The Cartographer's Map

Sheena is a cartographer who has spent a lifetime charting coastlines she never visits. When she inherits a Cornish cottage from an aunt she barely knew, she arrives with her drafting table and her grief and her carefully constructed solitude, intending to finish her commission and return home.

The wall at the edge of the garden is crumbling. She hires Theo, a local stonemason, to rebuild it.

Over the course of a single week in August, the wall rises stone by stone, and Sheena's defences fall down faster than she planned. Theo is everything she is not: solid, present, unafraid of his own body or his own desires. He reads the landscape of the wall with the same care she applies to the coastline, and she begins to wonder what it might feel like to be mapped by someone who takes time, someone who learns the terrain before making their move.

When the heat breaks and the rain comes, and the conversation turns deeper, Sheena finds that the most treacherous coastlines are not the ones on paper. They are the ones inside you, shifting under your feet, impossible to chart until you're already drowning in them.