Page 109 of Carry Me Home

Then I get out, and I go inside, and I start the rest of my life.

Chapter Twenty-Three

NINA

The text arrives at seven in the morning.

In Cornwall. Fancy lunch? E x

I stare at it for a long moment, brain still fuzzy with sleep. E. Ellen. Peter’s mother. Whom I haven’t seen since the funeral. She’d held my hand through the service, dry-eyed and steady, then disappeared back to Plymouth before I could fall apart properly. We’ve texted occasionally, only awkward messages on birthdays, Christmas, the kind of stilted communication that happens when two people share a grief too big to fit into words.

And now she’s here, in Cornwall and fancying lunch.

The café at 12? I text back.

Perfect. I’ll bring gin.

That’s so Ellen. I almost smile.

She arrives at noon exactly, sweeping through the door with a bottle of Hendrick’s in one hand and sunglasses pushed into silver-streaked hair that’s been cut shorter since I last saw her.

‘Nina.’ She pulls me into a hug which is brief, firm, and intoxicated with expensive perfume. ‘You look tired.’

‘Thanks. You look⁠—’

‘Incredible. I know. Lisbon for a month. Vitamin D and cheap wine.’ She releases me, sets the gin on the counter like she’s planting a flag. ‘Highly recommend it.’

She looks around the café. The chalkboard menu. The fuchsias in the window box, still going despite my neglect.

‘This place hasn’t changed,’ she says. ‘I like that. Everything else changes too bloody fast.’

I make her a gin and tonic – heavy on the gin, the way Peter always made them for her, the way she taught him – and a coffee for myself, even though I probably need what she’s having. We settle at the table by the window. The one with the best view of the harbour. The one Peter always liked.

Ellen notices. Doesn’t comment. Just runs her finger along the edge of the table and sits down.

‘So.’ She takes a sip. ‘How are you? And don’t say fine. I hate fine. Fine is what people say when they don’t want to answer the question.’

‘I’m…’ I search for a word that isn’t ‘fine’. ‘Surviving.’

‘Surviving.’ She considers this. ‘That’s honest, at least. Surviving is underrated. People expect you to be thriving six months in, posting inspirational quotes about resilience. Bollocks to that. Surviving is enough.’

‘How are you?’

‘Better.’ She says it simply. ‘Not good – I don’t think good is coming back, not fully. But better. I can get through a day without crying now. Most days.’

‘That’s progress.’

‘It is progress. I went to see someone – a therapist. Don’t make that face.’

‘I’m not making a face.’

‘You’re making a face. You look exactly like Peter when I suggested he eat a vegetable.’ She takes another sip. ‘It helped. Genuinely. She reframed it for me – grief isn’t a tunnel with an end. It’s a room you carry with you. Some days the room is enormous and you can’t find the door. Some days it’s small enough to fit in your pocket.’

‘Which is today?’

‘Pocket-sized. Just about.’ She turns back to me. ‘What about you? What size is your room?’

Outside the window, a fishing boat is coming in – slow, heavy, nets piled on the deck. The harbour water is flat and grey-green, barely moving. I think about the empty flat upstairs. The space where Chips used to sleep. The harbour wall where I stood and watched Tom’s car disappear into the mist.