Chapter 6
Chapter Six
TOM
Idon’t run.
This is important. Tom Darcy does not run anywhere, not even when a text from Nina Ellis says Already here.
Just pulled up outside the café and every nerve ending he possesses lights up like a warning flare.
I walk. At a reasonable pace. Down the stairs from the flat, out the surgery door, across the harbour front under the late-afternoon sun, like a man going somewhere ordinary.
Chips trots beside me on his lead. The café comes into view. Her car is parked outside, boot still open, bags in the back seat. The shutters are still closed but the door is open, just slightly, and there’s a light on inside that wasn’t on this morning.
Three weeks I’ve been walking past this door. Three weeks of shuttered windows and silence and a chalk menu in her handwriting slowly fading in the weather. And now – light.
I stop at the door and knock on the frame.
She appears within seconds, and the first thing I see – before her face, before anything – is her hand on the doorframe, the rings on her fingers, the freckle on the inside of her wrist that I have no business knowing is there.
Then she pushes the door wider and she’s all of it at once: the sundress I don’t recognise, yellow with small blue flowers, bare shoulders already catching the heat of the sun.
Her bangles making their sound. Her hair up in that way she does it when she’s been driving, loose bits falling around her face.
The gold necklace in the hollow of her throat.
My brain registers all of it in pieces. My body doesn’t bother with order.
She looks the same. She looks like colour coming back into a room.
‘You came,’ she says.
‘I told you to stay. I assumed you’d realise I was coming along.’
She smiles, biting her bottom lip, blooming a little pink as she looks down at Chips.
Her whole face shifts, so complete, so immediate.
‘Oh, look at you,’ she croons, dropping into a crouch right there in the doorway, and Chips walks straight to her without a backward glance at me and sits on her feet.
Leans his entire small body against her shins.
I look down at the top of her head, close enough now that I can see the faint sun-warm flush across her shoulders.
Close enough that I have to be very deliberate about where I look in case I fixate on a loose strand of hair falling across her neck.
I put my hands in my pockets. Deliberately.
Not because they were going to do anything. Just in case.
‘He likes you,’ I say.
‘He’s perfect.’ She’s scratching behind both ears now, her bangles sliding down her wrists. Chips closes his eyes in canine ecstasy. ‘Look at his little beard. Look at his eyebrows. Tom, you didn’t tell me he was this handsome.’
‘I sent you a photo.’
‘Photos don’t capture the full effect.’
She looks up at me, her chin tilted, smiling, and the angle puts her face in the last of the evening sun and I am not going to think about it. I am going to stand here with my hands in my pockets and respond like a normal person.
‘Are you coming in,’ she says, ‘or are you just going to stand there looking decorative?’
‘I wasn’t aware I was decorative.’
‘You’re extremely decorative. Very stern and veterinary. It’s a whole aesthetic.’ She stands, and Chips follows the movement like she’s the centre of gravity. She is, but that’s not the point. ‘Come on. I’ll make tea. The kettle still works, I checked.’
I follow her inside. My hands are still in my pockets.
The café is dim, shutters still closed, but the string of warm lights still flicker – the Christmas ones she never takes down – and they cast everything in a soft glow, warm and close.
She’s already moving, of course. Switching on the coffee machine, opening a window, checking the fridge with the particular focus of a woman taking inventory of her own life.
She moves through this space like breathing – automatic, fluid, entirely unselfconscious.
I lean against the counter and watch her because that’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done. Stand in a room with Nina Ellis and watch her move through it. The fact that she’s never once found this strange is either a kindness or a cruelty, and I stopped trying to decide which a long time ago.
‘The drive was fine,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘In case you were wondering.’
‘I wasn’t wondering.’
‘You were absolutely wondering. You had your concerned face on.’
‘I don’t have a concerned face.’
‘You have several concerned faces. You have a whole repertoire. Milk, no sugar, correct?’
‘You know it’s correct.’
‘I’m checking. Three weeks is a long time. You might have changed.’
‘Into what?’
‘I don’t know. Someone who takes sugar. Someone with different socks. Someone who makes conversation like a normal person instead of answering everything with questions.’
‘Do I do that?’
She points at me. ‘See? You’re doing it now.’
‘That was deliberate.’
‘Was it?’
‘Now you’re doing it.’
She laughs – proper laughing, the kind that crinkles her eyes and shows her teeth and makes the whole room feel warmer than it was a second ago – and slides my mug across the counter.
The blue one with the chip on the handle.
The one I always end up with. She didn’t think about which mug to give me.
She never does. The blue chipped mug is mine without either of us ever deciding it.
That’s how it works with Nina. Things become yours by proximity, by repetition, by the slow accumulation of showing up until you’re part of the furniture.
I know. I’ve been part of her furniture for a long time.
‘So,’ she says, hopping up to sit on the counter, her legs swinging.
The sundress rides up above her knees and she doesn’t adjust it, doesn’t notice, because it’s me, because I’m Tom, because I’m the person she can sit on a counter in a sundress around without thinking about it.
Chips positions himself beneath her feet like a small furry sentinel.
‘What did I miss? Three weeks of Sea Salt Bay gossip. Go.’
‘Dot’s at war with the tourists again.’
‘Dot’s always at war with the tourists.’
‘This time it’s about parking. Someone left a campervan outside her shop for four days. She’s considering legal action.’
‘She’s not considering legal action. She’s considering a strongly worded note and a campaign of aggressive tutting.’
‘She mentioned a solicitor.’
‘She mentions a solicitor every summer. She’s never actually called one.’ Nina takes a sip of her tea, her legs still swinging, one foot almost but not quite brushing my hip where I’m leaning against the counter beside her. She doesn’t notice. I notice. ‘What else?’
‘Mrs Penhallow’s hip replacement went well. She’s already terrorising the physiotherapist.’
‘I’d expect nothing less. That woman is unstoppable.’
‘Brynn pulled a fishing net out of the lifeboat propeller last week. It took three hours and she said words I’ve never heard before.’
‘Brynn knows words nobody’s heard before.
She invents them specifically for mechanical failures.
’ Nina’s foot catches my hip on the backswing – the lightest contact, there and gone – and she glances down, says ‘Sorry’, and keeps going, and I take a sip of tea thinking perhaps I need something stronger ‘What about Isla? Have you seen her?’
‘Briefly. She came into the surgery to complain about the baby’s positioning.’
‘To you?’
‘She wanted a second opinion. I reminded her I specialise in animals.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She said, and I quote, “Same basic principles, surely.”’
Nina snorts tea. ‘That’s extremely Isla.’
‘I told her I wasn’t qualified to comment on human babies. She told me I wasn’t qualified to comment on anything, but as I still had opinions about her choice of baby names, I might as well have opinions about this too.’
‘And do you have opinions about her choice of baby names?’
‘I think Peter is a good name.’
The words land differently than I intended.
Or exactly how I intended. I never know which, with Peter’s name – whether I’m being careful enough, whether any amount of careful is enough.
Nina’s face flickers – shadows passing across it, quick and complicated, the door opening and closing in the space of a breath – and then she looks down at her mug.
‘It is,’ she says quietly. ‘It’s a good name.’
The silence sits between us. Chips sighs heavily and puts his chin on his paws. Through the crack in the shutters, the harbour is going gold. I hold the mug and I wait, because that’s the thing I’m good at. Waiting. Standing in the silence while Nina finds her way through it.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean to—’
‘No, it’s fine. It’s good, actually.’ She looks up, and her eyes are bright but she’s smiling, that smile she has when she switches it on, bright and cheerful, regardless of how she feels on the inside.
I’ve seen it enough times to know what it looks like.
‘I’m glad they’re doing it. Peter would have found it hilarious.
A tiny baby named after him, causing chaos. That’s exactly his sense of humour.’
‘The baby’s already causing chaos. Isla says it kicks every time Kit tries to sleep.’
‘Kit deserves it. He was insufferable when they first got back together again. Talk about overprotective buffoon. The universe owes Isla some karmic revenge.’ She takes another sip of tea, and the moment passes – the way moments do with Nina, always moving, never settling long enough for anyone to catch.
She reaches over and squeezes my arm, just briefly, her fingers pressing through the sleeve of my shirt. ‘You’re good at that, you know.’
‘At what?’
‘Being there. When it gets heavy.’ She says it like she’s remarking on the weather. Like she’s telling me I’m good at fixing cars or remembering birthdays. ‘You never make it weird. You just … sit in it with me. I don’t know anyone else who does that.’