Page 74 of Carry Me Home

I see Tom’s profile in the flickering light – the line of his jaw, the set of his mouth, the way his hands rest on his knees, still and steady. I see Cara lean into him during a scene and his shoulder adjust to take her weight, the small mechanical kindness of a body making room. I see her hand settle on his forearm, light and casual, her fingers resting where mine have rested a hundred times – on the arm, on the sleeve, in that spot between wrist and elbow that I think of as mine and that isn’t mine, has never been mine, has apparently always been available to anyone who wanted it.

My nails press into my palms. I make myself look at the screen.

On screen, Celia Johnson is falling in love with a man she can’t have, and she’s trying not to, and she can feel it happening anyway, and her face in the train station is the face of a woman who has just realised that the life she built is not the life she wants, and⁠—

I pull my cardigan tighter. I watch the screen. I do not look at Tom again.

The interval comes and people drift towards the tea stand.

Cara appears beside me with two paper cups.

‘Two cups of semi-flat supermarket own-brand pop.’

‘Thanks.’ I wrap my hands around the cup, it’s not cold at all. ‘Are you enjoying the film?’

‘It’s devastating. In the best way.’ She sips her cola. ‘I can see why you two come every year. There’s a real magic to it – the stars, the screen, everyone wrapped up in the same story.’

‘It’s a tradition. One of the few that has stuck over the years.’

‘Tom said. He said you’ve been coming since sixth form. He said—’ She pauses, and her expression shifts into something lighter, amused. ‘He told me about your first date, actually.’

My hands tighten on the cup.

‘The whole “like kissing my brother” thing.’ Cara laughs, all easy-going and oblivious, while my breath starts to catch in my lungs. ‘He said you told your friends it was a disaster. That you nearly killed each other. I think his exact words were, “She said it was like kissing her brother and I heard her say it and that was pretty much that.”’

I swear my stomach drops.

‘He heard that?’

‘Apparently. Through a door or something.’ Cara is watching the queue, casual, no idea what she’s doing to my insides. ‘He laughed about it. Said it was formative.’

He heard.

Tom heard me. Seventeen years old, stupid and careless, performing for girls whose names I can’t even remember now. Saying it was gross. Saying it was like kissing my brother. Saying I’d rather die. Laughing.

And he was on the other side of the door.

And he never said a word.

Eleven years. Eleven years of friendship, of him being the person I call at midnight, the person who waters my fuchsias and fixes my windows and sits on my kitchen floor at three in the morning when the grief is too heavy to carry alone – and the whole time, underneath all of it, there was this. A thing I said when I was too young to understand the weight of words. A sentence he absorbed and carried and never once threw back at me.

He told Cara. Casually. Like it was just a funny story from the past. Like it was something he’d made peace with.

But you don’t tell someone about a wound that’s healed. You tell them about a wound that still has edges.

‘Nina?’ Cara is looking at me. ‘You’ve gone pale.’

‘The heat,’ I say. The word tastes like ash. ‘Still getting to me.’

‘Do you need to sit down?’

‘I’m fine. Just going to find the loo.’

I don’t find the loo.

I walk to the edge of the field, where the cliff drops away and the sea spreads out black and silver under stars, and I stand there with my hands shaking and my tea going cold and I try to breathe.

He heard.