Page 58 of Carry Me Home

‘Nothing is ever just anything, love.’ She heaves her side of the wheelbarrow forward. ‘Haven’t you learned that by now?’

We push the bear up the beach towards home, and I don’t look back to see if Tom is still there.

Chapter Twelve

TOM

The heat has been building for three weeks and the village has given up pretending it’s temporary.

Gardens are dying. Tempers are fraying. The ice-cream van has extended its hours and Dot has extended her Greensleeves campaign to anyone within earshot. The harbour shimmers like a mirage by midday, and even the gulls seem to have lost their enthusiasm for screaming.

‘Unnatural,’ Dad says, for what must be the hundredth time this week. We’re in the surgery waiting room, three fans running and achieving nothing. He mops his forehead with the handkerchief he’s carried every day since 1987. ‘This isn’t weather. This is provocation.’

‘Provocation from whom?’

‘The universe. The sun. The general concept of summer.’ He peers at me over his glasses. ‘You’re picking up this friend of yours today, aren’t you? The girl from university?’

‘Cara. Yes. She’s not a girl, Dad. She’s twenty-seven.’

‘Everyone under fifty is a girl to me. It’s a perspective issue.’ He folds the handkerchief with surgical precision. ‘And she’s staying how long?’

‘A week or two. She’s between jobs.’

‘Hmm.’ Dad’s hmm is a family heirloom. Mum has one too, slightly different frequency, same devastating payload. ‘And she’s just a friend, is she?’

‘She’s a friend.’

‘Because your mother has questions. About friends. About the specific nature of this particular friendship. About⁠—’

‘Dad.’

‘I’m the messenger. I don’t write the messages.’ He stands, creaking. ‘I’ll be in the garden. Watching the roses surrender. If you need me, I’ll be the one arguing with the hose.’

He leaves. I check the clock. Half twelve. Cara’s train gets in at two-fifteen. That gives me time to finish the morning’s paperwork, drive to Truro, and remember how to be a person who has a plan and is executing it.

The fete was three days ago. Three days, and I can still feel the weight of the bear, the look on Nina’s face when I handed it to her – confused, pleased, something else I couldn’t name flickering underneath. She’d tried to say favourite again and the word had stalled, and something had moved across her face that I’ve been turning over ever since, examining from every angle like a slide under a microscope, looking for evidence of something that probably isn’t there.

Her mother had hugged me goodbye like I was already family. That had been worse, somehow. The kindness of it. The assumption.

I’d got home that night and found more texts from Cara – cheerful, counting down the days, the exclamation marks of a person who knows what she wants – and felt something complicated settle in my chest. Not dread. More like the sensation of walking into a room you’ve committed to entering while your body is still trying to turn around.

Tom Darcy is moving on.

The sentence used to feel like a plan. Now it just feels like something I say.

Truro station is a furnace.

The platform shimmers. A woman fans herself with a newspaper. A child is having a meltdown near the ticket barriers and I sympathise entirely.

The train pulls in. Doors open. People spill out, already wilting.

And there’s Cara.

She spots me before I spot her – waving from three carriages away, her face breaking into a grin so immediate and uncomplicated that something in me loosens despite itself. Considering the last time I saw her was weeks ago, rumpled in bed and clutching her head while groaning and promising to never drink sambuca again, she looks damn amazing. Cara has always been put together; even when we were students, she dressed to make an impression – not on us, the other students, but on the lecturers. She once told me that her mum had whispered words of wisdom to her at five years old: Always dress so people take you seriously. It seemed an ominous thing to say to a child; my own mother would have been sticking plasters on my knees at that age from where I’d slipped on seaweed-covered rocks. Guess we are all different though, and who am I to judge? Cara’s blonde hair is casual glamour, soft waves that shine regardless of the lighting. She’s slim, wearing dark jeans and a shape-hugging vest top, paired with gold sandals. I’m more than aware that she’s pulling stares from passing men.

‘Tom Darcy.’ She stops in front of me, hands on hips, assessing. ‘You look deliciously melting.’

‘So do you.’ What? ‘I mean, you look lovely.’