Page 85 of Carry Me Home

His name was on that board. Now it’s not. And the world kept turning.

The tournament ends. Bill wins, which makes his weathered face light up with a smugness that might make us all live to regret it for the next couple of weeks. The pub erupts. I cheer with everyone else.

Walking home through the dark village, past the marina where Jenny’s Dream waits in the moonlight, I think about what Brynn said. Just chalk. Maybe that’s what all of it is, in the end. Marks that get wiped to make room for what comes next. Not forgotten. Just allowed to become the past instead of the permanent present.

I don’t know if I’m ready.

But I’m closer than I was this morning, and maybe that’s enough.

Chips is asleep on the sofa. One ear twitches at the door. He confirms it’s me and settles back with a sigh.

‘Some guard dog you are.’

He ignores me. Fair.

I should go to bed. It’s late. Tomorrow the café opens whether I’m ready or not.

I put on pyjamas, wash my face, apply the cream Isla swore was essential and a cult secret, most importantly only costing a tenner. Peter had laughed when I bought it, said I was beautiful just the way I was. I’d told him that if I had any intention of staying beautiful into my dotage, I’d be taking all the A-lister advice she was prepared to share.

I settle into bed with Chips at my side. The bed doesn’t feel quite so vast with him there. That cold space, a little smaller.

But the restlessness won’t settle. The dartboard. The boat. The faded mermaid. Peter’s mug on the draining board. Round and round.

There isn’t a decision. I don’t plan to get out of bed. I just do – one moment horizontal, the next standing in my living room, looking at it properly. Really looking, for the first time in months.

Peter’s books on the coffee table. His bird-watching guide – pages soft with use, annotations in his terrible handwriting. His binoculars beside them, leather strap cracked from salt air. He used to sit at the window with those binoculars, tracking gannets, calling me over. Nina, quick, you’re missing it.

I pick up the book. The spine cracks. Inside the front cover, in faded pencil: Property of Peter Curnow. If found, return to the Lavender Café (or just buy me a pint).

I close it. Hold it against my chest for a moment. Then I go to the cupboard under the stairs and pull out an empty cardboard box.

I don’t think about it. If I think, I’ll stop.

The bird book goes in first. Then the binoculars – carefully, wrapped in a scarf. A battered paperback he’d been halfway through and never finished. A tide table from two summers ago.

The mug with the chip in the rim. The one he’d drunk from every morning. The one I still reach for sometimes before remembering.

I hold the mug for a long time. Then it goes in.

The box fills. Each object a small goodbye that is also a small permission – permission to have a shelf that’s mine. A table that’s mine. A flat that belongs to the person I am now, not the person I was with him.

Chips watches from the sofa. Head on paws. Bearing witness.

The living room looks different when I’m done. Emptier. Lighter. More mine.

I should stop. This is enough.

But my feet carry me to the bedroom where his clothes are in the two drawers that became his over time – the way things do when someone stays often enough that a toothbrush becomes a life. T-shirts, jumpers, socks rolled into fastidious pairs because Peter was obsessive about socks in a way that defied all logic for a man who left coffee cups on every surface. A small laugh bubbles up inside my chest at a memory. One lazy winter Sunday, when the wind was high and the sea rough, and Sea Salt Bay was undisturbed by tourists, weekenders, and outsiders. Peter had lain on my sofa, arms folded under his head, ankles crossed, thick woolly socks poking from under the hem of his jeans and watched in absolute horror as I tipped the end of my laundry basket into a heap of unmatched socks and declared my chores done. ‘But the socks, Neen, you haven’t matched the socks.’ Those aquamarine sea-blue eyes of his had crinkled at the edges as I’d launched myself at him, telling him there were better things to do in life than match socks.

‘Aye, what’s that, my love?’

‘This.’

And I’d kissed him. Losing myself in the rough sweetness of his rope-worn hands and the warmth of his mouth.

Fuck. I ache.

The ache is so deep. So profound that I freeze for a moment. Breathe. Centre.