Chapter 52
Jess
“I want to go home now”
are the first words Carrie says when she leaves Matthieu’s side. Her face, already wrecked from the cold night she spent on the mountain, swells with more tears as Jess wheels her back to her room. “Can you speak to the doctor? Get them to speed up with their final checks and get me discharged? I need to go and see Cora and Howard, go and check on them in the ward Howard’s in. I shouldn’t stay here. I need to pull myself together, be strong for them . . .”
“Sure,”
Jess says, glancing quickly back at Matthieu, asleep on the hospital bed. His features are just as wrecked, just as hollowed out. As though the mountain took and took from him, leaving nothing else for him to give. She doesn’t know what Carrie has found in this man over the winter. Jess doesn’t know him at all. She’s never seen Carrie devastated, not in all the years they grew up together.
But . . . she’s missed the last decade. That’s ten years of cracked hearts, of misery and grief and loneliness. Guilt holds a blade to her chest, slowly sinking between her ribs. Suppressing her own feelings, the nausea grows in her belly. But she chooses to be the friend she should have been all along. “Whatever you need.”
“Should I have come back? I don’t know anymore. I thought, I guess I thought, he was the one. That it all suddenly made sense. The cottage, the wildflowers . . . it was like Ivy left it all there for me to find.”
“And he’s not . . . the one?”
“He’s leaving.”
“Shit.”
Carrie’s breath stutters in her chest, and she quietly cries, pressing her fingers into her eyes. No one looks at either of them, no one bothers with them as Jess wheels Carrie slowly along the fluorescent-lit corridors, trying to figure out what to say.
“I can’t go with him. Not after this winter, not after finding what I’ve been missing all these years. Roots. A home. But he—he wouldn’t want me to anyway.”
“You’re meant to stay, Carrie,”
Jess says, stopping suddenly. She walks around to the front of the wheelchair and kneels down before her. After a brief hesitation, she reaches across, gripping Carrie’s hands in hers. They’re cold, so much colder than her own, but a faint thrill goes through her, a connection she hasn’t felt in too long. She steadies herself, looking down at their hands, then up into Carrie’s eyes. She suppresses a wave of mourning for the woman she never saw Carrie grow into. “You’re meant to stay. In fact, you should never have left. It’s the biggest regret of my life, letting you go like that. Not speaking to you, not trying harder to search for you.”
“You . . . searched for me?”
Jess’s nose wrinkles. “Online mostly. Just every now and then. Ivy told me once you were in St. Ives, renting a cottage, and I went to go and find you. I guess I was beginning to think that you didn’t care anymore, that you had moved on. But I didn’t move on. Not ever. I know it seemed that way, but I was scared, Carrie. And guilty.”
Jess shakes her head. “It’s amazing what guilt will do.
“So I told Tom I wanted a few days to myself, to be by the sea. I caught the train, checked into a B&B, and the whole time I kept telling myself I should turn back. But I couldn’t stop myself. I . . . I had to see you.”
She clears her throat, looking down at their hands again. “On the second morning I saw you across the beach, batting away a seagull, laughing with some guy over cones of ice cream. It was . . . I couldn’t breathe. I remember just standing there, watching you like some kind of ghost. I imagined myself going over, talking to you, but that little strip of sand seemed impossible to cross. Anyway, you just wandered off with him after a while, and I didn’t follow.”
Carrie frowns, quiet for a moment. “That might have been Ian.”
“Might have been?”
“None of them really mattered after I left.”
Carrie smiles, the corners of her mouth twitching upward sadly. “None of them mattered, until Matthieu.”
“Come and meet Elodie. Please. Let’s get you discharged, and I can bring Elodie over to meet you. You’ll love her, she’s a little monster in human form. Please, Carrie . . . just, please.”
Carrie’s smile grows more real, then she sighs, leaning forward to touch her forehead to Jess’s. Jess’s heart stutters. She remembers . . . oh, how she remembers . . . the way they used to stand like this, how it used to be with the two of them, how she used to feel complete with Carrie next to her.
“God, I’ve missed you,”
Carrie says with a sigh. “You have no fucking idea how much I’ve missed you.”
Jess stifles a sob and wraps her arms around Carrie, her hot tears leaking into Carrie’s hair. “I’m sorry. That night when I came to see you—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“But—”
“It really, really doesn’t matter,”
Carrie says, her voice muffled by Jess’s jumper. “All that matters is this. Now. We’ve lost ten years. I don’t want to lose another ten years.”
Jess’s phone vibrates in her pocket and she reaches down, pulling away from Carrie. She frowns down at the screen, at the flashing words no caller id peering up at her, and swipes to answer. “Hello?”
Her features sink as she listens to the voice on the other end. She blinks quickly, taking it in, fighting back the nausea writhing inside her. Blowing out a quick breath, she answers as calmly as she can, her gaze slicing to Carrie, the nausea clawing up her throat. When she hangs up, she takes a moment to gather herself, placing her hands on her belly, fighting for strength.
“Jess . . .”
Carrie says, knowing it’s bad, both wanting and not wanting to know.
“It’s Cora. And—and Howard.”
Jess’s eyes fly open, fixing on Carrie’s. She reaches once more for Carrie’s hands, as though to brace her. As though bracing herself. “I’m so sorry. So very, very sorry.”