Page 125 of Carry Me Home

Jude doesn’t register it. He’s in the flow now, the beer doing the talking, and his voice carries the way voices carry in The Ship – over the heads and the noise and straight to the one person who shouldn’t be hearing it.

‘Eleven years.’ Jude takes another swig. ‘Eleven years of being in love with her and he’s stuck in bloody Scotland because he couldn’t⁠—’

He stops.

Kit’s grip has tightened on his arm. Reuben is staring into his pint like he’s trying to disappear into it.

Slowly, Jude turns. Sees me watching. Sees my face.

The colour drains from his.

‘Wait.’ His voice has lost its cheerful slur. Completely sober now, in the space of a heartbeat. ‘You … you knew that, right?’

The pub noise is still there – the laughter, the glasses, Dot’s voice from the corner – but it’s muffled, like hearing it from underwater. Like standing inside a bell that’s just been struck.

Eleven years.

Eleven years of being in love with her.

‘Nina?’ Brynn’s hand is on my arm. ‘Nina, what’s⁠—’

‘Did you know?’ I’m looking at Brynn. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. ‘Did you know?’

Her face tells me before her mouth does.

‘Nina—’

‘Did everyone know?’

The silence from the bar answers that. Kit looking at the floor. Reuben looking at his pint. Jude looking at me with the expression of a man who’s just pulled a pin and can’t put it back.

Everyone. Everyone in this pub, in this village, on this harbour. Dot with her crossword and her pointed observations. Bill with his knife and his stories about Peter. Tilly with her slides and her not-subtle glances. My mother.

Everyone saw it except me.

I think about him at seventeen That first date, the one I laughed off to my friends afterwards. Like kissing my brother. I said that. I said those words, and he⁠—

My hands are shaking. I look down at them and they’re shaking, and the baby is still in my arms and I need to put the baby down because my hands are shaking.

‘Here.’ I transfer Peter to Brynn. Carefully. My hands are steady enough for that, at least. ‘I need – I need air.’

I push out of the booth. The pub is too hot, too loud, too full of people who’ve been watching this slow disaster for over a decade and saying nothing. The door. The cold air. The harbour.

I stand on the cobblestones and I breathe.

The water is black and still. The boats creak at their moorings. A halyard clinks somewhere in the dark – that small, persistent sound – and the air is cold on my face, cold on my arms, raising goosebumps.

Tom Darcy is in love with me.

Tom Darcy has been in love with me for eleven years.

And the memories aren’t arriving in order. They’re coming in a rush, overlapping, piling on top of each other – Tom at the funeral, his hand under my elbow when my legs buckled. Tom painting the café shutters, lavender on his cheekbone, laughing. Tom introducing himself to Peter, shaking his hand, stepping back. The stepping back. How many times has Tom Darcy stepped back to make room for someone who wasn’t him?

The fuchsias. The dog. The phone calls when I couldn’t sleep. The way he always, always answered before I could count to five.

The ring. Carrying Peter’s ring in his head for eight months because telling me would have meant watching me grieve for a future I didn’t know I’d lost. I called that betrayal. I stood in his kitchen and called it betrayal and watched his face absorb it, and he let me, because that’s what Tom does. He absorbs. He stays. He stands in the dark and waits and doesn’t ask for a single thing in return.

Eleven years.