Page 38 of Carry Me Home

‘Bill does cheat,’ Brynn says gently.

‘Bill absolutely cheats. Peter used to keep a tally.’ Nina’s smiling now, a real smile. I think it’s costing her, but she pays it anyway. ‘He’d have been furious we won without him. He’d have claimed partial credit.’

‘He always claimed partial credit,’ Kit says. ‘He once claimed partial credit for a lifeboat rescue he wasn’t even on.’

‘That’s because he made the sandwiches. Sandwiches are essential to rescue operations, I say, recalling that moment with such clarity it makes the air in my lungs sting.

‘They really aren’t.’ Kit shakes his head, lips forming half a smile, but shadows flicker across his gaze.

‘They’re essential to morale.’ I try and lift the mood. ‘Morale is essential to rescue operations. Transitive property.’

The conversation opens out – more Peter stories, the same ones the village has been telling since the memorial, worn smooth with repetition but still warm. I watch Nina the way I always watch her – carefully, from the side, how you’d watch something you don’t want to startle. She laughs at the right moments and adds details everyone’s heard before and nobody minds hearing again, and the whole time her left hand is resting on the table, a centimetre from where my hand is resting, and neither of us moves them closer and neither of us moves them away.

The pub empties slowly, with lingering conversations, last rounds, and a reluctance to let a good evening end. Nina leaves with Brynn, pausing at the door to turn back and wave – a half-wave, her bangles sliding down her wrist – and she catches my eye across the room and smiles, and the smile is warm and complicated and I have no idea what’s in it.

‘Night, Tom,’ she calls.

‘Night.’

She leaves. The door swings shut behind her.

Jude and Kit have already gone. The Treloars are still commiserating in the corner, Cal’s cousin up from Plymouth looking significantly less confident than she did four hours ago. Ayo is wiping down the bar and humming something tuneless.

I should go home. It’s late. Early appointments tomorrow – a Labrador with a skin condition, a cat that keeps eating things it shouldn’t.

Instead I sit in the empty booth and I finish my drink and I let myself think.

She was right there. Her face inches from mine, her hands on my shoulders, her eyes wide and bright, and she didn’t pull away. Not immediately. For one beat – one beat – she stayed, and something in her expression had been open in a way I haven’t seen it in a long while.

Tom Darcy is moving on. That’s the plan.

The plan has been the plan for seven months now. Since I saw the way she shattered into two when Peter didn’t return from that rescue. The plan has been the plan through every closing-time visit to the café and every text and every phone call and every hug that lasts exactly the right amount of time and not a second longer. The plan was the plan the other weekend when I invited Cara into my hotel room at the wedding, and tried to forget this ache. Tried to forget Nina. Tried to lose myself in another woman’s skin, taste, feel, sliding between her legs, pushing myself home, finding a release, all the things I’ve never actually done with Nina.

But all I could smell was coffee and flowers.

I finish my pint and stand up. I walk home through the village, past the darkened harbour, the boats shifting on the water, the moonlight turning the sea to something silver and cold. The surgery is dark. The flat above it waits – empty now that Chips lives at the café, quiet in a way that used to be peaceful and now just sounds like what it is.

I let myself in. I stand in the kitchen. I don’t turn on the lights.

Her hands on my shoulders. Five points of pressure. The way she’d said we won like I was the best part of the victory.

I fill a glass with water. I drink it. I put the glass in the sink and I stand there for a long time, looking at the dark window and the harbour beyond it.

Chapter Nine

NINA

Ican’t sleep.

This isn’t unusual. Sleep and I have been negotiating terms since Peter died, and tonight sleep has decided to hold out for a better offer. I’ve tried reading, tried chamomile tea, tried the breathing exercises Brynn swears by that make me feel like I’m being slowly suffocated by my own diaphragm. Nothing’s working.

Chips is asleep at the foot of my bed, snoring gently, completely unbothered. At least one of us is functional.

The flat above the café has always felt like living inside a held breath – the silence of a space that’s usually full of noise, waiting for morning to bring it back to life. I used to love it. Now, some nights, it feels like being buried under the quiet.

I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up.

It’s half eleven. Tom will be asleep. Tom goes to bed at a sensible hour and wakes up at a sensible hour and probably has sensible dreams about veterinary procedures and the correct way to organise a filing cabinet.