Chapter 19 #2
‘—then someone should say it,’ she finishes, looking at me with an expression that isn’t frustration or concern but something worse: pity.
The particular pity of a twenty-four-year-old sister who has watched her older brother break his own heart in slow motion and has run out of patience with the performance.
‘Have you talked to her?’ Hayley asks, softer. ‘About any of this?’
‘Nina and I aren’t—’ I stop. The sentence has nowhere to go.
We aren’t talking. We aren’t friends, currently, or at least not the version of friends we were a week ago.
We aren’t anything I can name at this table without the whole truth spilling out, and the whole truth includes a doorstep at one in the morning and trailing shoelaces and the word friend landing between us like a door being shut. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘It’s always complicated with you two,’ Meg says, but the fight has gone out of her. ‘You’re like a very slow, very frustrating television programme. When does something actually happen?’
‘Meg.’ Dad says. The final warning. ‘Your brother’s love life is his own business.’
She slumps back. But she’s still looking at me, and what she sees – whatever it is – makes her reach under the table and squeeze my knee. Brief. Sisterly. The kind of gesture she’d deny if I mentioned it.
‘The point is,’ I say, ‘I wanted you to know. About Scotland. About Cara. Nothing’s decided. I’m just exploring.’
‘And we support you,’ Mum says. ‘Whatever you decide. Don’t we?’
Agreement around the table. Even Meg, who says ‘obviously’ in a tone that means obviously, you idiot, but you’re making a mistake.
‘Eat your Yorkshire pudding,’ Dad says. ‘Before it goes cold.’
I eat it. It’s perfect. Crispy outside, soft in the middle, exactly the way Mum’s always made them. It tastes like this kitchen and this family and every Sunday I’ve ever had, and it tastes like something I’m about to lose, and the two flavours are the same.
After lunch, I help Mum with the dishes. Dad and the girls have retreated to the garden with cold beers and a debate about whether Hayley’s new boyfriend is ‘a bit wet’ or ‘refreshingly calm’.
‘You’re quiet again,’ Mum says, handing me a plate.
‘I’m drying. Hard to talk and dry.’
‘No it isn’t.’ Another plate. ‘Talk to me. What’s really going on?’
‘I told you. Scotland.’
‘That’s the what. I’m asking about the why.
’ She turns off the tap. Wipes her hands.
‘You’ve been different since Nina came back.
Brighter at first. Then not. And this week you’ve been—’ She pauses.
‘You’ve been the way you were when Peter died.
Holding everything. Carrying it alone. Doing that thing where you pretend the weight isn’t crushing you. ’
My throat tightens. I dry the plate.
‘I’m not asking you to tell me what happened,’ she says.
‘I’m just saying I see it. I’ve always seen it.
’ She reaches up and touches my face – brief, her palm against my cheek, the gesture she’s used since I was five and crying about a dead bird I couldn’t save.
‘You feel everything, Tom. You always have. You’d bring home injured things and sit with them for hours.
You’d cry when they died and then go find the next one. ’
‘That’s just—’
‘It’s not a weakness. It’s who you are. But sometimes I worry you feel so much for everyone else that you forget to feel things for yourself.’ She drops her hand. ‘That you put everyone else’s needs first and yours somewhere they can’t be found.’
I keep drying. The plate is already dry. I dry it again.
‘If Scotland is what you want – really want, for yourself, not for Cara, not because you’re running – then go.
With every blessing I have.’ She turns the tap back on.
Water runs into the sink. ‘But if you’re running from something instead of towards something, Tom, that never works. Trust me on that.’
‘How do I know the difference?’
She’s quiet for a moment. Through the window, the garden is bright and dying in the heat – Dad’s roses drooping, the lawn brown. The girls are laughing about something I can’t hear.
‘You ask yourself one question,’ she says. ‘If Nina didn’t exist – if there was nothing to run from – would you still want this?’
The question lands in the kitchen and fills it.
I think about Cara. The practice. The photographs she showed me – green hills, a stone building, a loch visible from the consulting room.
A life without lavender shutters. A life without dark curls and bangles and a laugh I can hear across a harbour.
A life where I am not waiting, not watching, not standing at my window every night looking at fairy lights left on by a woman who doesn’t know I’m there.
Would I still want it?
The honest answer is: I don’t know.
And the more honest answer – the one underneath, the one I can feel but can’t quite reach – is: I don’t know because I’ve never been able to imagine a life that doesn’t include her.
Not Scotland, not Cornwall, not anywhere.
She’s in every version of the future I’ve ever built.
And the question isn’t whether I’d want Scotland without her.
It’s whether I can survive a life where I stay here, fifty metres from her door, watching her fairy lights every night, and she never turns around.
‘Think about it,’ Mum says. ‘That’s all.’
‘I will,’ I say.
‘Good.’ She hands me the last plate. ‘Dry.’
I dry.
Later, when I get home, the flat is empty. Cara, who must have come back since her visit to Amber Cove, has gone out for a walk along the coastal path. In the kitchen, where I slide my keys, I find her message scrawled on the notepad on the counter:
back by six.
The flat is mine and it’s quiet in a way that used to be peaceful and now sounds like the inside of a held breath.
I think of heading out, finding Cara out on her walk and enjoying the late afternoon sun. But I don’t; instead, I open my laptop. The practice listing is still open on my browser with its photographs of green Scottish hills and possibilities.
If Nina didn’t exist, would you still want this? The echo of Mum’s question reverberates in my head, bouncing around.
She does exist. That’s the whole problem. She exists and she’s furious with me and she hasn’t called and the phone in my pocket is silent and the fairy lights are off and the world feels like it’s holding its breath, waiting for me to do the one thing I’ve never been able to do.
Leave.