Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
NINA
Iwake up crying and I don’t know why.
The dream slips away before I can catch it – fragments, impressions.
Peter’s voice. The smell of salt and engine oil.
The way he used to laugh, head thrown back, no self-consciousness at all.
His hand on my waist, turning me towards him, saying my name the way he said it – Neen, two syllables drawn into one, lazy, certain.
Chips is pressed against my side, warm and solid, and when I open my eyes he’s watching me. Patient. Like he’s been waiting for me to surface.
‘Sorry,’ I tell him, wiping my face. ‘Didn’t mean to wake you.’
He doesn’t move. Just watches, his ridiculous eyebrows furrowed with concern.
The clock says six-thirty. I should get up. Shower. Open the café. Deliveries, prep, the Saturday rush that starts at eight and doesn’t stop.
I don’t move. My body is heavy in a way that has nothing to do with sleep – a weight in my chest, a thickness in my throat. The grief has come back in the night and settled on me like a second blanket, and I can feel it pressing down, dense and familiar and absolutely not interested in my schedule.
Chips nudges my hand with his nose.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know. You need to go out.’
I let him into the garden. Watch him follow his invisible trails. The morning is already warm – another scorching day building – and the village is stirring. Dot’s shop door. A car on the coast road. Gulls.
I go back inside. Look at the café. The tables. The machine. The pastries that won’t prep themselves.
I walk past all of it and go back upstairs.
Today is not a café day.
The knock comes at half nine.
I ignore it.
It comes again.
‘Nina?’ Brynn, muffled through the door. ‘The café’s shut. You never shut the café.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘That’s not what I asked. Let me in or I’m climbing through the window.’
She will. I’ve seen her scale the side of a boat in a force eight without flinching.
I open the door.
Brynn takes one look at me – unwashed hair, pyjamas at half-nine in the morning, eyes swollen – and walks straight past me into the kitchen.
‘Kettle. Where’s the good tea?’
‘Brynn—’
‘I’m not asking if you want to talk. I’m making tea. Separate activities.’ She’s already filling the kettle, finding mugs, moving through my kitchen with the efficient competence of someone who has managed crises at sea and considers emotional ones a downgrade. ‘Sit.’
I sit. Chips climbs half into my lap – too much dog for the chair, neither of us caring.
Brynn makes tea. Sets a mug in front of me. Sits across the table.
‘The café being shut caused a minor panic,’ she says. ‘Dot thought you’d died. Bill suspected robbery. Tilly started a betting pool on elopement.’
‘I didn’t elope.’
‘I told them you were having a shit day.’ She blows on her tea. ‘Am I right?’
‘You’re right.’
‘Want to tell me about it?’
‘No.’ I wrap my hands around the mug. The heat presses into my palms. ‘Yes. I don’t know.’
Brynn waits. No pressure, no expectation. This is why I trust her with the underneath of things – she holds space the way the harbour holds boats. Steady. Without commentary.
‘I woke up crying,’ I say. ‘Dreaming about Peter. I can’t remember what – just the smell of him, the sound of his voice. And I woke up and it was like it had just happened. Like no time had passed.’
‘That happens.’
‘I know. But it hasn’t happened in months. I thought I was—’ I stop.
‘Further along?’
‘Something like that.’ I look at Chips, his warm weight against my legs. ‘Maisie told me once that it doesn’t get easier. You just get better at carrying it. She’s eight. She got it right.’
Brynn takes a sip of her drink.
‘Maybe it’s because it’s summer,’ I say. ‘We used to do all these things together – picnics in the evenings, early walks before he went out on the boat. Just sitting, listening to the sea.’ My throat is tight, the words squeezed thin. ‘And none of that is happening. And I miss it.’
‘Makes sense.’ Brynn’s smile is small and careful, standing in for words she doesn’t have.
‘And I haven’t dealt with any of it properly.’ I press my knuckles into my sternum, like I can push the emptiness out through the bone. ‘The boat. His things. I’ve just been avoiding all of it. Pretending that if I don’t look, it’ll sort itself out.’
‘It won’t.’
‘I know.’ I set down the mug. ‘I know it won’t.’
The silence stretches. Outside, the village carries on – voices, footsteps, Dot’s door chiming. Life happening whether I’m in it or not.
‘Go to the boat,’ Brynn says.
‘What?’
‘Jenny’s Dream. You haven’t been there in months. The cover’s still on, the lines haven’t been touched.’ She drinks, not looking at me. ‘Go sit with it. Whatever’s tangled up in there – that’s where you start.’
I don’t answer.
‘Just a thought.’ She stands, rinses her mug. ‘I’ll tell everyone you’re not dead. Tilly will be gutted about the elopement theory.’ She pauses at the door. ‘There’s a darts tournament tonight. The Ship. You should come.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘Come,’ she says. Firm. ‘Trust me.’
After she leaves, I sit at the kitchen table with my tea going cold and Chips breathing against my knee, and I think about the boat. About all the things I’ve been keeping exactly where Peter left them, as if preservation is the same as love.
I sit for a long time. Frozen. Unmoving. I guess how I’ve been all these months.
My phone is on the counter. Eventually, my hand goes to it.
I catch myself. Put the phone down.
I’m not calling Tom. Not about this. Not today.
Why not?
Because I don’t know what I’d say. Because after the cinema – after the two blankets and the kiss on the cheek and Cara’s hand on his arm and the earthquake of he heard me, he heard what I said at seventeen and he stayed – I don’t know how to call Tom and cry about Peter without it meaning more than I can handle.
Because the person I want to call is the person I’m most afraid of calling, and I haven’t let myself ask why.
I leave the phone on the counter. I go to the harbour.
It’s quiet in the middle of the day, just that belting sun.
Most of the boats are out. But Jenny’s Dream is at her mooring, exactly where Peter left her. Exactly where she’s been for months, waiting for someone to decide her fate.
The cover is dusty. Stiff. I should have cleaned it. Someone should have.
I climb aboard, pull back the canvas, and sit in the cockpit.
The smell. Salt, diesel, the mustiness of a boat closed up too long.
And underneath – fainter now, almost gone – the ghost of Peter.
His cigarettes. His too-strong coffee. The lingering scent of the cheap mermaid air freshener he’d hung from the cabin door: Every vessel needs a figurehead, Neen. This is ours.
The mermaid’s still there. Sun-bleached, barely recognisable. Smiling her faded smile at nothing.
I sit. I don’t know how long.
The lines are coiled the way Peter always coiled them – obsessively neat, each loop identical. His lucky cap is on the hook inside the cabin. I can see it through the doorway. I don’t go in.
The last time we took her out was on a Sunday, three weeks before he died, cold and bright, autumnal sun had reflected on the water, breathtakingly beautiful.
We’d motored past the headland, cut the engine, drifted.
Peter had talked about spring – the trips we’d take, the coves we’d anchor in.
He’d talked about the future like it was guaranteed.
That’s what I can’t forgive. Not the dying – death is senseless and nobody asks for it. But the plans. The certainty. The way he said next year like next year was a place we’d both arrive at, and then he went out on a call and the sea took him and next year became a country I travelled to alone.
‘I miss you,’ I say out loud. The words are too small. ‘I miss you and I’m angry at you and I don’t know how to stop either one.’
The boat rocks. A gull lands on the cabin roof, looks at me with complete indifference, and flies off.
I stay until the sun starts dropping. Until the marina fills with returning boats and voices and the sounds of ropes being tied. Until I’m cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature.
Then I climb off Jenny’s Dream. I don’t look back.
The Ship is heaving by eight.
Darts tournament. Village tradition. I’ve showered, put on actual clothes, left Chips with a bone and a promise to return. I’m here because Brynn told me to be, and because the alternative was another evening alone in the flat with Peter’s things watching me from their shelves.
‘Nina!’ Tilly calls, swooping in with wine. ‘You’re alive. I had money on the elopement.’
‘Sorry to disappoint.’
‘Never a disappointment. Just a constant source of speculation.’ She presses the glass into my hands. ‘Bill’s defending his title. It’ll be carnage.’
I let the crowd absorb me. Brynn finds me, squeezes my arm, says nothing. Jude appears with a second glass I didn’t request. The noise and warmth of the village wrap around me like something I didn’t know I needed until I was inside it.
And then I see the dartboard.
The frame beside it – the one with the list of tournament winners in chalk. Peter’s name used to be there. Third from the top. 2021. His one and only darts victory, which he’d crowed about for months, insufferable and delighted. I’m a champion, Neen. I need a trophy. Build me a trophy.
It’s gone.
The frame has been wiped clean. Fresh chalk, fresh names, fresh history.
Peter Curnow, 2021. Erased. Not cruelly. Not carelessly. Just – making room, I guess. Overwritten by the ordinary passage of time.
‘They had to,’ Brynn says quietly, at my shoulder. ‘The frame was full.’
‘I know.’
‘Tilly asked if she should check with you. I told her it was just chalk.’
‘It is just chalk.’ I take a long drink of wine. My throat works around it. ‘Was I wrong to say that? Should I be more upset?’
‘I think you’re exactly as upset as you are, and that’s the right amount.’