Page 18 of Carry Me Home

I send her the photo. She doesn’t reply. I don’t check again.

Chapter Five

NINA

Iwake up at six, my body still not receiving the message that I’m on holiday.

Not holiday. Whatever this is. Strategic retreat. Temporary relocation. Running away, if we’re being honest, which I’m trying very hard not to be.

Mum’s spare room is painted the colour of weak tea and gets the morning sun directly in the face. I’ve hung a scarf over the curtain rod to block it out, one of the floaty ones I bought in St Ives three summers ago, and now the whole room glows amber like the inside of a lantern. Not unpleasant. Just not mine.

I lie there for a while, watching the light shift on the ceiling. Somewhere outside, a car alarm goes off, stops, goes off again. Someone shouts something I can’t make out. A door slams. Truro waking up sounds nothing like Sea Salt Bay waking up.

When are you coming home?

Tom’s voice, last night on the phone. He’d said it so casually, the same way he says everything. And he’d said ran, past tense, about my café.

Does he really think I’m not coming back?

Am I going back?

When I lived in London briefly, a few years ago, I don’t remember him ever thinking that? Asking me when I’d be back. All those late-night conversations, him doing his thing, at uni, me doing mine, there had never been a question of if I’d go back. If he’d be there.

I blink at the ceiling. All too easily the memories, the reasons why I am here, come back. Months later and those moments are still there, a pacing wild beast in my head. The RNLI boat coming into harbour. Counting off the boots. Jude, Tom, Cal … Kit, battered and bruised … and there I was, still waiting, still holding my breath, for the man who didn’t come back.

That breath is still pocketed inside of me.

Still waiting.

I get up because lying here isn’t helping. The floorboards creak, unfamiliar – I still don’t know this house the way I know the cottage, even though Mum’s been here nearly fifteen years. Which cupboard has the mugs. Which tap runs hot. Which step on the stairs to avoid.

The kitchen is empty, which means she’s already down in the café. I fill the kettle, open three cupboards before I find a mug, go through the motions of making tea I’m not sure I want.

My phone is on the counter where I left it.

No messages. Six-fifteen in the morning: most of my friends will be awake – fishermen don’t do lie-ins apart from on a Sunday – but none of those lives are going to pause because I’m standing in my mother’s kitchen, waiting for something I can’t identify. I put the phone back down.

‘You’re up early.’

Mum’s in the doorway – but not still, never still. Already dressed, already moving, she flits to the counter to check her phone, then to the fridge, then to the kettle I’ve just boiled. She pours herself a tea while simultaneously wiping down the counter and checking the time and asking me about my sleep, all of it happening at once, and I watch her do it with the strange vertigo of seeing your own future. This is where I learned it. The motion. The filling of every silence with something that isn’t silence.

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I say.

‘The traffic?’

‘The everything.’

She nods and shrugs like this makes perfect sense and keeps moving – sink, back door, toast. I watch her and drink my tea.

‘Isla’s having a boy,’ I say, because it’s something to say. ‘They’re naming him Peter.’

Mum pauses – actually pauses, mid-motion, toast in hand. ‘That’s lovely.’

‘It is.’ I wrap my hands around the mug, feeling the heat press into my palms. ‘It just… I wasn’t expecting it. When she told me.’

‘Grief hides in the strangest places.’ She’s moving again – butter, knife, the constant choreography. ‘You think you’ve got it mapped out, and then someone says something perfectly ordinary and you’re on the floor.’

‘I wasn’t on the floor.’