Chapter 21 #2
It’s only for half a second. Less, maybe. And I see it all: the anger and the hurt and the fear, and underneath it, burning low and unmistakable, I think I see regret.
She looks away. The mask goes back. She picks up her glass and drinks.
I look away too. Cara’s hand on my back. Round and round.
Too late. I saw it too late, or she showed it too late, and now I’m sitting here with Scotland in my mouth and a woman’s hand on my spine and across the table Nina Ellis is holding herself together with both hands and I don’t know what to do with any of it.
I don’t do anything. That’s always been my problem.
‘Nina.’ Isla’s voice, from the booth. ‘Any chance you can grab me a water? I’d get it myself, but I’m wedged in. Water?’
‘Of course.’ Nina stands. Her chair scrapes. ‘Anyone else?’
Requests of pints and crisps are reeled off. Nina nods, already moving, and heads for the bar.
I watch her walk to the bar, her shoulders rigid. The usual Nina walk is loose, quick, full of purpose and noise. This walk is someone trying to cross a room without leaving a mark.
‘You’re staring.’ Jude whispers, low, and for my ears only.
‘I know.’
‘While Cara rubs your back.’
‘I know, Jude.’
‘Then stop.’
‘I can’t.’
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: ‘Go talk to her. At the bar. Right now. Say the thing.’
‘There’s nothing to say.’
‘There’re years of things to say. Pick one. Any one. Say it before you get in a car and drive away and spend the rest of your life wondering.’
‘She doesn’t want to hear it.’
‘You don’t know that.’ His voice drops further. ‘You’ve never known that. You’ve assumed it but you’ve never once actually asked.’
Brother. The word echoes out of nowhere. I’ve known Jude all my life, but I’ve never told him about that humiliating moment. Never will either.
‘Jude—’
‘Go. Now. Before I do something stupid like tell her myself.’
I head to the bar. Nina’s there, waiting for the drinks, and for a moment we’re standing side by side in the noise of the pub, not speaking.
The inches between us feel like geography.
I can smell her – coffee and flowers and underneath it the warmth I know the way I know my own hands.
My arm is close enough to hers that I can feel the heat coming off her skin without touching it.
‘Nina—’
‘Don’t.’ Her voice is quiet. Not angry. It’s worse. It’s held.
‘I just want to—’
‘Congratulations on Scotland.’ She’s looking straight ahead, at the bottles behind the bar, at anything that isn’t me. ‘I hope it’s everything you want.’
The word want catches. A slight emphasis. Barely there. Like a finger pressing a bruise to check if it still hurts.
‘That’s not—’
‘Here you go.’ The barman sets down the tray. Nina picks it up before I can move. ‘Excuse me.’
She walks away. And as she turns, tray in hand, her eyes meet mine again – one more half-second, involuntary, the way you glance at the sun before you can stop yourself – and in that half-second her composure cracks. Not much. A tremor in her jaw. A brightness in her eyes that isn’t the pub lights.
Then she’s gone. Back to the table. Setting down the tray, making Isla laugh, sliding into her seat.
I order more drinks for the rest of the table. Carry them back. Sit next to Cara.
Her hand finds my back again. The circles resume. Warm. Steady. The hand of a woman who is here, who wants me, who isn’t going to make me decode silences or interpret half-second glances or spend the next decade dissecting the emphasis someone put on a single word.
‘You okay?’ she murmurs.
‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t look—’
‘I’m okay, Cara.’
She doesn’t push. The hand keeps moving.
The pub keeps drinking. My friends toast new beginnings and Tilly demands to know if there’ll be a leaving party and Bill wants to discuss Scottish beer prices and Dot is already composing a formal letter of complaint to whichever authority is responsible for losing Sea Salt Bay’s only vet.
At the end of the table, Nina laughs at something Brynn says.
The sound is bright and sharp and utterly wrong – too high, too quick, missing the warmth that usually lives in the centre of it, the low frequency I have spent years tuning myself to hear.
She’s laughing the way she laughs when she’s trying to convince a room she’s fine.
I know because I’ve heard the real version a thousand times and this isn’t it.
This is the version with a wall behind it.
I look away. I feel Cara’s hand on my back. I look at the pint in front of me and the pub around me and the life I’m leaving.
This is the right decision.
The sentence forms in my head and doesn’t quite complete itself. It gets as far as This is the right – and then stalls, the way a sentence stalls when the mouth knows the words but the body refuses to say them.
I pick up my pint. I drink.
Across the table, Jude watches me with eyes that say everything his mouth won’t.
And at the end of the table, Nina hasn’t moved.
I think about the fairy lights still turned off.
I think about Cara’s hand on my back, warm and certain and here.
I think about Scotland, and lochs, and a life where I wake up every morning without looking out the window to see if the café shutters are open.
I think: This is the right—
I can’t finish it.
I drink my pint. I let Cara lean into my shoulder. I let the evening happen around me.
And I try not to count the number of times Nina doesn’t look at me, which is all of them, which is the same number of times I can’t stop looking at her, which is also all of them, and the devastating symmetry of that is the thing I’ll take to Scotland and carry like a stone in each pocket for however long it takes to learn how to set it down.