Page 95 of Carry Me Home

She’s quiet for a moment. Through the window, the garden is bright and dying in the heat – Dad’s roses drooping, the lawn brown. The girls are laughing about something I can’t hear.

‘You ask yourself one question,’ she says. ‘If Nina didn’t exist – if there was nothing to run from – would you still want this?’

The question lands in the kitchen and fills it.

I think about Cara. The practice. The photographs she showed me – green hills, a stone building, a loch visible from the consulting room. A life without lavender shutters. A life without dark curls and bangles and a laugh I can hear across a harbour. A life where I am not waiting, not watching, not standing at my window every night looking at fairy lights left on by a woman who doesn’t know I’m there.

Would I still want it?

The honest answer is: I don’t know.

And the more honest answer – the one underneath, the one I can feel but can’t quite reach – is: I don’t know because I’ve never been able to imagine a life that doesn’t include her. Not Scotland, not Cornwall, not anywhere. She’s in every version of the future I’ve ever built. And the question isn’t whether I’d want Scotland without her. It’s whether I can survive a life where I stay here, fifty metres from her door, watching her fairy lights every night, and she never turns around.

‘Think about it,’ Mum says. ‘That’s all.’

‘I will,’ I say.

‘Good.’ She hands me the last plate. ‘Dry.’

I dry.

Later, when I get home, the flat is empty. Cara, who must have come back since her visit to Amber Cove, has gone out for a walk along the coastal path. In the kitchen, where I slide my keys, I find her message scrawled on the notepad on the counter:

back by six.

The flat is mine and it’s quiet in a way that used to be peaceful and now sounds like the inside of a held breath.

I think of heading out, finding Cara out on her walk and enjoying the late afternoon sun. But I don’t; instead, I open my laptop. The practice listing is still open on my browser with its photographs of green Scottish hills and possibilities.

If Nina didn’t exist, would you still want this? The echo of Mum’s question reverberates in my head, bouncing around.

She does exist. That’s the whole problem. She exists and she’s furious with me and she hasn’t called and the phone in my pocket is silent and the fairy lights are off and the world feels like it’s holding its breath, waiting for me to do the one thing I’ve never been able to do.

Leave.

Chapter Twenty

NINA

‘I’m just saying, if he goes to Scotland, he should commit to the aesthetic.’

Tilly waves her teaspoon. A blob of cream lands on the counter. Brynn wipes it up without comment.

‘The aesthetic being…?’ I ask, because someone has to.

‘Kilts. Tartan. Maybe a nice sporran.’ Tilly stirs with great intensity. ‘If you’re going to abandon Cornwall for the frozen north, you should at least dress the part.’

‘Scotland isn’t the frozen north,’ Brynn says. ‘It’s just north.’

‘Anything past Bristol and my toes go numb.’

I wipe the counter. We’ve been circling this for twenty minutes – Tilly raising it, Brynn deflecting, me pretending the cloth needs my full attention. Tom Darcy might be leaving for Scotland. With Cara. The whole village knows.

I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to notice that the fairy lights above the counter are the same ones he watches from his window, or that the giant pink bear is still sitting in its corner by the door, bright and ridiculous, the mascot he won for me at the fete three weeks ago in a life that seems to belong to someone else.

‘Have you talked to him?’ Brynn asks. Carefully casual. ‘Since he told his parents?’

‘Nothing to talk about.’