Page 76 of Carry Me Home

He holds my gaze.

The silence is intolerable.

‘Okay,’ he says finally.

We drive back in near silence. Cara talks about the film – Celia Johnson’s face in the final scene, the devastating restraint of it. I listen from the back seat, watching the road unspool in the headlights, watching Tom’s hands on the wheel, watching everything.

He drops me at the café. I climb out and I’m almost at the door when his voice stops me.

‘Nina.’

I turn. He’s leaning out the window, and in the streetlight his face is all angles and shadow. ‘Whatever’s going on,’ he says quietly, ‘you can tell me. You know that.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m here. I’m always here.’

‘Goodnight, Tom.’

‘Goodnight.’

He pulls away. I watch the taillights until they turn the corner. Cara’s silhouette in the passenger seat. Tom’s hands on the wheel.

Inside, Chips is waiting. He presses against my legs, solid and warm.

Chips nudges my hand. I look down at him.

‘I think I’ve been very stupid,’ I tell him. ‘For a very long time.’

He doesn’t argue. He just leans against me, warm and patient, the way everything in my life that matters has been warm and patient.

I stand in the dark café with my hand on the counter and I feel the ground shifting – not violently, not all at once, but the deep slow movement of something fundamental rearranging itself, the tectonic plates of a truth I’ve been standing on without knowing it was moving.

Eleven years ago. He heard me say the worst thing. And he stayed.

I go upstairs. I get into bed. Chips climbs up after me and puts his head on my ankle.

My mum’s words from the day I came back from Truro swim in my head. Who are you, Nina Ellis?

Whoever I am, I’m not sure I like her.

Chapter Sixteen

TOM

The call comes at four in the afternoon.

‘Tom,’ Jack Penrose, says, tightness in his tone – a tightness I’ve learned to read the way I read vitals: elevated, strained, close to breaking. ‘The mare’s in labour. She’s been at it for hours and nothing’s coming.’

‘I’m on my way.’

I’m already grabbing my bag, already running through differentials in my head – malpresentation, uterine inertia, the foal stuck at the shoulder. The body knows the drill before the brain finishes processing. Cara appears in the surgery doorway, my car keys in hand.

‘Emergency?’

‘Foaling gone wrong up at the Penrose farm.’

‘I’m coming.’