Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
TOM
The coast path is the only place in the village where you can breathe.
The heat has been sitting on Sea Salt Bay for three weeks like a punishment – thick, immovable, the kind that follows you indoors and waits. But up here, with the cliff dropping away and the sea spreading out silver and flat below, there’s a breeze. Not much, but just enough.
Cara insisted on the walk after breakfast. ‘I need air, Tom. Actual air. Not this soup we’ve been swimming in.’ I didn’t argue. I’ve been needing air too, though the kind I need doesn’t come from the coast path.
We’ve been walking for twenty minutes in mostly comfortable silence.
The path is narrow here, single file, and I let her go ahead.
She moves easily – confident, unhurried, the way she’s always moved.
Some people walk like they’re apologising for the space they take up.
Cara walks like the path is lucky to have her.
I’ve walked this route a thousand times.
With Brynn after lifeboat training. With Jude on the days the village feels too small.
With Nina, once, years ago, when she was still new to the village and I was still pretending I wasn’t already gone.
The gorse was in bloom then too, and she’d said it smelled like coconut, and I’d spent the rest of the walk trying not to stare at her.
Now I’m here with Cara, and the gorse is in bloom, and the thought of Nina is here too, the way it’s always here, a permanent resident in my head that doesn’t pay rent.
‘So,’ Cara says, when the path widens enough for us to walk side by side. ‘I met Nina yesterday.’
‘I heard.’
‘She’s lovely.’
‘She is.’
‘Very warm. Very funny. Exactly like you described.’ Cara glances at me sideways. ‘Also very clearly the centre of your entire existence, but we’ll get to that.’
‘Cara—’
‘I’m not attacking you. I’m observing.’ She stops at a bench overlooking the cove and sits, patting the space beside her. ‘Come on. Sit. Talk to me properly. We haven’t done that since I got here.’
I sit. The view from here is the one I’ve known my whole life – the curve of the bay, the harbour, the boats at their moorings.
The café with its faded shutters. From this distance I can’t see Nina, but I can see the window where she stands, and the door Chips sits outside of, and the fairy lights she leaves on every night.
I know the geography of her life the way I know my own pulse. Without thinking. Without choosing.
Cara is watching me look at it. I feel her watching me look at it and I stop.
‘She’s very attached to that dog,’ Cara says. ‘Chips. It’s sweet – the way she talks about him, like he’s the best thing that’s happened to her in years.’
‘He’s good for her.’
‘I’m sure he is.’ Cara pulls her legs up onto the bench, turning to face me. ‘I know what you were doing, by the way. Finding a dog. Bringing it to her. Hoping it would help.’
‘The dog needed a home. Nina needed—’
‘A reason to stay. A thing to take care of.’ Cara nods. ‘It’s very you. Thoughtful. Strategic, in that way you have of pretending you’re not being strategic.’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘You won her a bear, Tom.’
The words land clean.
‘At the fete,’ she continues. ‘You won a bear – the big one, three coconuts in a row – and you gave it to her. In front of the whole village. It’s sitting in her café right now, in the corner by the door, bright pink and enormous, like a monument.
’ She pauses. ‘You know what it looks like, right? To everyone?’
‘She doesn’t see it that way.’
‘I know she doesn’t. That’s what makes it worse.
’ Cara’s voice is gentle, which is harder to take than sharp.
‘You keep making these declarations she can’t hear.
The dog, the bear, the fuchsias, the windows, the closing-time visits.
You’re saying it every single day and she’s not listening, and you just keep saying it louder in the same silent language and hoping one day she’ll learn to read it. ’
My hands are on my knees. I’m gripping them. I make myself let go.
‘I’m not trying to make declarations,’ I say. ‘I just—’
‘Want her to be happy. I know.’ Cara looks at the harbour. ‘But what about your happiness, Tom? Does that factor in?’
‘I am happy.’
‘You’re functional. There’s a difference.’ She turns back to me. ‘Do you remember what you were like at university? Before you came home?’
‘Sleep-deprived. Useless at parties.’
‘Ambitious. Curious. You had that list of places you wanted to work – the wildlife programmes, the conservation project in Scotland. You were going to do things. And then you came home for Christmas in third year and everything changed. Suddenly all you talked about was the village and the practice and—’
‘Nina.’
‘You said her name like it answered every question anyone could ever ask you.’ Cara shakes her head. ‘I should have known then. I think I did know.’
‘Cara, I’m sorry—’
‘Don’t be sorry. Ancient history.’ She waves a hand. ‘My point is – you had possibilities. A whole life that could have gone anywhere. And you chose to come back here and wait.’
The breeze picks up. Salt and gorse. Below us, a fishing boat is heading out of the harbour, its wake spreading behind it – movement, direction, purpose.
‘I don’t know how to want anything else,’ I say. ‘I’ve tried.’ I don’t add that I tried with her, at the wedding, tried to lose myself in a moment that sang with pleasure but left a hollow out-of-tune note after.
‘Have you tried? Or have you just told yourself you’re trying while organising your entire life around her?’
I don’t answer. The fishing boat rounds the headland and disappears.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Cara says, and her tone shifts – lighter, deliberately so.
‘About what’s next for me. I can’t stay unemployed forever.
And your dad’s retiring properly this time – you said so.
What if we did something together? A practice.
You and me. Your patient rapport, my surgical experience. We could build something real.’
I let out a loose laugh. ‘We talked about that once. After too much wine at the uni Christmas party.’
‘It was a very detailed conversation. We had a napkin with numbers.’ She grins, but then the smile drops, just slightly. ‘I’m not proposing, Tom. I’m just saying – you have options. You’ve always had options. Not just here. Cornwall, Devon, Scotland – anywhere.’
The word Scotland catches. The conservation project I’d applied for at twenty-two and then withdrawn from because I came home and Nina was here and the rest of my life rearranged itself around that fact like water around a stone.
‘Think about it,’ Cara says. ‘No pressure. Just think about what you actually want, instead of what you’ve convinced yourself you have to settle for.’
She stands and starts back along the path. I stay on the bench one more minute, looking at the village below. The café. The harbour. The life I built.
The life I built around her, without ever deciding to. Without her ever asking me to.
I stand up and follow Cara back down the hill.
The Ship is heaving by nine o’clock.
Tilly’s declared it karaoke night – a monthly tradition the village either loves or dreads depending on who’s had enough to drink to volunteer first. The speakers are crackling, the songbook is dog-eared, and Bill is warming up with what might be Tom Jones but could also be a medical emergency.
‘This is incredible,’ Cara says, watching Bill attempt the high notes of ‘It’s Not Unusual’ with the commitment of a man who has never once considered failure. ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever seen.’
‘Wait until Dot does Celine Dion.’
‘Dot does Celine Dion?’
‘The entire Titanic soundtrack. Annually. Without mercy.’
Brynn appears with a tray of drinks – umbrella-laden things in colours not found in nature – and slides into the booth. ‘Nina’s on her way. She’s just closing up.’
My throat tightens. Not the vague kind – the specific, muscular contraction of a man who has been bracing for this all evening, the moment Nina and Cara are in the same room while he’s in it too.
Cara catches my eye. Her expression says: I see you. I look away.
Nina arrives ten minutes later, slightly flushed from the walk, bangles announcing her before the door finishes opening. She squeezes into the booth next to Brynn, across from me, and reaches for one of the umbrella drinks.
‘What did I miss?’
‘Bill’s Tom Jones.’
‘Damn. I love Bill’s Tom Jones.’ She takes a sip and her face creases. ‘What is this?’
‘Tilly’s special. Don’t ask what’s in it.’
‘I’m afraid to.’
‘You should be. I think I saw her put Cointreau in a blender with something purple.’
‘That tracks.’ Nina laughs, and beside me I feel Cara go still – not obviously, not in a way anyone else would notice.
Just a small settling, a recalibration. She’s heard me talk about this laugh.
She’s hearing it for real now, and she’s measuring the distance between what I described and what it actually does to a room.
The drinking game starts – Ring of Fire, chaotic as always, rules half-remembered, arguments about whether a six means categories or waterfall.
Cara picks it up fast, deploying strategy with the precision of someone who wins everything she enters.
Nina is across the table from me, the fairy lights from The Ship’s ceiling catching her bangles every time she moves, and I’m trying to watch the cards and not watch her and failing comprehensively at both.
‘King!’ Brynn slams the card down. ‘Make a rule.’
‘Everyone has to speak in a French accent until the next King,’ Nina declares, immediately producing the worst French accent I’ve ever heard. ‘Zis is ze new law.’
‘That’s an atrocity,’ I tell her. ‘That’s a crime against the entire nation of France.’
‘Your accent is no better, Tom Darcy. Do not even try.’
‘I wasn’t going to try. I have dignity.’
‘You ’ave no dignity. You are drinking somezing wiz an umbrella in it.’
‘So are you.’
‘Yes, but I am French now, so it is sophisticated.’