Page 82 of Carry Me Home

The clock says six-thirty. I should get up. Shower. Open the café. Deliveries, prep, the Saturday rush that starts at eight and doesn’t stop.

I don’t move. My body is heavy in a way that has nothing to do with sleep – a weight in my chest, a thickness in my throat. The grief has come back in the night and settled on me like a second blanket, and I can feel it pressing down, dense and familiar and absolutely not interested in my schedule.

Chips nudges my hand with his nose.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know. You need to go out.’

I let him into the garden. Watch him follow his invisible trails. The morning is already warm – another scorching day building – and the village is stirring. Dot’s shop door. A car on the coast road. Gulls.

I go back inside. Look at the café. The tables. The machine. The pastries that won’t prep themselves.

I walk past all of it and go back upstairs.

Today is not a café day.

The knock comes at half nine.

I ignore it.

It comes again.

‘Nina?’ Brynn, muffled through the door. ‘The café’s shut. You never shut the café.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘That’s not what I asked. Let me in or I’m climbing through the window.’

She will. I’ve seen her scale the side of a boat in a force eight without flinching.

I open the door.

Brynn takes one look at me – unwashed hair, pyjamas at half-nine in the morning, eyes swollen – and walks straight past me into the kitchen.

‘Kettle. Where’s the good tea?’

‘Brynn—’

‘I’m not asking if you want to talk. I’m making tea. Separate activities.’ She’s already filling the kettle, finding mugs, moving through my kitchen with the efficient competence of someone who has managed crises at sea and considers emotional ones a downgrade. ‘Sit.’

I sit. Chips climbs half into my lap – too much dog for the chair, neither of us caring.

Brynn makes tea. Sets a mug in front of me. Sits across the table.

‘The café being shut caused a minor panic,’ she says. ‘Dot thought you’d died. Bill suspected robbery. Tilly started a betting pool on elopement.’

‘I didn’t elope.’

‘I told them you were having a shit day.’ She blows on her tea. ‘Am I right?’

‘You’re right.’

‘Want to tell me about it?’

‘No.’ I wrap my hands around the mug. The heat presses into my palms. ‘Yes. I don’t know.’

Brynn waits. No pressure, no expectation. This is why I trust her with the underneath of things – she holds space the way the harbour holds boats. Steady. Without commentary.

‘I woke up crying,’ I say. ‘Dreaming about Peter. I can’t remember what – just the smell of him, the sound of his voice. And I woke up and it was like it had just happened. Like no time had passed.’