Page 97 of Carry Me Home

‘They want him back. They’ve got kids – two of them, apparently. The kids have been devastated.’ He swallows. I watch his throat work. ‘I’m sorry, Nina.’

Chips is wagging his tail. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand that his real family has been found, that he’s leaving, that I’m about to lose the thing that’s been keeping me upright for weeks.

‘When?’ My voice comes out level. Controlled. A masterpiece of not-falling-apart.

‘They’re driving down today.’ I can’t look at his face as he talks, can’t look in his eyes. I know I’ll see sorrow there, and regret, and shame that he’s going to make me lose something once again when I’m only just standing on my feet. ‘They’ll be here by this afternoon. I said they could come to the surgery at three o’clock to pick him up.’ He pauses. ‘You don’t have to be there for the handover. I can bring him over⁠—’

‘He’s my dog.’ The words catch. I force them through. ‘He’s been my dog for weeks. I’ll bring him myself.’

‘Okay.’ Tom hovers. I can feel him hovering – the specific quality of his attention, focused and patient, waiting for me to let him in. The same attention he’s been giving me for eleven years. The same patience. The same steady, maddening, unbearable kindness.

‘If you want to talk⁠—’

‘I don’t.’

‘Right.’ A pause. ‘I’m sorry. About all of it. About⁠—’

‘Don’t.’ I turn around. Face him. And for a second – one second – the anger slips and there’s something else underneath, raw and terrified, the feeling of standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down. ‘Don’t apologise for things you can’t fix, Tom.’

The shift in register catches him. I see it – the way his eyes change, the slight forward movement he makes and then stops. He heard what was underneath. He always hears what’s underneath.

‘I’ll have him at the surgery by three,’ I say, and the wall goes back up, and I turn to the counter, and I wipe the cloth across the surface in long deliberate strokes. ‘You should go.’

He stands there for one more moment. I can feel it – his gaze on my back, the weight of everything between us pressing down on the air in the café. The bear in the corner. The fairy lights. The counter where he’s sat every evening for weeks, drinking tea from the blue chipped mug, fixing my machines, telling me I’m enough.

The bell chimes. He’s gone.

Silence.

‘Well,’ Tilly says eventually. ‘That was⁠—’

‘Don’t.’

‘I was just⁠—’

‘I know.’ I throw the cloth into the sink. ‘I need some air.’

I walk out the back before they can respond. The tiny garden is hot and bright and empty and I press my hands flat against the wall and I don’t cry. I don’t cry because I’m at work and because crying won’t change anything and because I’ve done enough crying this week to fill the harbour.

Chips is leaving. Tom is leaving. Everything I’ve let myself hold on to is being pulled away.

My hand goes to the pocket of my apron, to my phone. It’s an automatic reach – the reflex of eleven years, the muscle memory that says when the ground shifts, call Tom. My fingers find the phone and I pull it out and his name is right there, at the top of every list, and I can’t call him. I can’t call the person I always call because the person I always call is part of the earthquake.

I put the phone away. I go back inside. I make coffee for nameless customers and I wait for three o’clock.

The family is nice.

That’s the worst part. If they were awful – rude, careless, the kind of people who shouldn’t have a dog – I would refuse. I would fight. I would make a scene.

But they’re nice. Mum, Dad, two kids under ten who burst into tears the moment they see him.

‘Biscuit!’ the little girl shrieks. ‘Mummy, it’s Biscuit!’

Biscuit. His name is Biscuit.

I named him Chips. I named him with Tom on the phone at half eleven at night, laughing about Napoleon complexes and Chairman Woof, and the name I gave him was never his name. He was always Biscuit. I just didn’t know.

I keep naming things wrong. Friendship. Favourite. Fine. I keep putting my words on things that already have their own words and not listening to what they’re actually called.