective, especially where vanity is concerned. Although, judging by the situation, it appeared the request had eventually been processed, approved, and delivered with a decade-long delay.

Either way, whether one calls it a belated New Year’s miracle or simply the work of an excellent surgeon depends on temperament. What required immediate attention over the next few days was simple and practical: almost nothing I owned fit me anymore. I couldn’t spare a dime for new clothes, but I still had to brave the icy winters of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

I could either freeze to death or figure out how to layer up without turning into a walking rash. So I went to the local thrift stores, where I discovered a treasure trove of sad, discarded cashmere sweaters. They were stained, moth-eaten, and unloved. But not by me. I saw the potential. 

Necessity doesn’t just mother invention. It decks her out in patchwork cashmere and sends her down the runway. I started hacking the sweaters up, deconstructing them, reshaping and reassembling the pieces into entirely new creations that, to put it kindly, would make anyone with a basic understanding of fashion weep. Think neon patchwork scarves, Frankenstein-style ponchos, and a sweater with sleeves that could double as neck pillows. 

Patchwork wasn’t just aesthetic; it was autobiographical. Not long ago, my surgeons’ hands had mapped my body in sections, deciding where to cut and where to join, and I’d been rendered into components, returned to myself with seams, taught that coherence and beauty could be manufactured. Certainly, my pieces were far from flawless. Deliberately imperfect, each stitch carried the thrill of risk, the pride of doing it my way. 

I didn’t care what anyone thought. But somehow, in a twist of cosmic irony, my hideous chic aesthetic struck a chord. Apparently, the world was ready for cashmere sweaters that looked like the fever dream of someone with a loose grip on reality. And people? Oh, they wanted them. They needed them. 

Success felt weird.

My first sale was to a yoga influencer who called my lopsided cardigan “an inspired meditation on imperfection.” (I called it “my knitting machine jammed.”) She saw profound art where I saw pure survival, a metaphor for modern existence if there ever was one. 

Before I knew it, orders flooded in, and I had to start outsourcing to actual professionals who didn’t think “straight seams” were just a suggestion. My little cashmere Frankenstein factory had turned into an accidental empire, and somewhere along the way, I became the face of avant-garde cashmere, which, let’s be real, isn’t a thing. 

(Un)fortunately, I learned pretty quickly that idiosyncrasy was hard to scale. Reality arrived in the form of invoices, backorders, and the quiet recognition that the used cashmere business model would never grow beyond a certain point. As it turned out, the secondhand market worked for a personal aesthetic, but it did not sustain payroll. So we began supplementing reclaimed material with yarn sourced directly from mills, the kind that usually only travels between factories and brands whose archives are older than most American infrastructure. 

I realized fairly early on that what we were actually selling was not moral virtue or environmental salvation but irreproducibility, which is a much less socially friendly word but a much more honest one. The material wasn’t rescued; it was redirected, and we had built a reputation on the promise that if a client owned one of our pieces, the statistical likelihood of encountering it again in the wild was close to zero. 

Then the investors started circling, and I kept explaining that we didn’t produce excess inventory, that everything moved in small controlled pulses, that if a piece came back to us, which happened rarely but not never, it didn’t become discounted merchandise, it became unfinished material again. I could see them mentally flipping through the standard luxury playbook and failing to find a matching chapter. 

Around the same time, my personal life had already forced another structural decision, because about a year ago I had moved from Pittsburgh to New York City for medical treatment. There was exactly one hospital in the country equipped to manage my very particular hematological disorder. The hospital happened to be in Manhattan, which was a deeply inconvenient place to relocate since I was running a labor-heavy manufacturing operation in a different state.

The women who actually constructed the garments stayed in Pittsburgh, partly because they had built their lives there and partly because hiring that level of skill in Manhattan would have required venture capital or a small miracle.

For a while, I lived in this strange geographic split where the brain of the company was in New York and the rest of it was still in western Pennsylvania. (Luckily for me, I had always liked flying.)

This year, by early February, when we had essentially sold through everything, I finally understood that the next phase of the company wasn’t about getting bigger. It was about getting cleaner, more precise, more honest about where humans belonged in the process.

The real decision was not whether I would introduce industrial knitting systems, but whether those machines would live in Pittsburgh, preserving the ecosystem I had built there, or whether this was the moment I relocated production to Brooklyn and accepted that I would be trading stability for proximity and probably aging ten years faster in the process. On paper, that left two questions: where the system would end up, and how many versions of myself I was willing to split into in order to run it. Entrepreneurship (as I learned) is mostly the art of negotiating with alternate versions of oneself who all want incompatible things.

I should also probably admit something less polished. Because beneath all of that operational drama, there was another thought that kept interrupting the narrative in a way I initially didn’t take seriously. I found myself entertaining the least noble and therefore most seductive entrepreneurial fantasy of all: selling the company and disappearing. Not scaling it or shepherding it into some more mature phase of institutional excellence. Just selling it. Taking the money, retaining a tasteful amount of mystique, and allowing someone else to spend their afternoons discussing fulfillment strategy and weighted inventory turnover.

What complicated this fantasy, aside from my own vanity, was that I had no particularly coherent plan for what would come after. I did not dream of beaches or philanthropic panels or becoming one of those women who acquires a ceramic studio the moment she no longer needs one. I wasn’t even sure I wanted freedom in the abstract. I wanted, more specifically, to stop being mechanically necessary to a thing I had never set out to build on purpose. Because for all its mythology, the company had not begun as a calling. It began because I was cold, broke, and allergic to bad fabric. That is not a founder story so much as a highly specific inconvenience with good branding. Somehow I had become the custodian of a business grand enough to require infrastructure, investors, and serious conversations about industrial machinery, when in fact its earliest business model could be summarized as: a broke girl enters a thrift store, develops a point of view.

And that, more than the machines, was what had followed me to the island. I had to make a decision. Either I would step out of the business entirely, or I would commit to it properly by investing in industrial systems and accepting everything that came with that level of scale. This was not a decision that could be deferred indefinitely. By the end of the spring, one version of the future would have to give way to the other. 

None of that, of course, needed to be settled before I’d even washed the ferry ride off me. I stepped away from the window and took a long, hot shower. 

Then I slipped into a black, oversized cashmere sweater from my very first collection. It barely grazed the tops of my thighs like a mini dress. The shoulders, upper sleeves, and back were adorned with thick, intricate cashmere interweavings that twisted and curled like ram horns. 

I was dressed, technically. But only technically. 

I padded out to the living room, ready to settle in. My stomach growled, a sharp reminder that I hadn’t eaten all day. Though some of my grocery delivery from the mainland had already arrived, I was too tired from the trip to cook anything. So I settled for ordering from the island’s seafood joint. I got fried clams, a lobster roll, and chowder. 

The chill in the air crept through the old house, biting at my skin even through the sweater. I glanced at the fireplace. It hadn’t been used in years, judging by the layer of ash and soot caked around the edges. I crouched in front of it and opened the flue, silently hoping the chimney wasn’t completely blocked. When I reached up to feel inside, something hard and brittle shifted under my fingers. Before I could pull my hand back, a small object tumbled down, landing with a soft thud in the ashes.

It was a journal. The edges were charred, as though it had been caught in a fire but never fully burned. The leather cover was cracked, and the pages inside were yellowed with age. I held it gingerly, my fingers brushing away the soot. 

I set it aside then struck a match and lit the kindling. The warmth spread slowly, chasing away the chill of the room. I sat down, staring into the flickering flames, then reached for the journal again. I opened it carefully, angling the pages toward the firelight. The handwriting was cramped and uneven. I tried to follow it, tracing the ink with my eyes, but the dim light and my own fatigue blurred the meaning into fragments. 

The knock on the door startled me. I set the journal down, then pulled the cashmere sweater lower over my thighs and opened the door.

He stood there, holding a brown paper bag with the restaurant’s logo. He was tall and rugged, with the kind of good looks that seemed buried beneath rough edges. His unruly beard suggested a kind of incidental neglect rather than a deliberate style. His dark hair, wind-tousled and loosely pushed back, was damp and curling slightly at the ends.

But it was his eyes that caught and held me. They were glacial gray, the color of the Atlantic in winter. It was as if he wasn’t merely seeing me, but absorbing every detail and filing it away. He looked at me with penetrating focus I wasn’t used to getting from someone delivering food. There was no malice in it, but no warmth either. And despite the disquiet, I couldn’t look away.

Neither of us spoke. We stared at each other for a breath longer than strangers usually do. 

“You ordered from Salty’s?” he finally asked.

A wave of déjà vu crashed over me. His face wasn’t familiar in any way I could recall, yet his presence felt like something I had once known but somehow lost. 

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” 

He handed over the bag, his fingers brushing mine before he stepped back. His hands were warm and clean. Mine were caked in soot and the kind of regret you can’t exfoliate.

He lingered a second too long. I looked at him. He looked at me. I was wearing nothing but a sweater dress with horns growing out of the shoulders. My black hair, damp from the shower and still severely tangled by the ferry wind, hung down to my tailbone. Pale skin, green eyes, ash on my hands. I was reasonably sure there was soot on my face, too. In other words, I looked like someone who had narrowly escaped a 1692 public execution in Salem and reemerged on Shadow Island to place a takeout order from Salty’s. Was he staring at me because he was silently praying?

He adjusted his stance. “Salty’s doesn’t usually deliver this time of year,” he said. “But the owner’s a friend, and I was already dropping off some fresh catch, so I figured I’d bring it out.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly self-conscious. “That’s kind of you.” 

“Word gets around when someone rents this house. Two months, right?” he asked, his lips curving in the faintest hint of a smile. 

“Yes,” I replied, surprised by his knowledge. “Give me a second.” I stepped aside, fumbling with my backpack until I wrestled my wallet free. The faint rustle of bills filled the quiet space as I pulled a few out. 

“I really appreciate you going out of your way to deliver this,” I said, holding out the money, slightly unsure whether that was enough for food deliveries on a remote island.

He didn’t move. He looked at the bills in my hand, then at my face, his expression unreadable. For a moment, I felt like I had done something wrong, like tipping him was an offense to some unspoken island rule.

“It’s no big deal,” he finally said. “It was on my way. Enjoy your food.” Then, with a slight nod, he turned and walked away, leaving me standing in the doorway with the money still clutched in my hand. I watched him go, his boots crunching on the gravel. 

I shut the door and sat down at the table, taking a bite of my lobster roll. I chewed mechanically while mentally replaying the look in his eyes and scrambling to remember a man I had never actually met. 

Soft bread, warm butter, salt air, and the lingering memory of a man who looked like the Grim Reaper’s younger, hotter brother. 

Maybe this island wasn’t going to be uneventful after all.