Page 157 of Carry Me Home

‘Yeah,’ she says softly. ‘Maybe it is.’

I put my arm around her. She leans into me. We stand there looking at what she’s built – this woman who eight months ago couldn’t walk past a shuttered café without flinching, who six months ago couldn’t step onto this boat without crying, who has taken a dead man’s fishing vessel and turned it into the most beautiful thing in the harbour.

My hand drifts to my pocket. Touches the box. Not yet. But soon.

‘Right,’ Nina says. Puts on her game face. ‘Let’s do this.’

The launch is chaos in the best possible way.

Nina’s behind the hatch, pulling espresso shots like she’s been doing this her whole life – which, in a way, she has. Just on water now instead of land. The coffee is excellent. The lavender shortbread is beyond imagination.

Brynn’s on crowd control. Jude, who’s skipped classes for the day, is manning the till, looking baffled by the card reader but gamely trying. Emmett from Newquay is standing by the gangway with the quiet pride of a man whose carpentry is being admired by a hundred people, and he keeps running his hand along the serving-hatch frame the way you’d pat a dog you’re proud of.

Kit appears at my elbow, baby Peter strapped to his chest in one of those complicated carrier things that makes every man who wears one look simultaneously heroic and ridiculous.

‘All right?’

‘All right.’

‘Big day.’

‘Massive.’

We stand there watching the crowd, two men who’ve never needed many words between them. Baby Peter makes a sound that could be approval or wind. Difficult to tell.

‘Nina,’ Kit says. Just the name. But the way he says it – the weight of it, the respect – says everything else.

‘Yeah,’ I say, and there’s a sigh there, and no, it’s not very manly, but it’s what I feel. I want to spend the rest of my days sighing with contentment.

‘Peter would’ve been down here with a paintbrush and the worlds proudest smile.’

‘He would.’

Kit adjusts the carrier. Looks at the boat. Looks at Nina through the hatch, laughing at something a customer’s said, her hair escaping its bun, chalk dust still on her apron from the specials board. ‘I’ll always regret the fact I changed the course of her life that night in the storm.’

I shake my head. ‘You can’t think that. It is what it is.’ Maybe if there hadn’t been a storm, maybe if Kit hadn’t been thrown from his boat into the water, maybe if I’d been the one to jump into those black depths and save him, not Peter. Maybe all of this would be different.

But it’s not.

‘Don’t be too patient,’ he says. ‘That’s all I wanted to say. Life’s short. You know that. I know that.’ He touches the top of baby Peter’s head. ‘He’ll know it, when he’s old enough. Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Just make the moment you’ve got count.’

My hand is in my pocket. On the box. ‘Yeah. I know.’

He claps me on the shoulder. Walks away. Baby Peter’s head bobs gently with each step.

Ellen arrives at two.

She’s wearing a blue dress and a wide smile, and when she sees the boat, she stops in the middle of the harbour and presses both hands to her heart.

‘Oh, Nina.’

Nina climbs down from the deck, wipes her hands on her apron, and crosses to Peter’s mother.

‘What do you think?’

‘I think—’ Ellen’s voice wobbles. ‘I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I think my son would have been down there with a paintbrush before you finished explaining. I think—’ She pulls Nina into a hug. Holds on. ‘I think you’ve done him proud.’

I watch them. Two women bound by a man who isn’t here anymore, building forward from the place where he left them. Ellen’s hand on Nina’s hair. Nina’s face on Ellen’s shoulder. It’s the tenderness of people who’ve survived the same loss and found their way to the other side of it.