Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
NINA
Ican’t sleep.
This isn’t unusual. Sleep and I have been negotiating terms since Peter died, and tonight sleep has decided to hold out for a better offer.
I’ve tried reading, tried chamomile tea, tried the breathing exercises Brynn swears by that make me feel like I’m being slowly suffocated by my own diaphragm. Nothing’s working.
Chips is asleep at the foot of my bed, snoring gently, completely unbothered. At least one of us is functional.
The flat above the café has always felt like living inside a held breath – the silence of a space that’s usually full of noise, waiting for morning to bring it back to life. I used to love it. Now, some nights, it feels like being buried under the quiet.
I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up.
It’s half eleven. Tom will be asleep. Tom goes to bed at a sensible hour and wakes up at a sensible hour and probably has sensible dreams about veterinary procedures and the correct way to organise a filing cabinet.
I call him anyway.
He picks up on the second ring. ‘Hey.’
One word, and something in my chest unclenches. Just like that. His voice in the dark is different from his voice in daylight – lower, softer, closer, like he’s right here instead of across the harbour.
‘Were you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘Liar.’
‘I wasn’t. I was reading.’
‘Reading what?’
‘A deeply boring article about advances in equine dentistry.’
‘That does sound boring.’
‘It’s extremely boring. You’ve saved me from it.’ A pause. The creak of something – his bed, the old leather armchair. ‘Why are you awake?’
‘Couldn’t sleep.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’ I settle back against my pillows, curling onto my side, the phone pressed between my ear and the pillow so that his voice is the only sound in the room.
The darkness feels different with him in it.
Less like a weight, more like a blanket.
‘Sometimes my brain just decides that sleep is optional and consciousness is mandatory. It’s very inconvenient. ’
‘Have you tried—’
‘If you say chamomile tea, I’m hanging up.’
‘I was going to say whisky.’
‘That’s … actually not a terrible suggestion.’
‘I have my moments.’
Silence. But it’s comfortable – the kind that only happens when you’ve known someone long enough that the gaps belong to both of you.
I can hear him breathing, steady and even.
I wonder what his flat looks like right now.
I’ve been there a hundred times during the day – the bookshelves, the journals, the cracked leather armchair – but never at night.
Never like this. I wonder if he leaves a light on.
I wonder what he’s wearing, and then I wonder why I’m wondering what he’s wearing, and then I stop wondering because that’s a road I don’t need to be walking down at half eleven on a Tuesday.
‘Chips has taken over the bed,’ I say. ‘He’s supposed to sleep in his basket but he’s staged a coup.’
‘He did the same thing at mine. I think he has authoritarian tendencies.’
‘He’s five kilos. How much authority can he have?’
‘You’d be surprised. Small dogs are the worst dictators. It’s a Napoleon complex.’
‘Did you just compare my dog to Napoleon?’
‘I compared all small dogs to Napoleon. Yours is just a particularly good example.’
‘I’m telling him you said that.’
‘He already knows. We’ve discussed it.’
I laugh, and the sound surprises me – how easy it comes, how real it is.
This is what Tom does. He makes me laugh in the dark when nothing else is working.
He’s been doing it for so long, but I’ve never once thought about what that means, and I’m not going to start now.
Not at half eleven. Not lying in bed with his voice in my ear.
‘How was the rest of quiz night?’ I ask. ‘After I left?’
‘Uneventful. The Treloars sulked. Ayo counted the money. Bill tried to argue we’d cheated on the ferret question.’
‘The ferret was legitimate.’
‘I know. I told him that. He didn’t believe me.’
‘Bill never believes anyone. It’s his defining characteristic.’
‘That and the cheating.’
‘That and the cheating.’
Silence. I close my eyes and listen – the sea through the window, the building settling, Tom breathing. It should be strange, lying in bed talking to someone about nothing in the middle of the night. It doesn’t feel strange. It feels like the safest place I’ve been all day.
And then – without planning it, without permission – a flash of his face from quiz night. Close to mine. His eyes, lighter than I’d expected at that distance. The heat of his hands through my shirt, the five – no, I hadn’t been counting. I hadn’t counted his fingers on my waist.
I open my eyes and stare at the ceiling.
‘Dot’s declared war on the ice-cream van,’ Tom says, and I grab the sentence like a rope thrown into water.
‘Again?’
‘Again. Apparently it parks too close to her shop and the music is, quote, “an assault on human dignity”.’
‘The music is “Greensleeves”.’
‘She finds “Greensleeves” particularly offensive. Something about historical inaccuracy.’
‘“Greensleeves” is historically inaccurate?’
‘According to Dot, yes. She’s written a letter to the council. And to the ice-cream van owner. And to the local paper, which they definitely won’t publish but which she’s framed and put in the shop window anyway.’
‘Of course she has.’
‘She used the phrase “acoustic terrorism”.’
‘That’s Dot.’
‘That’s Dot.’
The silence comes back. Longer this time. I can feel the conversation shifting – the way water finds the lowest point, the way every late-night phone call eventually finds its way to the thing you actually needed to say.
‘Sometimes it feels like time is going so quick, Tom, then it’s not moving at all,’ I say, and I don’t know why I’m saying it except that it’s been sitting in my chest for days and somehow nightfall makes it easier to let things out. ‘Seven months.’
Tom doesn’t respond immediately. Just his breathing, steady and patient, holding the space open. ‘I don’t think there’s a timeline,’ he says eventually.
‘Everyone else seems to have one. Brynn keeps looking at me like she’s waiting for something.
Tilly keeps saying I’m doing so well, like there’s a version of me that should be doing badly and she’s relieved I’m not.
’ I press my face into the pillow, phone wedged against my cheek.
‘And I don’t know what they’re expecting, or what I’m supposed to be, or how I’m supposed to feel about any of it. ’
He doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t try to fix it. Just holds the line open, and I talk into it because I can – because it’s dark and it’s Tom and these are things I can say to him that I can’t say to anyone else.
‘What do you want?’ he asks eventually. ‘For the anniversary. What do you actually want?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you didn’t have to worry about anyone else. If it was just you, deciding.’
I think about it. Not the reflexive answer. The real one.
‘I want to remember him without it destroying me,’ I say slowly. ‘I want to be sad and also okay. I want to miss him and also be glad I’m still here. Is that allowed? Can both of those things be true?’
‘I think they have to be.’
‘That’s very philosophical of you.’
‘The equine dentistry articles. Surprisingly profound.’
I laugh, and it’s wet this time, and I realise there are tears on my face. Not the drowning kind. The release kind. Something moving that was stuck.
‘He would have hated this conversation,’ I say.
‘Peter. He hated talking about feelings. He’d change the subject whenever things got too serious, or make a joke, or suddenly remember something urgent he had to do.
He once pretended to get a phone call in the middle of me telling him I loved him.
Held his hand up to his ear and everything. No phone. Just his hand.’
‘That sounds exactly right.’
‘You knew him. You know that’s true.’
‘I know.’ Tom’s voice is quiet. Careful in that way he gets when we’re near something that might break. ‘He was good at a lot of things. Sitting with the hard stuff wasn’t one of them.’
‘No.’ I wipe my face with the back of my hand. Chips stirs, settles. ‘He’d have been terrible at grief. If it had been the other way around. If I’d been the one who—’ I stop. ‘Sorry. That’s morbid.’
‘It’s not morbid. It’s just true.’
The silence that follows is different. Heavier. The kind where you can feel the edges of something you’re both choosing not to say.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘For answering. For talking. For not trying to fix anything.’
‘I’m not sure I’ve done anything.’
‘You picked up the phone. At half eleven. When you were reading about equine dentistry.’
‘The equine dentistry was very boring.’
‘I’m serious, Tom.’
‘I know you are.’
A pause. When he speaks again, the deflection is gone. Just his voice, quiet and bare. ‘I’m always going to pick up the phone, Nina. You know that.’
The words land somewhere deep. Not my chest. Lower. Somewhere underneath all the architecture I’ve built to keep myself standing – the motion, the café, the smiling, the getting-on-with-it. Somewhere underneath all of that, there’s a floor, and his words land on it.
For a long time, I don’t say anything, and he lets me not say anything, and that’s the thing about Tom – he doesn’t need the silence filled. He just stays in it with me.
‘I should let you sleep,’ I say eventually, even though the thought of hanging up makes something in me contract. ‘You have equine dentistry to finish.’
‘It can wait.’
‘It can’t. The horses of Sea Salt Bay need you at your best.’
‘There are no horses in Sea Salt Bay.’
‘There’s Mrs Pemberton’s pony.’
‘Mrs Pemberton’s pony is in St Agnes. That’s a different village.’
‘Same general area. Same dental needs.’
‘You’re ridiculous.’
‘I’m charming. There’s a difference.’
‘Is there?’
‘Goodnight, Tom.’
‘Goodnight, Nina.’
I hang up before I can say anything else. The phone is warm in my hand. I press it against my sternum and lie there, staring at the ceiling, feeling the heat of it through my T-shirt like a handprint.