Page 27 of Carry Me Home

I sit in the armchair. I pick up a veterinary journal. I read the same paragraph three times.

She called me her favourite. She said it twice, easily, like it was nothing, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Favourite person. Favourite. The word you use for the friend who makes you laugh. The word you use for the person you’d call first in a crisis, first in the morning, the one whose name sits at the top of every list except the one that matters.

I close the journal. I sit in the quiet flat and look at the corner of the sofa where Chips used to be, and I think about Nina Ellis opening the shutters of her café with a dog at her heels and fairy lights in her hair, calling me her favourite person with the easy confidence of a woman who has absolutely no idea what she’s asking me to survive.

Eleven years. I’ve survived all these years.

I can survive tomorrow.

Chapter Seven

NINA

Ireopen the café on a Tuesday, because Tuesdays are slow and if I’m going to be rusty, I’d rather be rusty with an audience of six than sixty.

However I’ve somehow managed to forget that it’s May and this is Sea Salt Bay, which means families in wetsuits, little kids with salt-encrusted hair, and sand all over my floors.

Is this what grief does to you? Does it blank out memories and knowledge that were once habitual but now are mere flighty thoughts that drift into the air?

Chips watches me from his bed by the counter – the fancy orthopaedic bed Tom brought over this morning, along with his tablets and a bag of food and a handwritten list of his preferences that I’m fairly sure was meant to be ironic but also contained genuinely useful information. Doesn’t like his water bowl near his food bowl. Prefers to sleep somewhere he can see the door. Will pretend to be starving regardless of when he was last fed. Do not fall for it.

‘Your previous owner was very thorough,’ I tell him.

Chips sighs heavily. He’s heard this before.

The café needs work. Three weeks of sitting empty has left it dusty and stale, the air thick with the smell of a space that hasn’t been breathing. I throw open every window, prop the door wide, let the sea breeze do what the sea breeze does. Then I start cleaning – surfaces, counters, letting the coffee machine run through its cycle three times until the grinding noise stops and the first shot pulls clean and dark. My hands remember the order of things before my brain catches up. Stock check, fridge inventory, the quiet geometry of a kitchen put right. I’ve been doing this since I was twenty-two, when I took over from Mum and pretended I knew what I was doing until I actually did. Twelve years. More than a third of my life, measured in coffee grounds and cinnamon buns, and the particular satisfaction of a space that answers to me.

The café comes back to life around me, and something in my chest eases that I hadn’t realised was tight.

By noon, the place looks like itself again. Clean counters, fresh flowers on the tables – just garden roses from outside, nothing fancy – and a new menu board that I spend forty-five minutes on because my chalk lettering has apparently atrophied.

‘What do you think?’ I ask Chips, stepping back to assess.

He lifts his head, considers the board, and puts his head back down.

‘Harsh but fair.’

I flip the sign to OPEN and wait.

Bill and Frankie are first through the door, which is so predictable it’s almost funny.

‘Heard you were back,’ Bill says, sliding onto his usual stool. He’s got his fisherman’s tan and his RNLI polo and the expression of a man who’s been sent on a reconnaissance mission by his wife.

‘Word travels fast.’

‘Word travels at the speed of Dot.’ Frankie appears behind him, already scanning the menu board. ‘She called me last night. Said you’d been spotted pulling up outside, and did I know anything about it, and why hadn’t anyone told her you were coming back, and was there something going on with you and Tom Darcy that she should know about.’

‘There’s nothing going on with me and Tom Darcy.’

‘That’s what I told her. She gave me one of those looks.’ A staged pause. ‘You know, the inquisition when she looks through her glasses at the end of her nose.’

I roll my eyes and laugh.

‘He brought over the dog. That’s all.’

‘The dog.’ Frankie glances over at Chips, who has lifted his head at the mention of himself. ‘That’s the coast-path dog that Tom rescued from the gorse? Why’ve you got it?’