Chapter 5
Chapter Five
NINA
Iwake up at six, my body still not receiving the message that I’m on holiday.
Not holiday. Whatever this is. Strategic retreat. Temporary relocation. Running away, if we’re being honest, which I’m trying very hard not to be.
Mum’s spare room is painted the colour of weak tea and gets the morning sun directly in the face.
I’ve hung a scarf over the curtain rod to block it out, one of the floaty ones I bought in St Ives three summers ago, and now the whole room glows amber like the inside of a lantern. Not unpleasant. Just not mine.
I lie there for a while, watching the light shift on the ceiling. Somewhere outside, a car alarm goes off, stops, goes off again. Someone shouts something I can’t make out. A door slams. Truro waking up sounds nothing like Sea Salt Bay waking up.
When are you coming home?
Tom’s voice, last night on the phone. He’d said it so casually, the same way he says everything. And he’d said ran, past tense, about my café.
Does he really think I’m not coming back?
Am I going back?
When I lived in London briefly, a few years ago, I don’t remember him ever thinking that? Asking me when I’d be back. All those late-night conversations, him doing his thing, at uni, me doing mine, there had never been a question of if I’d go back. If he’d be there.
I blink at the ceiling. All too easily the memories, the reasons why I am here, come back.
Months later and those moments are still there, a pacing wild beast in my head.
The RNLI boat coming into harbour. Counting off the boots.
Jude, Tom, Cal … Kit, battered and bruised …
and there I was, still waiting, still holding my breath, for the man who didn’t come back.
That breath is still pocketed inside of me.
Still waiting.
I get up because lying here isn’t helping. The floorboards creak, unfamiliar – I still don’t know this house the way I know the cottage, even though Mum’s been here nearly fifteen years. Which cupboard has the mugs. Which tap runs hot. Which step on the stairs to avoid.
The kitchen is empty, which means she’s already down in the café. I fill the kettle, open three cupboards before I find a mug, go through the motions of making tea I’m not sure I want.
My phone is on the counter where I left it.
No messages. Six-fifteen in the morning: most of my friends will be awake – fishermen don’t do lie-ins apart from on a Sunday – but none of those lives are going to pause because I’m standing in my mother’s kitchen, waiting for something I can’t identify. I put the phone back down.
‘You’re up early.’
Mum’s in the doorway – but not still, never still.
Already dressed, already moving, she flits to the counter to check her phone, then to the fridge, then to the kettle I’ve just boiled.
She pours herself a tea while simultaneously wiping down the counter and checking the time and asking me about my sleep, all of it happening at once, and I watch her do it with the strange vertigo of seeing your own future.
This is where I learned it. The motion. The filling of every silence with something that isn’t silence.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I say.
‘The traffic?’
‘The everything.’
She nods and shrugs like this makes perfect sense and keeps moving – sink, back door, toast. I watch her and drink my tea.
‘Isla’s having a boy,’ I say, because it’s something to say. ‘They’re naming him Peter.’
Mum pauses – actually pauses, mid-motion, toast in hand. ‘That’s lovely.’
‘It is.’ I wrap my hands around the mug, feeling the heat press into my palms. ‘It just… I wasn’t expecting it. When she told me.’
‘Grief hides in the strangest places.’ She’s moving again – butter, knife, the constant choreography. ‘You think you’ve got it mapped out, and then someone says something perfectly ordinary and you’re on the floor.’
‘I wasn’t on the floor.’
‘Metaphorically.’
‘I was fine.’ The tea is still too hot, but I keep sipping, letting it scald all the way down. ‘I am fine.’
‘Of course you are.’
‘Tom called last night,’ I say. ‘He found a dog.’
This does have her stopping and turning, one of her eyebrows up near her hairline. Mum has perfectly groomed brows, insists it’s the one expense a woman should never spare on. ‘Tom called you?’
I frown. ‘Of course he called, why wouldn’t he?’
Mum gives me one of those pointed looks. ‘I just didn’t think you were talking, that’s all.’
‘Of course we’re talking, we are best friends, always have been, always will be.’
A silence detonates in the kitchen while she reads my face, but then she shrugs and smiles brightly. ‘So, a dog?’
I exhale. Weird.
‘Yes, a dog on the coast path. The poor thing was stuck in the gorse. He’s been looking after it while he tries to find the owner.
’ I grin. ‘He says it has the energy of someone who’s seen too much and made peace with the fundamental absurdity of existence.
’ It’s so Tom. Finding a dog and immediately diagnosing its philosophical outlook.
‘We named it Chips,’ I tag on, with a random shrug.
‘We?’
‘He needed help. He has no imagination for names.’
‘Tom Darcy has plenty of imagination.’ Mum’s watching me over her mug. ‘He just doesn’t show it to everyone.’
I don’t know what to do with that, so I drink my tea. Outside, Truro continues waking up – more cars, more voices, the distant rumble of a lorry. The air through the open door is already warm. It’s going to be hot today, the kind of thick, airless heat that sits on your chest.
I miss the sea.
The thought arrives sharp and uninvited, the way Peter’s name arrives sometimes – in the middle of something ordinary, without warning, like a hand on my shoulder in an empty room.
I miss the salt and the gulls and the light on the water and the coffee machine that sticks and Brynn’s voice carrying across the harbour to make her a strong one because Jude snores like a train.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Another photo of the crappy little dog. No message – just the picture. A small brown dog on a leather armchair, looking directly at the camera with an expression of profound resignation. One ear up, one ear down. Ridiculous eyebrows. And, yes, a small, dignified beard.
I laugh out loud, the alien sound reverberating.
‘What?’ Mum asks.
‘The dog.’ I turn the phone to show her. ‘Look at its face.’
She looks. Her mouth twitches. ‘It looks like it’s contemplating the futility of existence.’
‘That’s what Tom said. Basically.’
‘Tom has good instincts.’
I look at the photo again. The armchair the dog is sitting in is the old leather one, cracked and soft, from when Tom’s dad still lived in the flat. Tom moved in after he qualified. Temporary arrangement. Five years ago.
Everything in Sea Salt Bay is temporary until it isn’t.
‘I should go back,’ I say.
The words come out before I’ve decided to say them. They hang there like stars waiting to fall or shoot across the sky, unsure yet of their path, and I wait for Mum to argue, to ask if I’m sure, to point out that I’ve only been here three weeks.
‘I wondered how long it would take.’
‘It’s not—’ I start, and then stop, because I don’t know what it’s not. Not about the dog. Not about Tom asking when I’m coming home and the silence that came after, the one I could feel him holding his breath inside. Not about any single thing I could point to and say this.
‘The café needs opening,’ I say instead. ‘I’ve left it too long. And I miss my friends. I want to see Isla grow with her baby blooming, and Brynn’s taking over the harbour like a firebrand.’
‘Nina.’ Mum sets down her mug. Crosses the kitchen. Takes my face in her hands – her palms rough from years of café work, warm from the tea. ‘You don’t have to list reasons.’
‘I feel like I do.’
‘You don’t.’ She smooths my hair back from my face. ‘You came here because you needed to. You’re going back because you’re ready. That’s enough.’
‘Is that why you left?’ The question comes out before I can stop it. ‘Sea Salt Bay. Were you just … ready?’
Her hands still on my hair. A shadow chases across her face – complicated, old.
‘I left because I couldn’t breathe there anymore,’ she says.
Her thumb traces a line across the tabletop, back and forth, the only fidget she allows herself.
‘Your dad was in everything. Every corner, every boat in the harbour, every sunrise. I couldn’t look at any of it without seeing him. And staying still meant feeling it.’
The kitchen is quiet. Just the two of us and the heat and the toast going cold on the counter.
‘I’m going back.’
‘I know.’ She smiles, and the space behind my ribs tightens. ‘But I want to talk to you first. Sit.’
She points a finger at the kitchen table, which can only be bad news. The café downstairs should be opening, she’s got cake stands to organise, but she wants me to sit. My arse drops to the chair.
‘Nina,’ she starts.
‘Mum.’
Her sigh is heavy. ‘You miss him, I know.’
I’m instantly ready to spring. Run. In my head I count boots coming off the boat. See the faces. Jude. Tom. Cal. Kit.
That breath I pocketed the night of the storm, the night Peter didn’t come back, pulsates near my heart.
‘Mum.’ Not a statement this time.
Her hand brushes through her silver-streaked hair. ‘Who are you, Nina Ellis?’
My stare wanders from her hair to her face. ‘What do you mean? I’m Nina, your daughter. I’m the same I’ve always been.’
She shakes her head. My stomach drops. I know where this is going.
‘Tell me who you were before Peter.’
‘Mum, there is no “before Peter”. Peter was everything, but then he died.’
Her cool hand reaches for mine, smooth fingers sliding across my skin and grasping firm.
‘I remember a Nina Ellis from before Peter. She laughed, baked, she wanted to take her gran’s old café and make it something that people would never forget, wanted to make it grow, make lavender the only colour that people remembered when they visited Sea Salt Bay.’
I breathe. My breath tastes of loss and longing, not just for Peter and the future I thought we might have. But also for that Nina, the one who loved lavender. Had dreams.
‘I don’t know where she is,’ I whisper.
Mum’s hand squeezes mine. ‘Maybe it’s time to find her.’
I shake my head, the motion mechanical, automatic. ‘I don’t know where to start.’
She’s quiet for a moment. Then: ‘Do you remember that amethyst necklace Gran left you? The little star. You were so gutted when you lost it. Turned the cottage upside down for weeks.’
My eyes sting. ‘I found it eventually.’
‘You did.’ Her smile is small and exact. ‘Look for yourself the same way. Carefully. Without giving up.’ She squeezes my hand once more and releases it. ‘That’s all I’ve got.’
I stay with mum for the lunchtime rush, until she puts her hands on her hips and raises her brows in a way that can’t be argued with. Shouldn’t be argued with. And suddenly the timing feels right. Maybe the stars have aligned, the sun is in Jupiter, I don’t know; but it’s right.
I pack in twenty minutes. I didn’t bring much anyway – clothes, toiletries, the books I haven’t read, the journal I haven’t written in. Two bags and the backseat of my car. A whole retreat, and it fits in the boot.
Mum stands in the doorway while I load everything in, arms crossed, watching me the way she’s always watched me.
‘Call me when you get there.’
‘I will.’
‘And eat something. Real food. Not just coffee.’
‘I run a café, Mum. I know how to feed myself.’
‘You know how to feed other people. That’s not the same thing.’
She’s right, and I hug her instead of saying so – tight and brief, breathing in the Mum-ness of her, perfume and flour and the warmth that’s been the same my whole life. She holds on a beat longer than usual.
‘Drive safe.’
‘I always do.’
‘You drive like you’re being chased by wolves.’
‘Only on the A30.’
She laughs, and I get in the car before I can change my mind.
The drive takes an hour and a half. The A30 gives way to the A39, and then the dual carriageway narrows into the winding lanes that lead to the coast. The hedgerows get higher.
The sky gets wider. I roll down the window as I cruise along the Atlantic Highway and the air changes – salt and cut grass and the unique scent of gorse and tilled earth that my body recognises before my brain does.
And then the village appears.
Sea Salt Bay, tucked into the curve of the coastline. The harbour, the boats, the cottages climbing the hill. I take the turn I’ve taken a thousand times, muscle memory more than thought, past Dot’s shop, past the lifeboat station, past the bench where Peter used to sit.
Used to. Two words that still have edges.
I pull up outside the café and turn off the engine, and the quiet folds around me like water. No traffic. No car alarms. Just the gulls, and the harbour, and the wind moving through the fuchsias that Dot has been watering and that do, in fact, badly need trimming.
The chalk menu in the window is still showing specials from three weeks ago. The fairy lights I never took down from Christmas. The little table by the door, empty, waiting.
I sit there with my hands on the wheel, breathing the salt air, and I don’t cry, which feels like it should count for something.
My phone buzzes. Tom. Chips would like you to know that he’s judging me for eating cereal for lunch. I maintain that cereal is a legitimate meal. Please advise.
I text back: On my way to arbitrate. Don’t drink all the milk.
Three dots. Then: You’re coming back?
Already here. Just pulled up outside the café.
The longest pause. The dots appear, disappear, appear.
Then: Stay there.
I stay.