Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
NINA
It’s two weeks since Ellen came to visit and the idea of Lavender Dreams arrived. I’ve been thinking on it. Mulling, I guess some would call it.
I’m doodling a sketch on a napkin when the door crashes open and Kit Harding stands in my café, wild-eyed, hair like he’s been running his hands through it for hours. He’s still wearing his fishing boots. There’s a smear of engine grease on his cheek.
‘Nina.’ He’s panting and I’m instantly heading around the counter.
‘What is it? Has there been an accident? Brynn? Jude?’
‘It’s time. The baby.’
My feet falter. ‘Now?’
‘Now.’ He doesn’t move. Just stands there in the doorway, hands clenched at his sides, looking like a man who actually doesn’t know how to move. ‘She wants you. Said to come get you.’
‘Is she okay?’
‘She’s—’ He stops. Runs a hand through his hair again. ‘I don’t know. She’s making sounds. Lots of sounds. I don’t—’ He breaks off. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
This is Kit Harding. The man who once sailed through a force nine gale to rescue a stranded yacht. The man who pulled three tourists out of a riptide without breaking a sweat. The man whose default expression is stoic disapproval.
He looks terrified.
‘Let me grab my keys.’ My fingers are jelly as I grab them and run after Kit to the door. Isla’s baby is coming. Isla’s baby is coming…
With trembling fingers I lock the café behind me, not worrying that I’ve left the lights on, and the coffee machine will have a sulk over its neglect the next time I try to use it.
Out in the street, I call to Bill. ‘You’ll have to move your van.’ I point at his and Frankie’s supply van, the one they’ve parked along the side of the curb that is blocking the way.
‘What? Why?’
‘Baby’s coming. Spread the word. And move your van – they’ll need the road clear.’
‘Baby’s—’ His eyes widen. ‘Right. On it.’
He disappears, already shouting down the harbour. Within seconds, the village is mobilising. Tilly emerges from The Ship, eyes wide with excitement as I follow Kit along the harbour road and up the curving path to the rows of cottages.
Through it all, impossibly, absurdly, the ice-cream van at the top of the harbour starts playing ‘Greensleeves’.
Kit stares at it. ‘What the hell?’
‘It’s Tuesday. He always comes on Tuesday.’
‘My wife is having a baby and there’s an ice-cream van playing bloody “Greensleeves”.’
‘Welcome to Sea Salt Bay.’
‘This is insane.’
‘Yes. Now let’s go.’
The cottage is chaos.
Isla’s in the living room, bent over the back of the sofa, gripping the cushions hard enough to tear the fabric. She’s wearing one of Kit’s jumpers – enormous on her – and nothing else from the waist down. Her hair’s escaping from its bun. Her face is flushed and sheeted with sweat.
‘Nina.’ She looks up, relief flooding her features. ‘Thank God. Someone who isn’t going to stand there like a useless lemon.’
Kit hovers in the doorway. ‘I’m not—’
‘You asked me four times if I wanted a cup of tea.’ Isla’s voice pitches upward as another contraction hits. ‘I don’t want tea. I want – oh God – I want drugs. Hospital drugs. All of them.’
‘Right.’ Kit nods. Doesn’t move. ‘Hospital.’
‘Yes, Kit. Hospital. Where they have the drugs.’
‘I’ll get the car.’
‘You do that.’
He disappears. Isla grabs my hand, squeezing hard enough to grind the bones together.
‘He’s going to be useless,’ she gasps. ‘Absolutely useless. I love him but he’s got that look – you know the look? The one where his brain has completely left his body?’
‘He’ll be fine.’
‘He won’t. He’ll go silent and weird and I’ll want to kill him.’ She breaks off, face contorting. ‘Oh God. Oh God oh God oh—’
‘Breathe. Just breathe.’
‘I am breathing. Breathing is the only thing—’ A groan, low and animal. ‘How did women do this before epidurals? How did the human species survive?’
‘Stubbornness. Spite.’
‘Sounds about right.’ The contraction passes. She sags against the sofa. ‘Don’t leave me. Promise you won’t leave me.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Even when I say horrible things. Because I’m going to say horrible things. I can feel them building.’
‘Say whatever you need to say.’
‘I’m going to tell Kit I hate him.’
‘He’ll understand.’
‘I’m going to tell him this is all his fault.’
‘It is his fault.’
She laughs, breathless and slightly hysterical. ‘I knew I liked you.’
‘Do you want me to get Brynn and Jude?’ I ask. It’s lovely that she asked for me, but I’m not family, not in the way they are. But she shakes her head, grimacing.
‘No, Nina. I need you. You’re the one with the positive energy.’
I don’t know about that, but I’ll take it.
Kit reappears. ‘Car’s ready.’
He crosses to Isla. The panic is still there – in his jaw, in the rigid set of his shoulders – but he pushes it down, smiles with what I think is supposed to be positivity, and takes her weight.
Arm around her, hand flat against the small of her back, guiding her towards the door with the same quiet steadiness he uses hauling rope in a gale.
‘I’ve got you,’ he says quietly. ‘I’ve got you.’
‘You’d better.’
‘Always.’
For a moment, watching them, I feel like an intruder. This is theirs – this terror and wonder, this journey they’re about to take. I’m just the friend. The support act.
But Isla reaches back and grabs my hand.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘You’re not getting out of this that easily.’
The drive to Truro takes forty-three minutes.
I know this because I’m watching the clock, counting the time between contractions, trying to calculate whether we’re going to make it or whether I’m about to witness a medical emergency in the back of Kit’s Land Rover.
Kit drives in silence with his jaw tight and his hands steady on the wheel. He takes the corners too fast but keeps the car controlled – the same way he’d handle a boat in rough water. Focused. Intense.
Isla’s in the back with me, crushing my hand with every contraction. They’re coming faster now. Every three minutes. Every two.
‘Talk to me,’ she gasps. ‘Distract me. Tell me anything.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Gossip. Village news. What’s happening with—’ She breaks off, groaning, her whole body curling forward. ‘What’s happening with the boat? Your coffee boat thing?’
‘It’s happening. Emmett came to look at it. He thinks—’
‘Who’s Emmett?’
‘Someone Brynn knows. The carpenter from—’
‘Oh God.’ She grips my hand tighter, bearing down, face contorting. ‘Oh God, it’s getting worse. They’re not stopping. There’s no gap anymore.’
‘Kit—’
‘I heard.’ His foot presses harder on the accelerator. ‘Ten minutes.’
‘I need the hospital. I need it now. I can’t do this in a car, I can’t—’
‘You can. Hold on.’
‘Don’t tell me to hold on. You’re not the one whose body is trying to turn itself inside—’ She screams. Actually screams, loud enough to echo off the windows.
Kit’s knuckles go white on the steering wheel. But his voice stays steady. ‘Nine minutes.’
‘I hate you.’
‘I know.’
‘This is your fault.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m never doing this again. Never. We’re adopting. We’re getting cats. We’re—’ Another scream, ragged, tearing through her.
‘Eight minutes.’
I hold on to her and pray.
The hospital appears around the corner like salvation.
Kit pulls up to the entrance, abandons the car at an angle that’ll definitely get him a ticket, and is out the door before the engine’s fully stopped.
‘She needs help,’ he tells the first nurse he sees. ‘Now. Please.’
They take one look at Isla and mobilise. Wheelchair. Forms. Rapid-fire questions: how far apart, how long, first baby, any complications.
Kit answers what he can. I fill in the gaps. And within minutes, Isla’s being whisked away towards the delivery suite, her hand reaching back for both of us.
‘Don’t leave,’ she calls. ‘Either of you. Don’t—’
‘We’re right here.’ Kit’s voice cracks. Just slightly. Just enough. ‘We’re not going anywhere.’
They let me stay.
I don’t know if that’s normal – a friend in the delivery room alongside the father – but Isla’s hand is locked around mine and Kit’s on her other side and nobody asks me to leave, so I don’t.
The hours blur. The epidural takes the edge off and Isla becomes herself again between contractions – sharp, funny, bossing Kit around with the focused authority of a woman who has done this before and knows exactly what she needs.
Kit takes it. He takes all of it. He holds her hand and fetches ice chips and absorbs every insult she throws at him with the same stoic patience he brings to hauling nets in a gale.
‘If you tell me to breathe one more time,’ Isla says at one point, teeth gritted, ‘I will divorce you.’
‘We’re not married.’
‘Then I’ll marry you just so I can divorce you.’
‘Noted.’
I hold her other hand. I wipe her forehead with a damp cloth. I do the small, useless things that feel enormous when someone you love is in pain – handing her cups of water, adjusting pillows, being present in a way that doesn’t fix anything. It’s all I can offer.
And I think – briefly, involuntarily, the way you touch a bruise – that Tom would be out in that corridor right now.
If things were different. He’d be the one who’d thought to bring proper coffee from the café instead of vending-machine grief.
He’d be sitting in a plastic chair with his legs stretched out, saying nothing useful, being completely essential.
I let the thought come. I let it go.
At 6:41, the midwife says it’s time.
What follows is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever witnessed.
Not beautiful – not in the way people mean when they say birth is beautiful.
Raw. Brutal. Loud. Isla screaming, Kit white-faced and gripping her hand, the midwife calm and steady, the room full of urgency and sweat and the metallic smell of blood and effort.
And then – at 6:47, in the golden evening light slanting through the hospital window – a cry. Thin and furious and brand-new.
‘It’s a boy,’ the midwife says.
Kit makes a sound I’ve never heard from him. Not a word. Not a sob. Just a sound – low, broken, the noise a man makes when the world cracks open and rearranges itself around him.