Page 22 of Carry Me Home

Chapter Six

TOM

Idon’t run.

This is important. Tom Darcy does not run anywhere, not even when a text from Nina Ellis says Already here. Just pulled up outside the café and every nerve ending he possesses lights up like a warning flare. I walk. At a reasonable pace. Down the stairs from the flat, out the surgery door, across the harbour front under the late-afternoon sun, like a man going somewhere ordinary.

Chips trots beside me on his lead. The café comes into view. Her car is parked outside, boot still open, bags in the back seat. The shutters are still closed but the door is open, just slightly, and there’s a light on inside that wasn’t on this morning.

Three weeks I’ve been walking past this door. Three weeks of shuttered windows and silence and a chalk menu in her handwriting slowly fading in the weather. And now – light.

I stop at the door and knock on the frame.

She appears within seconds, and the first thing I see – before her face, before anything – is her hand on the doorframe, the rings on her fingers, the freckle on the inside of her wrist that I have no business knowing is there. Then she pushes the door wider and she’s all of it at once: the sundress I don’t recognise, yellow with small blue flowers, bare shoulders already catching the heat of the sun. Her bangles making their sound. Her hair up in that way she does it when she’s been driving, loose bits falling around her face. The gold necklace in the hollow of her throat.

My brain registers all of it in pieces. My body doesn’t bother with order.

She looks the same. She looks like colour coming back into a room.

‘You came,’ she says.

‘I told you to stay. I assumed you’d realise I was coming along.’

She smiles, biting her bottom lip, blooming a little pink as she looks down at Chips. Her whole face shifts, so complete, so immediate. ‘Oh, look at you,’ she croons, dropping into a crouch right there in the doorway, and Chips walks straight to her without a backward glance at me and sits on her feet. Leans his entire small body against her shins.

I look down at the top of her head, close enough now that I can see the faint sun-warm flush across her shoulders. Close enough that I have to be very deliberate about where I look in case I fixate on a loose strand of hair falling across her neck. I put my hands in my pockets. Deliberately. Not because they were going to do anything. Just in case.

‘He likes you,’ I say.

‘He’s perfect.’ She’s scratching behind both ears now, her bangles sliding down her wrists. Chips closes his eyes in canine ecstasy. ‘Look at his little beard. Look at his eyebrows. Tom, you didn’t tell me he was this handsome.’

‘I sent you a photo.’

‘Photos don’t capture the full effect.’

She looks up at me, her chin tilted, smiling, and the angle puts her face in the last of the evening sun and I am not going to think about it. I am going to stand here with my hands in my pockets and respond like a normal person.

‘Are you coming in,’ she says, ‘or are you just going to stand there looking decorative?’

‘I wasn’t aware I was decorative.’

‘You’re extremely decorative. Very stern and veterinary. It’s a whole aesthetic.’ She stands, and Chips follows the movement like she’s the centre of gravity. She is, but that’s not the point. ‘Come on. I’ll make tea. The kettle still works, I checked.’

I follow her inside. My hands are still in my pockets.

The café is dim, shutters still closed, but the string of warm lights still flicker – the Christmas ones she never takes down – and they cast everything in a soft glow, warm and close. She’s already moving, of course. Switching on the coffee machine, opening a window, checking the fridge with the particular focus of a woman taking inventory of her own life. She moves through this space like breathing – automatic, fluid, entirely unselfconscious.

I lean against the counter and watch her because that’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done. Stand in a room with Nina Ellis and watch her move through it. The fact that she’s never once found this strange is either a kindness or a cruelty, and I stopped trying to decide which a long time ago.

‘The drive was fine,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘In case you were wondering.’

‘I wasn’t wondering.’

‘You were absolutely wondering. You had your concerned face on.’

‘I don’t have a concerned face.’

‘You have several concerned faces. You have a whole repertoire. Milk, no sugar, correct?’