Page 81 of Carry Me Home

‘I need to think. About all of it. Scotland. The practice. Everything.’

‘Of course.’ She squeezes. ‘Take your time.’

Her hand stays in mine all the way back. The village is dark. The harbour still. The fairy lights in the café are on.

When we enter the flat we both stop. Cara pulls off the cardigan she wore against the slight evening freshness, and the movement pulls the strap of her dress down. It’s just a thin spaghetti strap against skin. Yet it’s so much more. It’s what could be. One step. One slide of my hand.

One kiss.

But I’m not drunk this time. No heady mix of sambuca and champagne.

My foot takes a step though. One step closer. Cara’s step matches mine, and then there’s just breathing space between us and silence and the whirling possibility of a future that I hadn’t really thought an option.

The plan. The Tom-Darcy-is-moving-on plan. It could turn another page right now. Fresh and blank and ready for the unknown.

Cara’s lips part. I swear my heart is thrumming.

So I link my fingers through the scrap of cotton and slide it back up her shoulder. Her fingers stop my hand there, my palm against her smooth skin.

I breathe.

I count.

‘Goodnight, Cara,’ I say.

Her lashes drop. ‘Goodnight, Tom.’

I lie awake for hours.

The ceiling is the same ceiling I’ve looked at for five years. The sounds are the same – the pipes, the surgery humming below, the sea lapping against the harbour wall. Everything is the same.

Except.

Cara kissed me and I felt warmth and comfort and the flatness of a body going through correct motions without the correct feeling underneath. Cara is good and real and brave and she deserves someone whose first thought in the morning isn’t the sound of bangles and a laugh carrying across a harbour.

And Nina – Nina looked at me tonight and I saw something I have never seen in her face before. Not friendship. Not warmth. Not gratitude or the ease or the thousand familiar expressions I’ve catalogued over eleven years.

Fear.

I saw it. Clear as a diagnosis. The specific, unmistakable presentation of a woman who has just realised that the constant she’s been taking for granted might not be constant anymore.

It’s the first time that Nina Ellis has looked at me and been afraid, and the terrible thing – the thing I will turn over in the dark for hours, the thing I cannot reconcile with the plan, with Cara, with Scotland, with any version of moving on – is that her fear looked exactly like the beginning of something.

And I don’t know if I can leave before I find out what.

Chapter Seventeen

NINA

Iwake up crying and I don’t know why.

The dream slips away before I can catch it – fragments, impressions. Peter’s voice. The smell of salt and engine oil. The way he used to laugh, head thrown back, no self-consciousness at all. His hand on my waist, turning me towards him, saying my name the way he said it – Neen, two syllables drawn into one, lazy, certain.

Chips is pressed against my side, warm and solid, and when I open my eyes he’s watching me. Patient. Like he’s been waiting for me to surface.

‘Sorry,’ I tell him, wiping my face. ‘Didn’t mean to wake you.’

He doesn’t move. Just watches, his ridiculous eyebrows furrowed with concern.