Page 87 of Carry Me Home

Still there. Still real. Sea-coloured. His.

I don’t know what to do with it, or think about it, and hell, I don’t know what to feel about it.

With a pause, in which the thumping of my heart is painfully loud, I snap a decision.

I find my trainers.

Chapter Eighteen

TOM

The knock wakes me.

It’s not the phone, not an emergency call – a knock. Soft but insistent, coming from downstairs. I lie still for a moment, disoriented, the clock registering before the rest of me does. One twenty-three in the morning.

Nobody knocks at one in the morning unless something’s wrong.

I’m out of bed and down the stairs before I’m fully awake, pulling a jumper over my head as I go. The surgery is dark, the waiting room full of shadows. Through the glass panel in the door – a figure on the step.

Nina.

I open the door and she’s standing there in pyjamas and a cardigan thrown on crooked, her feet shoved into trainers with no socks, laces trailing on the cobblestones. Her face is swollen. Blotched. Her eyes are raw in a way I’ve only ever seen after Peter died.

She’s holding something in her hand. A small velvet box.

My hand goes to the door behind me – pulling it half-closed, instinctive, not wanting to wake Cara.

Nina sees the gesture. I watch her see it. Her eyes tracking the movement, the narrowing, the understanding that I’m shielding someone else’s sleep.

‘Nina, what⁠—’

She holds out a box.

Her hand is trembling. She doesn’t speak. She just holds it towards me, and then her face crumples – not gently, not in a gentle way like she cries when she’s sad. This is way she cries when the ground has been pulled out.

I know what’s in the box before I take it. I know because I stood in that jeweller’s in Truro while Peter turned the trays over, agonising – simple, nothing flashy, she’d hate flashy, something that looks like her, something the colour of the sea – his face bright with the simple joy of a man who realised that he had everything he wanted. He’d held the aquamarine up to the light and said: This one. It’s the colour of the water off Treloar’s Point. She’ll know what it means.

I’d said: She’ll love it.

And I’d meant it. Standing next to my friend, watching him choose a ring for the woman I loved, I’d meant it completely. I’d wanted her to have this. I’d wanted her to be happy, even if the happiness had a shape that would never include me.

Three weeks later, he was dead.

I open the box. There it is. Aquamarine in all its bright and gorgeously understated beauty. I swallow, although it hurts my throat, and hand the box back.

‘Come here,’ I say. My voice is wrecked. I reach for her.

She steps back.

‘I found this.’ She’s not folding into me. She’s rigid, arms still suspended mid-air, like she’s not sure she wants to hold it. The box sits between us like a barrier. ‘In his drawer. At the back of his sock drawer, Tom. He was going to⁠—’

‘I know.’

The words are out before I can catch them. The exhaustion, the hour, the rawness of her face – I can’t hold the lie anymore. It drops out of me like something I’ve been gripping too long and my fingers have simply given out.

Nina goes still. The tears stop. Her expression empties, completely, like a tide pulling back to expose the rocks underneath.

‘What do you mean, you know?’