Page 103 of Carry Me Home

‘You don’t know that.’ His voice drops further. ‘You’ve never known that. You’ve assumed it but you’ve never once actually asked.’

Brother. The word echoes out of nowhere. I’ve known Jude all my life, but I’ve never told him about that humiliating moment. Never will either.

‘Jude—’

‘Go. Now. Before I do something stupid like tell her myself.’

I head to the bar. Nina’s there, waiting for the drinks, and for a moment we’re standing side by side in the noise of the pub, not speaking. The inches between us feel like geography. I can smell her – coffee and flowers and underneath it the warmth I know the way I know my own hands. My arm is close enough to hers that I can feel the heat coming off her skin without touching it.

‘Nina—’

‘Don’t.’ Her voice is quiet. Not angry. It’s worse. It’s held.

‘I just want to⁠—’

‘Congratulations on Scotland.’ She’s looking straight ahead, at the bottles behind the bar, at anything that isn’t me. ‘I hope it’s everything you want.’

The word want catches. A slight emphasis. Barely there. Like a finger pressing a bruise to check if it still hurts.

‘That’s not⁠—’

‘Here you go.’ The barman sets down the tray. Nina picks it up before I can move. ‘Excuse me.’

She walks away. And as she turns, tray in hand, her eyes meet mine again – one more half-second, involuntary, the way you glance at the sun before you can stop yourself – and in that half-second her composure cracks. Not much. A tremor in her jaw. A brightness in her eyes that isn’t the pub lights.

Then she’s gone. Back to the table. Setting down the tray, making Isla laugh, sliding into her seat.

I order more drinks for the rest of the table. Carry them back. Sit next to Cara.

Her hand finds my back again. The circles resume. Warm. Steady. The hand of a woman who is here, who wants me, who isn’t going to make me decode silences or interpret half-second glances or spend the next decade dissecting the emphasis someone put on a single word.

‘You okay?’ she murmurs.

‘Yeah.’

‘You don’t look⁠—’

‘I’m okay, Cara.’

She doesn’t push. The hand keeps moving. The pub keeps drinking. My friends toast new beginnings and Tilly demands to know if there’ll be a leaving party and Bill wants to discuss Scottish beer prices and Dot is already composing a formal letter of complaint to whichever authority is responsible for losing Sea Salt Bay’s only vet.

At the end of the table, Nina laughs at something Brynn says. The sound is bright and sharp and utterly wrong – too high, too quick, missing the warmth that usually lives in the centre of it, the low frequency I have spent years tuning myself to hear. She’s laughing the way she laughs when she’s trying to convince a room she’s fine. I know because I’ve heard the real version a thousand times and this isn’t it.

This is the version with a wall behind it.

I look away. I feel Cara’s hand on my back. I look at the pint in front of me and the pub around me and the life I’m leaving.

This is the right decision.

The sentence forms in my head and doesn’t quite complete itself. It gets as far as This is the right – and then stalls, the way a sentence stalls when the mouth knows the words but the body refuses to say them.

I pick up my pint. I drink.

Across the table, Jude watches me with eyes that say everything his mouth won’t.

And at the end of the table, Nina hasn’t moved.

I think about the fairy lights still turned off.