Page 99 of Carry Me Home

I think about Mum’s question again, ‘Who is Nina Ellis?’

And I want to scream, ‘I just don’t know!’

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Not knowing might end me and I think I really should find out.

Tonight, though, I just lie on the cold floor and miss everything I’ve lost.

Chapter Twenty-One

TOM

The sea is loud tonight.

I stand at the harbour wall, hands in my pockets, watching the waves hit the stone. The tide’s coming in hard – white foam catching the streetlight, spray misting the air. I can taste salt on my lips. I’ve tasted salt on my lips for as long as I can remember. This sea, this harbour, this crash and pull that has been the soundtrack to every version of my life – learning to walk on these cobblestones, learning to swim in this cove, standing behind the lifeboat station at fourteen thinking I understood what love meant.

I didn’t. I had no idea. I still don’t.

The café is dark. Lavender shutters closed against the night. No light in the upstairs window. And the fairy lights – the ones she leaves on every evening, the ones I’ve been watching from my window for months, the warm persistent glow I’ve treated as proof of her, evidence that she’s there, that the distance between us is only fifty metres of cobblestone and harbour water – the fairy lights are off.

She hasn’t turned them on since the night she brought me the ring.

She won’t talk to me.

The wall she’s built between us, brick by brick, mortared with a silence more absolute than anything I’ve ever heard from Nina Ellis, who has never been silent about anything in her life.

I understand why. I carried Peter’s ring in my head for eight months and never said a word. I told myself I was protecting her, but really I was protecting myself.

It wasn’t enough. Eleven years of showing up, and the one time it mattered most, I hid.

The waves crash. The spray rises. The café stays dark.

I can’t do this anymore.

The thought arrives not as a decision but as a collapse – the final giving-way of a structure I’ve been holding up through sheer force of will. Not I’m choosing to leave. Just: I can’t stay. The distinction matters. One is brave. The other is survival.

I’m going to Scotland.

Cara’s reading when I get back. Curled on the sofa with a veterinary journal, glasses on, tea going cold. She looks up when I walk in.

‘You’re wet.’

‘Spraying at the harbour.’ I shake off my jacket. ‘Tide’s high.’

‘You’ve been gone for hours.’

‘Walking. Thinking, mainly, I guess.’

She sets down the journal and pushes her glasses up onto her blonde hair, watching me. ‘And?’

‘Scotland. I’m coming.’

She doesn’t smile immediately. I watch the hope move through her face before she catches it – the slight lift at the corners of her mouth, quickly managed, then the careful lowering of expectation that follows.

‘Not permanently,’ I say. ‘Not yet. But I do want to try. Give it a proper chance.’