Page 67 of Carry Me Home

‘Tomorrow.’

When he’s at the door, he turns back.

‘Nina.’

‘Yeah?’

He opens his mouth. Closes it. The light from the harbour is behind him and his face is in shadow and I can’t read his expression.

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight.’

The door closes. I stand in the quiet café with the fans humming and the light fading and Chips breathing at my feet, and I press both hands flat on the counter and I breathe.

She said I can see why he— and stopped.

Tom said nothing when he meant something else.

Everyone keeps starting sentences they don’t finish, and I’m standing in the middle of all these half-spoken things like a woman in a room full of open doors who can’t figure out which one the draught is coming from.

I crouch down next to Chips. He opens one eye, shuffles closer, presses his warm side against my knee.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve decided. Whatever happens.’

He sighs and closes his eye.

I stay on the floor for a long time. The bear watches from its corner. The fairy lights glow. Through the window, I can see the flat above the surgery – Tom’s flat, lit up, two figures moving behind the glass.

I look away.

I look back.

I make myself stand up, and I lock the door, and I go upstairs, and I don’t think about Cara’s hand on my counter or Tom in the doorway or the sentence she didn’t finish or the word I can’t say anymore.

I think about all of it. Obviously. I think about all of it until Chips climbs onto the bed and puts his head on my ankle and I fall asleep at midnight, restless and unsettled and unable to explain, even to myself, what exactly has changed.

Chapter Fourteen

TOM

The coast path is the only place in the village where you can breathe.

The heat has been sitting on Sea Salt Bay for three weeks like a punishment – thick, immovable, the kind that follows you indoors and waits. But up here, with the cliff dropping away and the sea spreading out silver and flat below, there’s a breeze. Not much, but just enough.

Cara insisted on the walk after breakfast. ‘I need air, Tom. Actual air. Not this soup we’ve been swimming in.’ I didn’t argue. I’ve been needing air too, though the kind I need doesn’t come from the coast path.

We’ve been walking for twenty minutes in mostly comfortable silence. The path is narrow here, single file, and I let her go ahead. She moves easily – confident, unhurried, the way she’s always moved. Some people walk like they’re apologising for the space they take up. Cara walks like the path is lucky to have her.

I’ve walked this route a thousand times. With Brynn after lifeboat training. With Jude on the days the village feels too small. With Nina, once, years ago, when she was still new to the village and I was still pretending I wasn’t already gone. The gorse was in bloom then too, and she’d said it smelled like coconut, and I’d spent the rest of the walk trying not to stare at her.

Now I’m here with Cara, and the gorse is in bloom, and the thought of Nina is here too, the way it’s always here, a permanent resident in my head that doesn’t pay rent.

‘So,’ Cara says, when the path widens enough for us to walk side by side. ‘I met Nina yesterday.’

‘I heard.’

‘She’s lovely.’