Page 10 of Carry Me Home

Mum shoots me a brief look, tucked away before I can examine it. ‘Did he? I didn’t know you’d talked to him.’

‘He texted. Last week.’ I pick at the scone. ‘He said Mrs Penrose’s cat had got into someone’s engine again, and that the fuchsias were holding up, and that Dot has started ordering extra pasties for the summer tourists and one of them was apparently a Scotch egg, which nobody has explained yet.’

She’s smiling. Facing the back counter where the sandwiches and baguettes get made, so I can only see the edge of it. ‘And how is Tom?’

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘You know Tom. He’s always fine.’

This is true and also not quite true. Tom is fine in the same way the café is fine – structurally sound, operational, not obviously damaged. Whether fine is the same as all right is a different question and not one I’m asking on a Sunday morning with a lopsided scone.

Mum puts down her cloth, and then I get the full scale of her ‘look’. ‘Nina, I really think it’s time for us to talk. Properly, not you just sitting there, in denial and avoiding.’

Well, that’s one way to ruin my enjoyment of the scone.

‘Mum.’ I sigh and it settles in my stomach like wet sand. ‘I don’t think I’m ready yet.’ My palms start to tingle and are slick with sweat just to prove how unready I am.

Another look, which I return, and then a simple nod.

She turns away and straightens the cake stand, and I let out a huff of relief.

Definitely not ready yet.

I eat the last of the scone and pretend the crumbs don’t get stuck in my tight throat.

I’m washing up when the door goes and Mum does the automatic café-owner scan, clocking the tables, the available seats, the cake stand – and then her lips curve, and she says, ‘Oh, how lovely,’ in the tone she uses when she actually means it and isn’t being sarcastic. Sometimes the two go together and create a puzzle that needs to be unravelled, but not now. Now is a ‘mean it’ situation, so I automatically turn to see what is genuinely lovely.

The two of them are standing in the doorway. The older one spots me first – blonde, forget-me-not-eyed, with a smile that gets there ahead of everything else. The mirror image of her brother.

‘Nina Ellis,’ says Meg Darcy, as though she’s just won a treasure hunt in spotting me first. ‘I knew we’d find you here.’

I’m wondering where else she thinks I’d be? Bali? Goa? On some sort of grief- and soul-healing retreat?

Hayley is behind her.

Automatically, I look for Tom.

He’s not there.

An unexpected stone drops inside me anyway, but I ignore it because it’s complicated now and I wish it wasn’t.

‘We were just passing,’ Hayley says, which we both know is a lie.

‘You were just passing Truro,’ I say, arching an eyebrow.

‘You know we come every few weeks,’ Hayley says. ‘There’s the farmers’ market. That candle stall Mum’s obsessed with, and shops that aren’t just Dot’s. Actual shops that sell clothes we might want to wear.’ She glances around the café, nodding with approval. Hayley knows nothing about cafés apart from how good the cake on sale is. ‘This is gorgeous.’

‘It is,’ Mum says, appearing from behind me. ‘Sit down. I’ll get you something. Scones? I’ve just done a batch, still warm. I haven’t seen you girls in a while.’

There’s that awkward pause. It’s the Peter pause. Mum hasn’t seen the girls since she came to stay with me after … after…

I can’t go there.

Don’t want to.

Don’t want to remember the harsh winter and the frost that elbowed its way into my heart and hardened all the things I thought I knew about myself.

The cereal days, as I like to call them, when I allow myself to think back, when all I could do was eat cereal in bed and cry in my mother’s arms.

Meg is already sitting down, elbows on the table, like she’s been coming here for years. Hayley takes the chair opposite and tucks her bag under the table.