Page 86 of Carry Me Home

Then, I open the first drawer.

The smell rises – so faint now, barely there, but enough. Fabric softener and salt and the living essence that was just Peter, underneath everything. The scent I used to press my face into when he was alive and that I haven’t been able to smell for months because the drawer has been closed and the air has carried it away, particle by particle, and this is the last of it.

This is the last of it, and I’m breathing it in, and it’s leaving.

His favourite navy T-shirt is on top. Soft from years of wear. He wore it last spring when we repainted the café shutters their habitual lavender. He’d got paint in his hair and I’d laughed so much, he’d streaked my cheek with the brush. The shutters had dried with our fingerprints in the paint and they’re still there, in the wood, invisible to everyone but me. He’d told me they needed redoing every year to keep them smart, to stop the paint from peeling, to ensure that The Lavender Café always looked smart and welcoming.

Now the paint is peeling.

Into the box.

Another shirt. And another. The jumper with the hole in the elbow he’d never let me mend. It gives it character, Neen. Everything good has a flaw.

Into the box.

The second drawer is messier – charger, paperback, back-up socks, receipts he’d never cleared. I sort through it quickly, not lingering.

At the back of the drawer, tucked behind a bundle of thick winter socks – how many socks did this man own? My fingers find something small and hard.

I know what it is before I pull it out. I know the same way you know a diagnosis before the test results comes back. The way you know it’s raining before you’ve opened the curtains and looked outside.

A small, black velvet box sits in the palm of my hand.

Mouth dry, I open it.

The ring is simple. A thin gold band with a single stone – not a diamond, I realise, looking closer and turning it under the bedroom light. An aquamarine. Sea-coloured. The colour of the water off Treloar’s Point on a clear day and near enough the same light blue as Peter’s eyes. I close my eyes, my body is swaying on the spot, and I can’t stop it. He’d have chosen it deliberately. He’d have gone to a jeweller and said the colour of the sea, and the jeweller would have thought he was being romantic, and Peter would have been completely, stubbornly literal. It’s not a metaphor, Neen. It’s just the right colour. The vision of it is so clear it takes my breath away.

I sit down on the edge of the bed because my legs are gone.

He was going to ask.

I’d suspected, maybe. Hoped, in that stupid whimsical way that a person can hope their perfect partner might feel the same way and cement it with a ring. I’d even told Isla I thought it might happen. But suspecting and knowing are different countries, and I’ve just crossed a border I can never uncross.

He was going to ask, and then he went out on a call, and now I’m sitting on our bed holding a ring he never got to give me, and the answer he never got to hear is stinging the end of my tongue.

Yes. The answer was yes. The answer was always going to be yes.

The crying comes from somewhere deeper than the mourning – not tears but a sound, an animal sound that rips from deep inside me, echoing from a place that’s beyond access. Inside that sound are the words that come too late and will never be said.

Yes.

I curl around the velvet box and I sob until my ribs ache, until there’s nothing left, until the crying has emptied me out and refilled me with something raw and clean and terribly miserable.

Chips comes. I don’t know when. He’s just there – pressing his warm body against my legs, pushing his head under my hand. I hold on to him and cry into his fur, and he lets me, steady and patient, giving me the odd, unexpected lick on any piece of my skin he can reach when locked in my desperate hold.

This dog. This ridiculous, scruffy, devoted dog that Tom pulled out of the gorse and brought to me. Who sits on my feet, sleeps at the end of my bed, and has never once made me feel like I’m too much, too sad, or too broken.

Tom brought me this dog.

The thought arrives sideways, unwelcome, insistent, refusing to wait its turn. Tom found a dog that needed a home and he brought it to a woman who needed a reason to stay, and he never said this is for you because Tom never says the thing. He just does it. He just shows up and gives you what you need and pretends it was a coincidence.

Peter was going to ask me to marry him.

And Tom has been asking me to stay alive since he died.

The two thoughts exist side by side, and neither cancels the other out. This is the thing about grief that nobody tells you – it doesn’t clear the stage before the next act starts. It doesn’t wait until you’re ready. It just keeps going, and new feelings arrive in the middle of the old ones, and you have to hold all of it at once or let it crush you.

When the crying finally stops – when I’m empty and wrung out, and my face is raw and swollen – I look at the ring again, blinking like I might have imagined it.