Page 126 of Carry Me Home

I sent him to Scotland. I was so angry about the ring, so hurt, so wrapped up in my own grief that I pushed him away without ever understanding what I was pushing. Who I was pushing. Not a secret. Not a lie. A man who loved me so much he’d rather lose me than cause me pain.

And before that – before the ring, before Peter, before any of it – I was seventeen years old and a boy kissed me and I told my friends it was like kissing my brother because I was scared. Not bored. Not repulsed. Scared. Because he looked at me like I was the whole room and I didn’t know what to do with that, so I made it small. I made him small. And he heard me do it.

He heard me, and he stayed anyway.

Footsteps behind me. Brynn.

‘Nina—’

‘Eleven years, Brynn.’ My voice cracks. ‘Eleven years of him being right there, and I was the only person in Sea Salt Bay who didn’t see it.’

‘You weren’t ready to see it.’

‘That’s not an excuse.’

‘No. It’s not.’ She comes to stand beside me, looking out at the harbour. ‘But you see it now.’

The question underneath the question. The one I can feel pressing against my ribs, too big to name, too urgent to ignore. Because I do see it now. And seeing it has rearranged every single memory I have of Tom Darcy, and the rearrangement is still happening, still shifting, still showing me things I don’t know what to do with.

‘He’s in Scotland,’ I say. ‘With Cara. Building a life.’

‘He’s in Scotland,’ Brynn agrees. ‘But I don’t think he’s building anything. Not really.’

‘But he left. He chose to leave.’

‘Because staying was killing him.’ Brynn’s voice is gentle but firm. ‘He didn’t leave because he wanted to, Nina. He left because he couldn’t watch you not love him back anymore.’

The words land somewhere deep. Below the shock. Below the guilt. In the place where I’ve been carrying a feeling I didn’t have a name for – the feeling that started the night I saw Cara’s hand on his arm at the pub, and grew when I saw the chalkboard without Peter’s name and chose to pack up his things. A feeling that solidified when I found Peter’s ring and the first person I ran to was Tom – not Brynn, not Jude, not Isla. But Tom, who shattered my heart more than he should have by keeping a secret from me.

I know what it is now. I’ve probably known for longer than I’ll ever admit.

‘What do I do?’ My voice is barely there.

‘What do you want to do?’

I look at the harbour. At the boats. At Lavender Dreams, half-converted, her outline just visible against the dark water.

I think about Tom in Scotland, lying awake listening for a sea that isn’t there.

I think about eleven years of not seeing, and ten months of grief, and a seventeen-year-old girl who was too scared to let a boy love her.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Not tonight.’

‘That’s okay.’ Brynn links her arm through mine. ‘You don’t have to know tonight.’

‘But I have to know soon.’

‘Yes. You do.’

We stand there, arm in arm, looking at the water. The pub noise drifts out behind us – laughter, glasses clinking, someone starting a song. Life going on. The way it always does in Sea Salt Bay, regardless of what’s breaking or mending in the hearts of the people who live here.

The air is cold. The stars are out. The boats creak and settle.

And somewhere in Scotland, seven hundred miles north of this harbour wall, Tom Darcy is awake. I know he’s awake. I know it the way I know the tides, the way I know the café, the way I know the sound of his voice on the second ring.

I just don’t know yet what I’m going to do about it.

But I know I’m going to do something. And for now, standing here with the salt air on my skin and my best friend’s arm through mine and a village full of people who’ve been holding this secret like a lantern in the dark – for now, that’s enough.