Page 26 of Carry Me Home

‘A dog is a commitment. A dog is showing up every day.’

‘You show up every day. You’ve never not shown up.’

‘I left for three weeks,’ she says.

‘You came back.’

‘I did.’ She looks around the café – at the fairy lights and the shuttered windows and the chalk menu still showing old specials. Her eyes catch on something near the coffee machine and she goes still, just for a breath. Peter’s magnet on the fridge. The cartoon penguin he stuck there as a joke, a year ago now. She hasn’t taken it down. I don’t think she will.

I watch her see it and I watch her put it away – the small tightening of her jaw, the breath she takes, the way she turns back to me with her face rearranged.

‘I came back,’ she says.

The silence between us is different now. Softer. She’s looking at me with an expression I don’t have a name for, and I’m looking back, and Chips is snoring gently on her feet, and the evening light through the cracks in the shutters has gone from gold to pink. The fairy lights hum above us. It’s the kind of moment that could turn into something, if either of us let it. If I reached across the counter. If I said the thing. If she saw me – actually saw me, not Tom-the-friend, not Tom-the-constant, not the reliable delivery system for gossip and sheep hooves, but me.

She doesn’t. She never does. And I don’t reach.

‘I should let you unpack,’ I say, because if I don’t leave now I’m going to say something I can’t take back.

‘I should unpack,’ she agrees, but she doesn’t move. ‘Thank you. For bringing him over. For coming.’

‘You asked me to come.’

‘I know. I just—’ She stops. Shakes her head. ‘Thank you anyway.’

I set down my mug and stand. Chips opens one eye, tracking the movement, but doesn’t lift his head from Nina’s feet. His loyalties have been reassigned. I look at him – this small ridiculous creature I pulled out of the gorse two days ago – and he looks back at me with his one ear up and one ear down, settled on Nina’s feet like he’s been there his whole life.

‘He’ll need his tablets in the morning,’ I say. ‘I’ll bring them over. First thing.’

‘First thing.’

‘And he likes to sleep on furniture. I tried to enforce boundaries but he has a stronger will than I do.’

‘I respect a dog with a strong will.’

‘I thought you might.’

I’m at the door now, and she’s followed me, Chips trotting at her heels. The evening air is cool against my face, the harbour settling into dusk behind me. I should go. I should say goodnight and walk away and not look back at the way she’s standing in the doorway with the light behind her.

‘Tom,’ she says. I turn.

She’s backlit by the fairy lights, Chips pressed against her ankles. Her bangles catch the light as she lifts her hand in a half-wave that’s almost awkward, and for a second she looks uncertain – Nina Ellis, who is never uncertain, who moves through the world like she’s already decided where she’s going even when she hasn’t.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she says. ‘In the village. In general. I’m glad you’re—’ She stops. Laughs at herself. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m tired. I just … you’re my favourite, that’s all. You know that, right?’

Favourite. There it is again. The word she uses like it means friend, like it means safe, like it means the person I can call at midnight and sit on counters around and touch casually because there’s nothing there, because it’s just Tom, because Tom is the one thing in my life I’ve never had to be afraid of.

‘I know,’ I say. My voice is steady.

‘Good.’ She smiles. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow.’

I walk away. I do not look back until I reach the corner, and when I do, I only look for a second. The café is glowing – fairy lights through the window, warm and golden – and through the glass I can see Nina, opening the shutters one by one, letting in the last of the evening light. Chips trots at her heels. She’s talking to him, I can see her mouth moving, her hands gesturing, and she’s smiling at nothing – at the fact of being home, at the small dog circling her feet, at the café coming back to life around her.

She’s home. The village is right again. I let go of something I’ve been holding for three weeks, and in its place is the other thing – the older thing, the permanent thing, the ache I have carried for so long it’s become architectural. Part of the structure. Remove it and the whole building comes down.

The flat is quiet when I let myself in. Quieter than usual. Two days I had the dog – two days of small paws on the floorboards, of a warm weight on the sofa, of another creature breathing in the space – and already the absence has a shape.