We walk back to my house and I hand him the hire-car keys so he can drive back to the airport tomorrow. I direct him to the spare bed and I thank him for his great kindness in traveling all this way to support me. We hold each other, briefly, then I make myself walk away.
—
It’s close to 4 a.m. now and my call is ignored by eight taxi companies before I give up.I tried, I whisper to my children’s empty beds.I’ll be with you in the morning.
I’m so tired I feel nauseous. My hands shake; my vision sways and fuzzes at the edges.
Our bed is empty except for one of Robin’s earplugs and Maeve’s purple koala. I take off my clothes and climb in, cuddling the koala while listening to the wind in the thatch, but sleep doesn’t come.
I don’t know how long it is before I put my dressing gown on and walk down the landing to the spare room where Johan is lying on the bed, still fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. I don’t know how long Istand there in the doorway, looking at his face in the moonlight. All I know is that time passes while we stare at each other, enough time for a conversation with no words to take place.
He gets up, comes to stand right in front of me. My back is to the doorframe and he moves in, closer, almost touching me. His breath is warm on my face in this cold, still room, but he stops there and waits, inches from me. Inches from the thing neither of us has ever managed to quite let go of. He, too, is desperate, but he understands that the first step must come from me.
I know that this cannot happen. I also know that it must. I can’t say goodbye to this man without knowing, one final time, what we feel like together. But here? In my house?
He watches me, one hand braced against the doorframe above me as if to stop him moving any closer. I open my mouth, although I’m not sure I trust myself to speak. But now, as always, he knows.
“Not here,” he says.
I nod gratefully and my body hums into life. It knows what’s coming. I duck under his arm and leave the room, hand outstretched behind me. He takes it. I almost run down the stairs, through the kitchen, out of the door. I have a vague notion that we will go up the track to the field but before we’ve even crossed the garden he pulls me around. “Carrie.”
And then we’re together. He kisses me hard, almost frantically, and I press myself into him, running my hands up his back. Then as now, I have never known anything like this feeling. My dressing gown has come open and his hands are on me, all over my body. It’s a sensation my conscious mind had slowly forgotten, but my body has not.
After a minute or two, I pull away, gasping. I’m unmoored, burning. But can I do this? Really?
It ismy rightis what comes back. I feel the energy of that truth flowinto my bones. It ismy rightto say goodbye in this way. To have the wedding night I never had. I have permission to do whatever I want in this moment, this night of reckonings. And this—him, us—thisis what I want. This is what I have always wanted.
I drag him over to the stone barn and we kiss harder, my back against the pitted granite wall. The edges of the night are fading to gray scale. There is a bird testing out its first few notes somewhere nearby; next to the barn the ancient hedgerow is swarming with silent life as morning readies for its first breath. I pull him harder against me, then I back him up so I can take off his jeans.
Johan pulls off my dressing gown and I have a sudden thought that our Roof guests are meters away, fast asleep in the Pig Shed, but I can’t stop now. It has to be here; it has to be now. Without a word he lifts me onto the stone stile that joins the hedge to the side of the barn, a freezing slab of granite behind which the fields drop down to the lower reaches of the open moor.
The cold of the stone is an unrecorded detail because I’m pushing him into me already, my legs splayed out into the beginnings of the day, and I’m aware only of the agonizing, exquisite pause before he starts moving. I have only ever known this feeling with him.
Only him.
Thirty-eight.
Eighteen months later:
Stockholm, September 2024
Stockholm in autumn is a carnival for the senses. A shortening, a falling, a blazing, a stillness; sharp mornings and clear skies; a slow procession into the unknown. I exit Karolinska Hospital in yet another dazzling sunset, deeply grateful to have found another space on earth that feels right, no matter how far or how different it is from my cherished home in Devon.
I call my sister. “I’m just leaving now,” I say when she picks up. “How are they?”
“Appalling,” Maya shouts, over Maeve’s yells about something to do with skipping ropes.
Maya, somewhat improbably, is my children’s part-time nanny. I am a single mother training to be a surgeon once again, and the only way I can make it work is to have help. A few days after Dad’s funeral, I drove her to Heathrow to fly back to Colorado. Six hours later she had reappeared in my kitchen with her suitcase. She sat down at my table and burst into tears.
“I have no money and nowhere to live and you are my one and only plan,” she said, half laughing, half crying. “Can I stay for a while?”
I hadn’t been wrong; she was not happy in her beautiful Colorado life. Their setup had suited Eagle far better than it suited her. In the years since they’d stopped trying for a baby, Eagle had leaned into his alternative community, but Maya had not. She had become lonely, then depressed.
“Biscuit is my only real friend out there,” she said, laughing again, as tears drew gentle mascara stains down her cheeks. “Everyone we know is lovely but they’re just…they’re just not my people, Carrie. They are so far from being my people. In fact, I’m not even sure why I’m calling them lovely. I find them weird and culty and fucking annoying and I can’t go back there.”
I asked if she’d called Eagle to talk this through. “No,” she admitted, because no matter how many years she’d spent as a therapist, she was still Maya. “I will, of course. But he won’t put up any sort of a fight and I want to be mentally ready for that.”
She hugged her knees. “I thought the slow lane was a way for me to feel safe, but it’s just…it’stoofucking slow. I can’t take another day of it!” For a moment she looked happy to have said this. Then she realized she might never see Biscuit again and she started sobbing. Through the sobs she told me she’d had to give up booze for good. “I’m sorry I lied about that, too! I’m a loathsome fuckup.”
