Chapter 19
If there’s a land-speed record for boat transporters, Dad breaks it.
We cross the Cornish border after sunset, and a relieved Trelawney guides us via speaker around the edge of moorland.
It’s so empty in contrast to the city where I last saw him.
There’s no sign here of Christmas shoppers or of the streetlight angels Calum once stared up at.
Not a single star lights this bleak and barren landscape. It’s . . .
The end of the world.
I can’t let what I found hiding in my B-roll be the end of Calum’s.
I won’t.
Calum sounds equally determined. “Ignore your satnav.” His voice fills the cab as he sends Dad down narrow lanes that seem to lead us nowhere helpful. “Trust me,” Calum tells us. “Keep the tors to your right, and you won’t get lost.”
“Tors?” Dad barks. “I can’t see any tors. I can’t see any bloody thing. There’s nothing here.”
The moon finds a break in night-dark clouds. “There.” I point at a single stony giant standing sentry in the distance. A lone star hangs above it as if signposting the right direction for us.
“That’ll be High Tor.” Calum must forget that Dad can hear him. “Really wanted to see the sunrise from the top with you one day.”
He sounds way too fragile. And too full of want for me to ever hide how much I mean this. “You will.”
“Yeah?” he asks.
“Oui,” I tell him firmly.
I repeat that when we finally arrive in a village car park to find what seems like every soul who lives in Porthperrin has come out to greet us.
A crowd gathers around Dad’s boat transporter.
Men hold up lanterns and children run in giddy circles.
“Maisie!” a man bellows as loudly as mon père ever bellowed at me.
“Take care on the cobbles. They’re slippery. ”
All I see is someone who put the Ho in hockey.
It says so on Calum’s sweater, and I’ve never wanted to hug anyone harder.
I settle for saying, “Oui,” again to someone who’ll fly away a few hours from now.
“You will see that sunrise with me one day, but first you need to see something else.” I look over my shoulder where Dad is in his element, busy giving orders.
Other Trelawneys take them from him. A whole tribe of big, blond giants are here to help unload this Christmas present.
“Can we leave them to it?”
Calum nods before changing his mind. “Everyone helps out when a new lifeboat arrives. Guiding it through the alleys to the slipway together is a village tradition I grew up hearing about. I’ve never seen it happen.” He shoves his hands deep into his pockets, his head lowering. “Might be—”
“Your last chance to see it? Like you’ve wanted to see everything else one last time ever since I met you?”
His head rises like I want to see the sun do someday with him.
And not just from the top of a tor here in Cornwall.
I want to start more days with him even if I don’t know when, where, or how that could even happen.
I haven’t known him for long. All I do know is that Calum told me what kept his lips zipped without once breaking his contract.
He needs someone like me to do that for him. Before it’s too late.
That will have to wait.
For now, I watch a hockey player return a favour to the same people who once gifted him rugby boots and swimming goggles. Calum lends them his strength to push a lifesaving boat through narrow alleys, while Dad bellows instructions.
“To the left, everybody. Now to the right.”
At least his shouts will stop anyone else from hearing me whisper, “Your club could count you telling the world about a health dispute as contract-breaking, oui? They might see it as you making a strategic weak link public and make you pay for it in ways you don’t want? Like maybe if they sued you?”
Calum doesn’t say a word, but that’s fine. I’m not pushing for answers. I push a boat instead, shoulder to shoulder with him.
One of Calum’s hands finds mine. He holds fast, and that tightness tells me plenty. It also keeps me talking.
Fuck it.
No contracts zip my lips, so there’s no reason for me to shut up. Besides, I’ve had hours to read up on neuro-ophthalmology as a specialism—searched all the way from a service station to where Calum’s world ends, so I’m pretty sure I know which domino an on-ice collision might have toppled.
Each one of those searches led to this moment.
“Telling anyone might have cost your hockey camps their funding. I know you must already have enough cash to keep them going. Your plans were even bigger?”
His nod is so slight.
I see it.
“You were going to expand them. And you weren’t just wining and dining hockey sponsors whenever you left London, were you?” I picture a pink and healthy web of life hidden by an eggshell. “You’ve been building a network to expand that project you fund for Robin.”
That’s pure guesswork, an evidence-based leap. So is this.
“And not only for Christmas.”
Calum rumbles confirmation. “Go big or go home, right?”
Up ahead, the alley walls must lean in too close for Dad’s comfort. He yells, “Careful, careful,” to his helpers, and I should try being the same while standing on what feels like the thinnest ice in existence. Instead, I skate right up to the edge of what might sink Calum’s entire future.
“Your morning sessions. They’ve been to assess if you’re a good candidate for the same trial as little Violet.”
“Gently now,” Dad booms, but I can’t be gentle about this. I can’t. Not with a truth this important.
“You share the same congenital issue. But even if you are a good fit—”
“I am. Found that out when they called me back this morning. Violet is too.”
That makes this feel even more vital. “But taking part in the trial would keep you out of the game for longer than the option your club favours?” I make another guess about contract clauses. “Those photos Lito took. Your management bought them?”
He nods again.
“Then what’s the hurry if they’ve locked down that news? Why rush you back to the States unless it’s to stop you from having the time here to explore your options? Someone should tell the fans about that bullshit.”
Calum stops dead.
The lifeboat moves on without him, guided and supported by a village that would support him too if they knew his struggle.
A splash soon follows. Calum misses getting to see that launch for himself, which means I’ll have to work even harder to make sure he’ll get to see the launch of that second boat he ordered from Dad.
I make a start when we’re all back at the boat transporter, where I pass an incubator holding an egg to someone who knows how to find a safe home for a baby.
“Dad, could you make sure Calum’s mother gets this? Ask her to look after it until we’re done here.”
I watch mon père head uphill with a crowd of Trelawney giants. The one giant I want to keep sits beside me in a cab lit by my laptop. It illuminates Calum’s reaction to a finished contest entry no one else but Dad has witnessed.
Calum watches himself saying different versions of “I want to see,” while I focus on his face.
I don’t need to look at the screen to watch him make the same wish under the London Eye as he did in a famous toy shop.
He repeats it across candlelit tables and in an alley where he couldn’t have been any clearer.
“I’ve got a chance of a better deal for me long term.”
A more recent clip is just as truthful.
“I still have things left on my list to see.”
All I want this Christmas is for him to get to do that—to see forever—and a final snippet caught by a motion-activated camera this morning seals that deal for me.
“Beautiful.”
Calum says that in the cabin of a boat where his body shields me from view. All anyone would see is him, and all they’d hear is him being honest.
“I want to see you while I still can.”
While I still can.
That worry is what left him grey on so many mornings. I know it. So does Calum. I can tell by the careful way he closes my laptop, and by the kiss he gives me after we leave the boat transporter behind and reach a cottage together.
He cups my face.
Snags a wave of my hair.
Kisses me even harder. “Wanted to tell you, Valentin. Nearly did so many times. And I wanted to tell them, but didn’t want to ruin their Christmas before I knew for certain if I made it onto the trial.”
He means the Trelawneys crowded inside this cottage who greet me like some kind of hero.
I assume that’s because I didn’t give up on a duckling until his mother hugs me and whispers, “Thank you for trying to help him,” so I guess I’m not alone in having a parent who never stopped watching out for their kid struggling.
I struggle too when Calum steers me to a room where a log fire crackles on a TV screen.
He closes the door, shutting us inside where he gives me his blessing.
“Do it. Submit your entry. It doesn’t matter that no one will see it in time to make a difference to me.
Upload it anyway. Get that win for you. And for whoever comes after me. ”
He leaves me to do that, but winning isn’t on my mind when I join him after pressing an upload button. I’m too busy being welcomed by a much bigger family than mine to join in with their Christmas.
At least participating in this early celebration means I get to witness Calum watching his mother open a new tree ornament.
I lose the next few hours too by watching him soak up every moment.
It passes all too quickly, Calum’s time to leave for the US fast approaching.
He holds my hand the whole time we share a festive dinner. Calum eats one-handed while I record every moment so that, come what may, he’ll get to hear Jack and Reece pulling Christmas crackers with Patrick and Seb even if he can’t watch it one day soon.
He definitely sees Dad sliding his phone out of his pocket to read a notification.
My hockey player is as observant here as he has been on so many ice rinks.
From the far end of the table, he spots Dad glance at me and then frown.
Calum asks, “Problem?” and his hand tightening around mine feels protective.
“No. Just a notification from a channel I subscribe to.” Dad’s gaze slides to me, and I don’t need any protection from this understanding. From his pride. I love to see it. “I’ll watch it later.”
His smile feels like approval. A gift I didn’t know I wanted.
I get another one not too long later.
Calum’s phone rings.
“My agent.”
He heads out of the room to take it and is gone for so long that I have to follow. I slip away from the table to find him in a living room where a new bauble dangles from a fir tree branch and a video of a crackling log fire still plays on the TV. It paints his face with flickering gold.
Calum looks up from his phone. “She says they don’t want me back.” He grabs a remote, and the flames of that log fire pause. “At least, not yet. They don’t want me to fly back until the media team figures out a response to this. Told me to stay put right here until they do that.”
He types Juno into a search bar, and there it is, the first full-length YouTube upload I’ve made in ages.
I know Calum’s reputation. It doesn’t match how softly he reads out the title.
“The big, bad, and brutal truth pro hockey wants you to ignore.”
He reaches for my hand again, holding it even tighter in front of a TV that now shows a thumbnail I put together in a service station.
Calum is on the screen with London spread out below an egg-shaped glass capsule.
Here in Cornwall, he turns to me, his worry just as transparent.
“But if you uploaded it to YouTube, that means—”
“I can’t use the same content for the contest?”
There’s nothing unique about a video three hundred thousand subscribers will have been notified about like Dad was.
“Non.” I shrug. “It’s too late anyway. I missed the deadline.” It passed while he kissed me outside this cottage.
“But you needed that win.”
Yes, I did once. That was before Dad and I started to speak the same language. I don’t need cash for repairs now or to win a trophy that already has my name on it.
Sure, winning would have been good.
Calum kisses me again to confirm my real truth.
Losing for him is even better.