No Mark Upon Her

he’d said. Other days, it was a wrench to adjust the rigging, oil for the seat runners, filler for the dents in the fiberglass.
    By that August, he’d become the club dogsbody, his mates forgotten, his dull terraced street subsumed by the river. He learned that the burly-shouldered man who gave him chores was a coach. And when one day the coach had looked him levelly in the eyes and handed him a pair of oars, the world had opened like an oyster, and Kieran Connolly had seen that he might be something other than a poor Irish kid with no future.
    The Lea—and rowing—had given him that. His coach had encouraged him to join the army. He could row, Coach said, and get an education, too. And so he had done, training as a medic, rowing in eights and fours, and then in the single scull that had been his true love since that very first day on the Lea.
    What neither he nor his coach had foreseen in those halcyon days before 9/11 was that the world would change, and that Kieran would see four tours of duty in Iraq. On the last, his unit had been taken out by an improvised explosive device, and he had been the only survivor.
    There’d been nothing left for him in Tottenham when he came home. His dad had been taken by cancer, the house sold to pay his debts, although Kieran had managed to salvage his father’s woodworking tools. After that, he couldn’t bear to go back to the Lea, to meet anyone he had known, or who—worse still—might offer him sympathy.
    So he’d bought an old Land Rover and drifted round the south of England, sleeping in a tent, always drawn by the rivers, but unable to imagine what he might do or where he might fit.
    Then, early one May morning, two months after his discharge, he’d stood on Henley Bridge, watching the scullers, feeling as insubstantial as a ghost.
    Later he’d walked through town, intending to buy some supplies, and he’d seen the advert for the boatshed in an estate agent’s window. It had seemed like a spar held out to a drowning man.
    A few weeks later, now the proud owner of the one-room shed, he’d moved in his few possessions, bought a used single shell, and begun to row for the first time in years. It was, he thought, like riding a bike—once learned, never forgotten. His body, still healing, had protested, but he’d kept on, and slowly he’d grown stronger.
    There was a small fixed dock that allowed him to tie up the little motor skiff he’d bought, and the boatshed’s small floating raft gave him a private place from which to launch the shell. He’d had no interest in rowing from a club, or competing again. He rowed for sanity now, not sport.
    But it was impossible to row on the Thames at Henley every day without encountering other rowers, and a few had recognized him from his competition days. A few others remembered that he had a knack for fixing boats, and as the months passed, he’d found himself taking on a repair here and there.
    The jobs helped fill his days between morning row and evening run, and when he wasn’t working on someone else’s boat, he’d begun very tentatively to work on a design for a wooden racing single. He was, after all, a furniture maker’s son. To him, wooden boats had a life and grace not found in fiberglass, and the project was in a way a tribute to his father.
    But he’d had no one to talk to but himself, and that small voice was little buffer against the memories that thronged inside his head and kept him awake in the night.
    And then one day he’d gone to pick up a boat that needed patching, and he’d seen the pen full of puppies in the owner’s garden.
    He’d come away with the boat, and Finn.
    That fat, black, wriggly puppy had, in the two years since, given Kieran a reason to get up in the morning. Finn was more than a companion, he was Kieran’s partner, and that union had given Kieran something he’d thought gone from his life—a useful job.
    Not that Tavie didn’t deserve credit, too, but if it weren’t for Finn, he’d never have met Tavie.
    Finn, as if aware that he was the subject of Kieran’s ruminations, spread his back toes in a luxurious doggy stretch and settled his heavy head a bit more comfortably on Kieran’s knee.
    Shifting position, Kieran grimaced at the prickle of pins and needles. His legs had gone to sleep. And, he realized, the storm was passing. The rain was pattering now, not ricocheting, the shed was no longer shaking in the wind, and his nausea had passed.
    “Get off, you great