Page 9 of Carry Me Home

She’ll come back when she’s ready.

And she will. That’s the thing about Nina Ellis. I’ve known it since she arrived in Sea Salt Bay at sixteen and I watched her grow into a woman with her jangling bangles and her too-big laugh and her habit of making everyone feel like the most important person in the room.

The question is, when she comes back, am I going to be able to keep going with Tom’s Moving-On Plan, or will I be sucked right back to Square One of Nowhere like I always am with her?

Chapter Three

NINA

Mum’s café is called Truro Tides Café, which she’ll tell you is ironic given that Truro is about as far from the actual beach as you can get while still technically being in Cornwall. She chose it because she liked the sign, which was already there when she took on the lease, and because – and this is a direct quote – it seemed like the kind of place that should have a name like that.

This is how Gina tarot-reading, crystal-healing, aura-cleansing Ellis makes most of her decisions.

They work out more often than they should.

It’s a Sunday, which means she’s been open since ten and is already on her third batch of scones and her second argument with the coffee machine, which has a personality disorder and responds unpredictably to barometric pressure. I am sitting on the wrong side of the counter eating the scone that didn’t make the grade because it came out lopsided, which is Mum’s threshold for rejection and my gain.

‘You could be doing this,’ she says, without looking up from the tray she’s sliding into the tall oven behind the counter – another batch of sausage rolls. ‘You have a whole café. That you own. That your grandmother left you because she thought you’d do something with it.’

‘I am doing something with it,’ I say. ‘I’m resting it.’

‘Resting it.’ She closes the oven door with a distinct snap and turns around. ‘Like a tendon.’

‘Exactly like a tendon.’

‘You’re not a tendon, Nina.’

‘How do you know?’

She picks up the cloth and wipes down the counter, which doesn’t need wiping, and I eat my lopsided scone, and this is most of what our time together looks like. Mum and I do better at a certain distance. Not far. Just enough. Living in the same town for three weeks has been a daily experiment in recalibrating that distance.

We only returned to Sea Salt Bay when I was turning seventeen and my gran died, leaving Mum the café. Mum left Sea Salt Bay a couple of years later, when I was grown and didn’t need her to stay. Even when I’ve wandered myself, I’ve always returned to Sea Salt Bay, to my gran’s café that feels like home.

Except now.

Now, the thought of Sea Salt Bay is like poison. One sip and it will end me.

I guess coming to Truro and putting myself in close quarters with Mum was my way of testing what life could look like without the Bay. Without the cove and the harbour, without The Ship and quiz nights.

And, most importantly, what life might be like without Peter.

Peter’s ghost, really, I suppose. Haunting me at every turn in the street, every scatter of pebbles on cobbles, that deep and desperate ache that has lived in me since the day he went into the sea and never came back out.

‘Brynn called,’ Mum says, and I’m pulled back to the present.

‘I know. I spoke to her.’

‘She says the café looks sad.’

‘The café is shut, Mum. It’s supposed to look sad.’

She makes a sound that is not quite agreement. ‘Your grandmother’s fuchsias⁠—’

‘Are fine.’

They are not fine. I know they’re not fine. I have been not thinking about the fuchsias with some energy for three weeks. The thing about the fuchsias is that Nan planted those fuchsias in their hanging baskets and I water them religiously every spring and summer without fail, ensuring new shoots thrive, deadheading the buds that aren’t going to make it to the summer months so they don’t ruin the summer display, and I am aware that this is not actually about the fuchsias but about what the fuchsias represent, which is a can of worms I am keeping firmly shut on a Sunday morning with a lopsided scone.

‘Tom said they looked all right,’ I say. ‘When he walked past.’