Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
NINA
‘I’m just saying, if he goes to Scotland, he should commit to the aesthetic.’
Tilly waves her teaspoon. A blob of cream lands on the counter. Brynn wipes it up without comment.
‘The aesthetic being…?’ I ask, because someone has to.
‘Kilts. Tartan. Maybe a nice sporran.’ Tilly stirs with great intensity. ‘If you’re going to abandon Cornwall for the frozen north, you should at least dress the part.’
‘Scotland isn’t the frozen north,’ Brynn says. ‘It’s just north.’
‘Anything past Bristol and my toes go numb.’
I wipe the counter. We’ve been circling this for twenty minutes – Tilly raising it, Brynn deflecting, me pretending the cloth needs my full attention. Tom Darcy might be leaving for Scotland. With Cara. The whole village knows.
I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to think about it.
I don’t want to notice that the fairy lights above the counter are the same ones he watches from his window, or that the giant pink bear is still sitting in its corner by the door, bright and ridiculous, the mascot he won for me at the fete three weeks ago in a life that seems to belong to someone else.
‘Have you talked to him?’ Brynn asks. Carefully casual. ‘Since he told his parents?’
‘Nothing to talk about.’
‘Nina—’
‘It’s his life. His decision. Good for him.’ I scrub at a spot that doesn’t exist. ‘Can we discuss literally anything else?’
‘Fine.’ Tilly sets down her cup. ‘Let’s discuss why you’re trying to polish a hole through the countertop.’
‘I’m cleaning.’
‘You’re avoiding.’
‘I’m cleaning while avoiding. It’s called multitasking.’
Brynn and Tilly exchange a look. The silent communication. The raised eyebrows. The routine that says we’re worried about you while pretending they’re not.
The bell above the door chimes. I look up, customer-service smile already forming.
Tom.
The smile dies. My hand tightens on the cloth. My whole body tightens – not the way it used to, not the warm involuntary pull towards him that I’ve been feeling for weeks. A different tightening. The bracing kind. The kind you do before impact.
He stops inside the doorway, clocking the scene – Tilly and Brynn at the counter, me behind it, Chips lifting his head and thumping his tail against the floor.
For a moment nobody speaks. The café hums. The bear grins from its corner.
The distance between the door and the counter is six feet and it might as well be the Irish Sea.
‘Tom!’ Tilly’s voice, too bright. ‘We were just talking about you.’
‘Were you?’
‘Kilts,’ Brynn says flatly. ‘Tilly thinks you should wear one.’
‘Right.’ Tom’s eyes haven’t left my face. He looks tired – properly tired, the kind that lives under the skin, the kind I recognise because I’ve been wearing it myself. There are shadows under his eyes that weren’t there a week ago. ‘Nina, can I talk to you?’
‘I’m working.’
‘It’s important.’
‘I’m sure it can wait.’
‘It can’t.’ He takes a breath. The breath has a shape to it – braced, controlled, the intake of someone about to deliver bad news. I’ve watched him do this at the surgery, when he has to tell someone their pet isn’t coming home. ‘It’s about Chips.’
My stomach drops. Not a metaphor. An actual physical descent, organs rearranging, the floor tilting slightly under my feet.
‘What about Chips?’
‘Can we talk somewhere—’
‘Whatever you need to say, you can say here.’ I fold my arms. ‘Brynn and Tilly don’t mind. Do you?’
‘Not at all,’ Tilly says. ‘I love a good drama.’
‘Tilly,’ Brynn warns, folding her arms with a scowl towards Tom.
‘I’m being honest.’
Tom looks at me. I stare back. The silence stretches like Blue-tac, or chewing gum stuck to a shoe.
‘His owners have been found,’ he says. ‘They’re a family from Bristol. They lost him on holiday a few months back. They’ve been searching ever since – flyers, shelters, everything. One of the shelters forwarded them to me this morning.’
The words land one at a time. Each one heavier than the last.
‘The owners,’ I repeat. The word sounds foreign.
‘They want him back. They’ve got kids – two of them, apparently. The kids have been devastated.’ He swallows. I watch his throat work. ‘I’m sorry, Nina.’
Chips is wagging his tail. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand that his real family has been found, that he’s leaving, that I’m about to lose the thing that’s been keeping me upright for weeks.
‘When?’ My voice comes out level. Controlled. A masterpiece of not-falling-apart.
‘They’re driving down today.’ I can’t look at his face as he talks, can’t look in his eyes.
I know I’ll see sorrow there, and regret, and shame that he’s going to make me lose something once again when I’m only just standing on my feet.
‘They’ll be here by this afternoon. I said they could come to the surgery at three o’clock to pick him up.
’ He pauses. ‘You don’t have to be there for the handover. I can bring him over—’
‘He’s my dog.’ The words catch. I force them through. ‘He’s been my dog for weeks. I’ll bring him myself.’
‘Okay.’ Tom hovers. I can feel him hovering – the specific quality of his attention, focused and patient, waiting for me to let him in. The same attention he’s been giving me for eleven years. The same patience. The same steady, maddening, unbearable kindness.
‘If you want to talk—’
‘I don’t.’
‘Right.’ A pause. ‘I’m sorry. About all of it. About—’
‘Don’t.’ I turn around. Face him. And for a second – one second – the anger slips and there’s something else underneath, raw and terrified, the feeling of standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down. ‘Don’t apologise for things you can’t fix, Tom.’
The shift in register catches him. I see it – the way his eyes change, the slight forward movement he makes and then stops. He heard what was underneath. He always hears what’s underneath.
‘I’ll have him at the surgery by three,’ I say, and the wall goes back up, and I turn to the counter, and I wipe the cloth across the surface in long deliberate strokes. ‘You should go.’
He stands there for one more moment. I can feel it – his gaze on my back, the weight of everything between us pressing down on the air in the café.
The bear in the corner. The fairy lights.
The counter where he’s sat every evening for weeks, drinking tea from the blue chipped mug, fixing my machines, telling me I’m enough.
The bell chimes. He’s gone.
Silence.
‘Well,’ Tilly says eventually. ‘That was—’
‘Don’t.’
‘I was just—’
‘I know.’ I throw the cloth into the sink. ‘I need some air.’
I walk out the back before they can respond. The tiny garden is hot and bright and empty and I press my hands flat against the wall and I don’t cry. I don’t cry because I’m at work and because crying won’t change anything and because I’ve done enough crying this week to fill the harbour.
Chips is leaving. Tom is leaving. Everything I’ve let myself hold on to is being pulled away.
My hand goes to the pocket of my apron, to my phone.
It’s an automatic reach – the reflex of eleven years, the muscle memory that says when the ground shifts, call Tom.
My fingers find the phone and I pull it out and his name is right there, at the top of every list, and I can’t call him.
I can’t call the person I always call because the person I always call is part of the earthquake.
I put the phone away. I go back inside. I make coffee for nameless customers and I wait for three o’clock.
The family is nice.
That’s the worst part. If they were awful – rude, careless, the kind of people who shouldn’t have a dog – I would refuse. I would fight. I would make a scene.
But they’re nice. Mum, Dad, two kids under ten who burst into tears the moment they see him.
‘Biscuit!’ the little girl shrieks. ‘Mummy, it’s Biscuit!’
Biscuit. His name is Biscuit.
I named him Chips. I named him with Tom on the phone at half eleven at night, laughing about Napoleon complexes and Chairman Woof, and the name I gave him was never his name. He was always Biscuit. I just didn’t know.
I keep naming things wrong. Friendship. Favourite. Fine. I keep putting my words on things that already have their own words and not listening to what they’re actually called.
Chips – Biscuit – goes berserk. Tail wagging so hard his whole body convulses.
He launches himself at the children, licking faces, whimpering with a joy so pure and uncomplicated it makes my chest cave in.
He remembers them. He knows them. He’s been living in my café and sleeping on my bed and sitting on my feet, and the whole time he’s had a family somewhere who was looking for him.
‘We thought we’d never find him,’ the mum says. She’s crying. ‘We’ve been searching for months.’
‘I’m glad,’ I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone standing much further away. ‘I’m glad he’s going home.’
‘Thank you for looking after him. We can’t—’
‘It was nothing.’ I crouch down. Biscuit bounds over, tail still going, tongue lolling. Happy. So happy. ‘Hey, boy.’
He licks my face. I bury my hands in his fur – wiry, warm texture I know as well as my own skin now. The weight of him pressing against my knees. The heartbeat under my palm.
‘Be good,’ I whisper into his ear, low enough that only he can hear.
‘Don’t eat anything you’re not supposed to.
Don’t let anyone move your water bowl next to your food bowl.
And—’ My voice breaks. I hold it together with my teeth.
‘And find someone’s feet to sit on. That’s important.
That’s the most important thing you do.’
He licks my face again. He has no idea what I’m saying. He’s just glad everyone he loves is in the same room.
I straighten. Hand the lead to the dad.
‘He’s scared of the hoover,’ I say. ‘But he pretends he isn’t. He’ll stand his ground and tremble. Don’t laugh at him – he takes it personally.’
The mum smiles. ‘He’s been doing that since he was a puppy.’
Right. Of course. They know him. They’ve known him his whole life. I’ve known him for a few weeks.
I was just the person who kept him safe until his real family came back.
‘Well.’ I step back. ‘I should go.’
‘Nina.’ Tom says. He’s been by the reception desk, watching, staying out of the way. Now he moves towards me. ‘Let me walk you—’
‘No.’ Not sharp this time. Just tired. I’ve run out of sharp. ‘I need to be on my own.’
He stops. Nods. Doesn’t push. A shadow crosses his face, a door closing over whatever he’s feeling. He’s been doing it for years and I never noticed. Until now.
I walk out. Through the waiting room, past the posters, the cat calendars, the smell of antiseptic. Into the afternoon sun, which is too bright, too warm, too much of everything.
I make it to the harbour wall before the tears come.
Not the flat, not behind a closed door – the harbour wall, in full view of anyone who’s looking, and I don’t care.
I sit on the warm stone and I press my hands over my face and I cry with the particular ugliness of a woman who has lost a dog and found a ring and broken something with someone and doesn’t know how to fix any of it.
A tourist gives me a wide berth. A gull lands nearby, assesses the situation, decides I’m not worth the trouble.
The crying doesn’t last long. It can’t – I’ve used up most of my reserves this week. What’s left is worse: the dry, hollow aftermath, where the tears are gone and the feeling stays.
The flat is quiet.
That’s the first thing. The quiet. No clicking of claws on the floor. No thump of tail. No warm body pressed against my legs at the counter, no weight at the foot of the bed, no small creature watching me with patient eyes that seem to understand more than a dog should.
Just silence. The kind that was here before Chips – before Biscuit – arrived, and that I’d forgotten existed because he filled it so completely.
I close the door. Lean against it. Let my bag drop.
The café below is closed. The fairy lights are off. The flat is dim and bare and still carries the ghost of last week’s clearing-out: the empty shelves where Peter’s books used to be, the cleaned surfaces, the spaces I made in the middle of the night with a cardboard box and a breaking heart.
I made room. And now the room is emptier than I ever intended.
Peter’s things are boxed. The dog is gone. Tom is leaving.
I slide down the door. The floor is cool and hard and Chips isn’t on it, and the absence of his weight against my legs is so specific, so precisely shaped, that I can feel the outline of where he should be. I put my hand on the empty floor and the tiles are cold.
I sit in the silence and I think about the night of the cinema – I think I’ve been very stupid, for a very long time – and I was right, but I wasn’t right enough.
I think about Mum’s question again, ‘Who is Nina Ellis?’
And I want to scream, ‘I just don’t know!’
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
Not knowing might end me and I think I really should find out.
Tonight, though, I just lie on the cold floor and miss everything I’ve lost.