Page 145 of Carry Me Home

I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the harbour, and I make a decision.

I’m not waiting five more days.

The drive to Scotland takes eleven hours. I decide to drive because I don’t want to ask anyone for a lift to the airport and I don’t fancy the thought of changing planes at Gatwick. Driving seems easier.

I don’t tell anyone I’m going. Not Brynn, who’d try to talk me out of it. Not Mum, who’d worry. I just pack a bag, leave a note for Dot to open the café if she can, or not if she can’t, and drive.

The landscape changes as I travel. The green softens past Devon. The hills flatten through the Midlands – miles of grey motorway and average-speed cameras and the kind of scenery that exists only to be driven through. I stop for coffee near Birmingham, in a services that smells of floor cleaner and reheated sausage rolls, and I sit in the car park drinking it and wondering if this is brave or insane.

Both, probably. Both is fine.

North of Manchester the hills return – steeper, darker, the heather-bruised greens Tom described. I roll down the window and the air that comes in is cold and sharp and smells of earth and rain. Not the sea. Not home. There’s a bleak wilderness up here and I wonder what Tom’s first impressions were.

I cross the border in the late afternoon. I swear the light in Scotland is different – the sun sits lower. My back aches. My hands are stiff on the wheel. I’ve been driving for nine hours and I haven’t listened to the radio once – just the road and my own breathing and the steady churn of thoughts I can’t switch off.

I’ve never been to Scotland. Never had a reason to go. But I’ve got a reason now, and his name is Tom Darcy, and I’m done waiting for him to come to me.

I park. Check my reflection in the mirror. Tired – eleven hours of driving will do that. Meh, it’s not terrible. My hair’s a disaster. I don’t care. I get out. Walk towards the entrance.

And then I see them.

Through the window. The big glass window that looks into what must be the staff room.

Tom and Cara.

She’s hugging him. Her arms around his neck, her face pressed against his shoulder. And he’s hugging her back – his hands on her waist, his chin resting on her head, his eyes closed.

I stop.

They pull apart. She says something – I can see her lips moving, a smile on her face. He laughs. Reaches up. Tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

The gesture is small. Unconscious. The kind of thing you don’t think about because your hands know where they belong.

I watch his fingers against her hair and the world goes very quiet. Not silent – I can hear the car park, the wind, a bird somewhere – but quiet like when someone stops breathing. Like when they fall to the bottom of the ocean and never come back. The ambient noise continues. Something fundamental has stopped.

I step backward. One step. Two. The gravel crunches under my feet, and for a terrible second I think he’ll hear it, look up, see me through the glass. But he doesn’t. He’s looking at Cara. His hand drops from her hair and he says something else and she laughs, and the ease between them – the comfort, the familiarity, the absence of eleven years of longing and complication – is the thing that breaks me.

Not the hug. Not the hair. The ease.

Cara is easy. Cara is simple. Cara is the life that makes sense.

I turn. Walk back to the car. Get in. Close the door.

My hands are on the steering wheel. I can feel the leather under my fingers. I can see the practice through the windscreen, the lit windows, the two shapes inside.

I start the engine. Pull out of the car park. The village passes – grey houses, grey hills, grey sky – and I drive south, and I don’t look back.

I don’t cry until Carlisle.

Then I have to pull over because I can’t see the road. I sit on the hard shoulder with lorries thundering past and I press my forehead to the steering wheel and I cry the way I cried when Peter died – ugly, total, ending.

I sit there until the tears stop. Until my breathing steadies. Until the shaking in my hands subsides enough to grip the wheel.

Then I pull back onto the motorway, and I drive.

Through the dark. Through the Midlands and the southwest and the narrowing lanes. Past Exeter, where, Tom whispered in the depth of night, his chest loosened on the drive home. Past every mile I drove this morning in the opposite direction, full of hope, full of the reckless certainty that I was finally doing the brave thing.

I arrive back in Sea Salt Bay at half past six in the morning. The village is dark. The harbour is still.