Chapter 16 #2
‘Practice listings.’ Cara’s voice lifts, her hand still squeezing on my arm. She turns her body towards me, leaning in. Cara is smart. Cara knows exactly what she’s doing, and the knowledge of that sits in my stomach like a stone. ‘There’s a veterinary practice in Scotland looking for a takeover.’
The table is slammed by a deathly silence.
‘Scotland,’ Nina says. Her voice level.
‘Outside Inverness. Mixed practice – small animals, farm work, some wildlife rehabilitation. Established client base, room to expand.’ Cara’s fingers tighten slightly on my arm. ‘It’s exactly the kind of thing Tom and I dreamed about at university. Building something from the ground up.’
‘That’s…’ Nina sets down her fork. ‘That’s a big move.’
‘It is. But sometimes big moves are what you need. A fresh start.’ Cara looks at me, and her smile is so bright and certain and I can feel the weight of that dream from the depths of my memory where it’s been locked for so long. ‘What do you think, Tom? Can you picture it?’
Everyone is looking at me. Brynn, Jude, Nina. The small kitchen, the steamed windows, the garlic-heavy air.
Scotland. The word sits in my chest like a held breath.
Scotland means leaving. Leaving the surgery, the flat, the harbour view.
Leaving the village that has been my whole life.
Leaving the walk that takes four minutes from my door to her counter.
Leaving the fairy lights I watch from my window every night.
My family.
Leaving Nina.
‘It’s a lot to think about,’ I say. There’s a giant boulder in my throat I can’t swallow around.
‘Of course. No pressure.’ Cara squeezes my arm. ‘I just wanted to put it out there.’
‘How does it feel?’ Jude asks. His voice is mild. His eyes are a different temperature entirely. ‘Scotland. Out there.’
‘Like I said. Thinking about it.’
‘Sure.’ Jude picks up his glass. Drinks. Sets it down. ‘Just seems like a thing worth thinking about carefully. Given what you’d be leaving.’
He doesn’t look at Nina when he says it. He doesn’t have to. The sentence has her name in it whether he says it or not.
Brynn makes a noise about wine and disappears to the kitchen. Jude follows. Through the doorway I hear Brynn hiss something I can’t catch and Jude’s low voice responding.
Nina is looking at her plate. Cara is looking at me. I am sitting between them in the most literal possible sense and the most metaphorical, and I have never in my life felt less capable of making a decision about anything.
Cara leans over and kisses my cheek.
It’s soft. Brief. The kind of gesture that says mine without saying a word. Her lips are warm against my skin and I can smell her perfume – woody, unfamiliar – and across the table, Nina’s head lifts.
I watch her see it.
Her expression flickers four things in two seconds: registers, flinches, smooths, smiles.
The smile is the one she uses when she’s holding the door shut against a feeling she’s not ready to have – I’ve seen it after Peter’s name comes up unexpectedly, after Maisie says something too wise, after grief arrives in the middle of a good day. I know that smile.
She has never used it because of me.
‘I should probably head off,’ she says, pushing back from the table. ‘Early start. Chips will be wondering where I am.’
‘Already?’ Brynn reappears with another bottle of red. ‘We haven’t done dessert.’
‘I know. Rain check.’ She’s standing, gathering her things, and the speed of it is its own tell. Nina in retreat, Nina filling the exit with motion so no one can see what’s underneath.
‘You okay?’ I ask.
She looks at me. For a second – one second – she doesn’t smile. She just looks at me, and her face is open in a way I’ve never seen directed at me before. Not warm. Not friendly. Not the face of a friend.
Then the smile comes back. The door closes.
‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Just tired.’
She hugs Brynn. Hugs Jude. Waves at Cara.
And for me – she stops. Puts her hand on my arm – my other arm, the one Cara hasn’t claimed – and squeezes.
Her fingers press through my sleeve the way they’ve pressed a hundred times, but this time they hold on for a beat longer. One extra second. Maybe two.
‘Goodnight, Tom,’ she says.
‘Goodnight.’
She leaves. The door closes and the room recalibrates around her absence the way rooms always do – the air slightly thinner, the noise slightly less, the frequency of Nina Ellis removed from the signal.
Cara’s hand is still on my arm.
‘Scotland,’ Jude says, dropping back into his chair. ‘That’s quite a distance.’
‘Flights. Trains. It’s not that far.’
‘Right.’ He picks up his glass again. Drinks, again. His eyes don’t leave my face.
Cara presses against my side, her hand moving from my arm to my shoulder to the back of my neck, her fingers brushing through my hair once – a gesture so intimate that Brynn looks away and Jude’s jaw tightens.
I let it happen. I don’t lean in. I don’t pull away.
I exist in the space between those two movements, which is where I’ve been living for most of my adult life.
When we finally leave, Cara slips her hand into mine for the walk home. Her fingers are warm. Certain. The same certainty as the kiss in the car, the same steady pressure of a woman who knows what she wants.
‘That went well,’ she says.
I don’t answer.
‘Tom?’
‘I need to think. About all of it. Scotland. The practice. Everything.’
‘Of course.’ She squeezes. ‘Take your time.’
Her hand stays in mine all the way back. The village is dark. The harbour still. The fairy lights in the café are on.
When we enter the flat we both stop. Cara pulls off the cardigan she wore against the slight evening freshness, and the movement pulls the strap of her dress down. It’s just a thin spaghetti strap against skin. Yet it’s so much more. It’s what could be. One step. One slide of my hand.
One kiss.
But I’m not drunk this time. No heady mix of sambuca and champagne.
My foot takes a step though. One step closer. Cara’s step matches mine, and then there’s just breathing space between us and silence and the whirling possibility of a future that I hadn’t really thought an option.
The plan. The Tom-Darcy-is-moving-on plan. It could turn another page right now. Fresh and blank and ready for the unknown.
Cara’s lips part. I swear my heart is thrumming.
So I link my fingers through the scrap of cotton and slide it back up her shoulder. Her fingers stop my hand there, my palm against her smooth skin.
I breathe.
I count.
‘Goodnight, Cara,’ I say.
Her lashes drop. ‘Goodnight, Tom.’
I lie awake for hours.
The ceiling is the same ceiling I’ve looked at for five years. The sounds are the same – the pipes, the surgery humming below, the sea lapping against the harbour wall. Everything is the same.
Except.
Cara kissed me and I felt warmth and comfort and the flatness of a body going through correct motions without the correct feeling underneath. Cara is good and real and brave and she deserves someone whose first thought in the morning isn’t the sound of bangles and a laugh carrying across a harbour.
And Nina – Nina looked at me tonight and I saw something I have never seen in her face before. Not friendship. Not warmth. Not gratitude or the ease or the thousand familiar expressions I’ve catalogued over eleven years.
Fear.
I saw it. Clear as a diagnosis. The specific, unmistakable presentation of a woman who has just realised that the constant she’s been taking for granted might not be constant anymore.
It’s the first time that Nina Ellis has looked at me and been afraid, and the terrible thing – the thing I will turn over in the dark for hours, the thing I cannot reconcile with the plan, with Cara, with Scotland, with any version of moving on – is that her fear looked exactly like the beginning of something.
And I don’t know if I can leave before I find out what.