Page 80 of Carry Me Home

‘Like I said. Thinking about it.’

‘Sure.’ Jude picks up his glass. Drinks. Sets it down. ‘Just seems like a thing worth thinking about carefully. Given what you’d be leaving.’

He doesn’t look at Nina when he says it. He doesn’t have to. The sentence has her name in it whether he says it or not.

Brynn makes a noise about wine and disappears to the kitchen. Jude follows. Through the doorway I hear Brynn hiss something I can’t catch and Jude’s low voice responding.

Nina is looking at her plate. Cara is looking at me. I am sitting between them in the most literal possible sense and the most metaphorical, and I have never in my life felt less capable of making a decision about anything.

Cara leans over and kisses my cheek.

It’s soft. Brief. The kind of gesture that says mine without saying a word. Her lips are warm against my skin and I can smell her perfume – woody, unfamiliar – and across the table, Nina’s head lifts.

I watch her see it.

Her expression flickers four things in two seconds: registers, flinches, smooths, smiles. The smile is the one she uses when she’s holding the door shut against a feeling she’s not ready to have – I’ve seen it after Peter’s name comes up unexpectedly, after Maisie says something too wise, after grief arrives in the middle of a good day. I know that smile.

She has never used it because of me.

‘I should probably head off,’ she says, pushing back from the table. ‘Early start. Chips will be wondering where I am.’

‘Already?’ Brynn reappears with another bottle of red. ‘We haven’t done dessert.’

‘I know. Rain check.’ She’s standing, gathering her things, and the speed of it is its own tell. Nina in retreat, Nina filling the exit with motion so no one can see what’s underneath.

‘You okay?’ I ask.

She looks at me. For a second – one second – she doesn’t smile. She just looks at me, and her face is open in a way I’ve never seen directed at me before. Not warm. Not friendly. Not the face of a friend.

Then the smile comes back. The door closes.

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Just tired.’

She hugs Brynn. Hugs Jude. Waves at Cara. And for me – she stops. Puts her hand on my arm – my other arm, the one Cara hasn’t claimed – and squeezes. Her fingers press through my sleeve the way they’ve pressed a hundred times, but this time they hold on for a beat longer. One extra second. Maybe two.

‘Goodnight, Tom,’ she says.

‘Goodnight.’

She leaves. The door closes and the room recalibrates around her absence the way rooms always do – the air slightly thinner, the noise slightly less, the frequency of Nina Ellis removed from the signal.

Cara’s hand is still on my arm.

‘Scotland,’ Jude says, dropping back into his chair. ‘That’s quite a distance.’

‘Flights. Trains. It’s not that far.’

‘Right.’ He picks up his glass again. Drinks, again. His eyes don’t leave my face.

Cara presses against my side, her hand moving from my arm to my shoulder to the back of my neck, her fingers brushing through my hair once – a gesture so intimate that Brynn looks away and Jude’s jaw tightens. I let it happen. I don’t lean in. I don’t pull away. I exist in the space between those two movements, which is where I’ve been living for most of my adult life.

When we finally leave, Cara slips her hand into mine for the walk home. Her fingers are warm. Certain. The same certainty as the kiss in the car, the same steady pressure of a woman who knows what she wants.

‘That went well,’ she says.

I don’t answer.

‘Tom?’