Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
TOM
The knock wakes me.
It’s not the phone, not an emergency call – a knock. Soft but insistent, coming from downstairs. I lie still for a moment, disoriented, the clock registering before the rest of me does. One twenty-three in the morning.
Nobody knocks at one in the morning unless something’s wrong.
I’m out of bed and down the stairs before I’m fully awake, pulling a jumper over my head as I go. The surgery is dark, the waiting room full of shadows. Through the glass panel in the door – a figure on the step.
Nina.
I open the door and she’s standing there in pyjamas and a cardigan thrown on crooked, her feet shoved into trainers with no socks, laces trailing on the cobblestones. Her face is swollen. Blotched. Her eyes are raw in a way I’ve only ever seen after Peter died.
She’s holding something in her hand. A small velvet box.
My hand goes to the door behind me – pulling it half-closed, instinctive, not wanting to wake Cara.
Nina sees the gesture. I watch her see it. Her eyes tracking the movement, the narrowing, the understanding that I’m shielding someone else’s sleep.
‘Nina, what—’
She holds out a box.
Her hand is trembling. She doesn’t speak. She just holds it towards me, and then her face crumples – not gently, not in a gentle way like she cries when she’s sad. This is way she cries when the ground has been pulled out.
I know what’s in the box before I take it.
I know because I stood in that jeweller’s in Truro while Peter turned the trays over, agonising – simple, nothing flashy, she’d hate flashy, something that looks like her, something the colour of the sea – his face bright with the simple joy of a man who realised that he had everything he wanted.
He’d held the aquamarine up to the light and said: This one.
It’s the colour of the water off Treloar’s Point. She’ll know what it means.
I’d said: She’ll love it.
And I’d meant it. Standing next to my friend, watching him choose a ring for the woman I loved, I’d meant it completely. I’d wanted her to have this. I’d wanted her to be happy, even if the happiness had a shape that would never include me.
Three weeks later, he was dead.
I open the box. There it is. Aquamarine in all its bright and gorgeously understated beauty. I swallow, although it hurts my throat, and hand the box back.
‘Come here,’ I say. My voice is wrecked. I reach for her.
She steps back.
‘I found this.’ She’s not folding into me. She’s rigid, arms still suspended mid-air, like she’s not sure she wants to hold it. The box sits between us like a barrier. ‘In his drawer. At the back of his sock drawer, Tom. He was going to—’
‘I know.’
The words are out before I can catch them. The exhaustion, the hour, the rawness of her face – I can’t hold the lie anymore. It drops out of me like something I’ve been gripping too long and my fingers have simply given out.
Nina goes still. The tears stop. Her expression empties, completely, like a tide pulling back to expose the rocks underneath.
‘What do you mean, you know?’
I should lie. I should say I meant I understood, that I could see what she was saying. I should say anything other than the truth I’ve been carrying for eight months like a stone in each pocket.
But she’s standing here in pyjamas with no socks and her face is destroyed, and I can’t.
‘I was there,’ I say. ‘When he bought it. He asked me to come.’
The silence is absolute. No harbour sounds, no gulls, no wind. Just Nina’s breathing and my own.
‘You were with him.’
‘He wanted a second opinion. He was nervous – And you know Peter, Nina. He was never nervous, but he was nervous about this. He must have looked at fifty rings.’ I can hear my own voice and it sounds like someone else’s.
‘He chose the aquamarine because he said it was the colour of the sea off Treloar’s Point. He said you’d know what it meant.’
Nina looks down at the box. Opens it. The stone catches the streetlight – pale blue with just the faintest hint of green, the colour of water, the colour of everything she’s lost.
‘He chose this,’ she says. Then, harder: ‘And you watched him choose it.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve known all this time?’
I nod, not trusting my words or my voice.
‘Months.’ Her voice has flattened into a register I don’t recognise, where there is no warmth, no wryness, no Nina.
Just the stripped-back sound of a woman recalculating everything she thought she knew.
‘Months of sitting across from me in the café. Of bringing me tea and fixing my windows and finding me a dog. Months of holding my hand when a storm hits, or the rescue alarm goes off. Months of smiling at me, while the whole time…’ The shake of her head is small, but its effect on my heart is catastrophic.
‘Nina—’
‘Who else knows?’ She cuts across me. ‘Brynn? Jude? Has everyone been keeping this secret while I’ve been—’ She presses her hand to her mouth. Takes it away. ‘Was anyone going to tell me? Or was I going to find it alone at midnight in a dead man’s sock drawer?’
‘I wanted to protect you.’
‘Protect me.’ Flat. Lethal. ‘From what? From knowing my boyfriend loved me?’
‘From more pain. You were already—’
‘Don’t.’ The word snaps out between us. ‘Don’t tell me what I was.
You don’t get to decide what I can handle, Tom.
You don’t get to sit there with your patience and your fuchsias and your’—she gestures at me, at the surgery, at the half-closed door behind me—‘your whole quiet martyrdom thing and deciding that I need protecting. Deciding for me.’
‘That’s not what I was doing.’
‘Then what? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’ve been carrying around this piece of my life – my life – and not mentioning it. For months. While I’ve been talking to you about Peter, about missing him, about not knowing how to move on. And the whole time you knew.’
The streetlight hums above us.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know how to tell you.’
‘You could have opened your mouth. That’s how telling works.’ She’s shaking, but not with grief anymore. ‘You could have said, Nina, there’s something you should know. You could have trusted me to handle it instead of treating me like I’m made of glass.’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘You were. You’ve been doing it for years.
Standing on the sidelines. Being patient.
Being there. What I don’t know is why.’ Her voice cracks on why, and for a second the anger gives way.
‘Why do you do it, Tom? Why do you show up every day? Why do you water the fuchsias and fix the shutters and sit on my kitchen floor at three in the morning?’
The question hangs between us. The real question. The one underneath all the others.
I could answer it. Right here, right now, on the surgery doorstep at half one in the morning, I could tell her the truth.
I could say: Because I love you. Because I’ve loved you since I was sixteen.
Because I heard you say it was like kissing your brother and I stayed anyway because the alternative was a world without you in it and that world was not survivable.
I don’t say it. Because she’s angry and she’s hurt and she’s holding another man’s ring, and telling her now would be the most selfish thing I’ve ever done. It would turn her grief into my confession. It would make this moment about me instead of about Peter.
So I say, ‘Because you’re my friend.’
The word friend lands between us like an avalanche.
Nina looks at me. And I watch her hear it – friend. I watch her face fold, close, slam doors shut.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Your friend.’
‘Nina—’
‘I need to go.’ She’s already backing away. ‘I can’t be here right now. I can’t even loo—’ Her eyes go to the door behind me. The half-closed door with Cara’s asleep behind it. ‘I just can’t.’
‘Let me walk you home.’
‘No.’ Sharp. Final. ‘I walked myself here. I can walk myself back.’
She turns and goes. I watch her cross the cobblestones – the cardigan pulled tight, the ring box clutched in her hand, the untied laces trailing. She doesn’t look back. She turns the corner of the harbour and the dark takes her.
I stand on the doorstep and I feel the absence of her like a change in atmospheric pressure. The street is empty. The harbour is still. The fairy lights in the café are on.
I’ve been watching those lights for weeks. Months. They’ve been a comfort. A sign of her, a proof of her, a small warm signal across the water.
Tonight they look like something left behind.
The door opens behind me.
‘Tom?’ Cara’s voice, soft with sleep. ‘Who was that?’
I don’t turn around. I’m still looking at the corner where Nina disappeared.
‘It was Nina.’ I almost shudder her name. ‘She found a ring,’ I say. ‘Peter’s ring. And I … and I, told her I knew about it.’ I turn from where I’ve been watching the empty space Nina left behind.
Cara’s in her dressing gown, hair mussed, face creased from the pillow. She looks tired and real and completely here.
‘Come inside,’ she says.
I let her lead me to the kitchen. She puts the kettle on. I sit at the table and I look at my hands and I try to understand what just happened.
‘I told her I was there when Peter bought it. I told her I knew.’ My voice sounds distant. ‘She asked me why I didn’t tell her. She asked me why I do any of it – the fuchsias, the windows, all of it. Why I show up.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said because she’s my friend.’
Cara is quiet for a moment. She pours two mugs. Sets one in front of me. Sits across the table.
‘Is that what you are?’ she asks. ‘Her friend?’
‘It’s what I’ve been.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
I wrap my hands around the mug. The heat presses into my palms. The kitchen is dark except for the light over the stove, and in the half-dark Cara’s face is gentle and clear-eyed and asking me to be honest.
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s not what I am.’
The admission costs me something down deep.
Cara nods. Not surprised. She was never going to be surprised.
‘I’ve known since about five minutes after I arrived,’ she says. ‘The way you talk about her. The way you look at her. The way you light up when she walks into a room and dim again when she leaves.’ She wraps her hands around her own mug. ‘I’m not blind, Tom. I’ve never been blind.’
‘Then why did you stay?’
‘Because I hoped I was wrong.’ A pause. ‘And because I thought maybe, if she wasn’t interested, you’d eventually see what was in front of you.
’ She smiles, and it’s sad but it’s not bitter, and the absence of bitterness is the thing that breaks me.
‘And because I meant every word about the practice. You’re a brilliant vet.
We’d be brilliant together. That part was real. ’
‘I know it was.’
‘Scotland is real too. The listing. The partnership. All of it.’ She drinks her tea.
‘The question is whether you want it. Whether any of it – me, the practice, a whole new life – is enough. Or whether you’re going to keep standing in this village, watching those fairy lights, waiting for someone who might never turn around. ’
I look at my tea. I look at the window, the harbour dark beyond it, the faint glow of the café lights through the glass.
‘She asked me why I show up,’ I say. ‘And I couldn’t tell her the truth, Cara. She’s holding Peter’s ring. She’s standing on my doorstep falling apart. I can’t make that about me.’
‘Noble.’ Cara says it gently, not mockingly. ‘That’s always been your problem, Tom. You’re so busy being noble that you forget to be honest.’
‘If I’d told her—’
‘If you’d told her, she’d know. And then she’d have to decide.
And that terrifies you more than the waiting, doesn’t it?
Because the waiting has a shape. It’s familiar.
You’ve built your whole life around it.’ She sets down her mug.
‘But if she knew, and she chose – really chose, one way or the other – the waiting would be over. And you’d have to build something else. ’
The kitchen is quiet. The kettle clicks as it cools. Through the window, the fairy lights persist.
‘I need you to hear me,’ Cara says. ‘Not as the woman who wants you – though I am that, and I’m not ashamed of it.
As your friend. As someone who cares about you.
’ She leans forward. ‘You deserve to be someone’s first choice, Tom.
Not their constant. Not their safety net.
Not the person they call at midnight because they know you’ll always answer.
You deserve someone who chooses you on purpose. In daylight. With their eyes open.’
The words land in the quiet kitchen and stay there.
‘Can you honestly tell me,’ she says, ‘that Nina has ever chosen you? Not defaulted to you. Not relied on you. Chosen you?’
I open my mouth. Close it.
‘Think about Scotland,’ Cara says. She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand – once, firm, certain. ‘Not as an escape. As a beginning. A life where you’re not waiting anymore. Where someone actually sees you.’
She stands. Rinses her mug. Stops at the doorway.
‘Whatever you decide,’ she says, ‘I’ll respect it. But decide, Tom. Please. For everyone’s sake.’
She goes to her room. The door closes softly.
I sit at the kitchen table for a long time.
The mug goes cold. The kitchen goes dark. Through the window, the fairy lights glow – stubborn, persistent, left on by a woman who doesn’t know I watch them every night.
Nina’s face on the doorstep. The trainers with no socks. The laces in the puddle. The way she’d said your friend like she was tasting something that had gone off.
Cara’s hand on mine. Warm. Certain. You deserve to be someone’s first choice.
And underneath both – the thing I couldn’t say. The truth I swallowed on the doorstep because the timing was wrong, because it’s always wrong, because I have been waiting for the right moment for eleven years and I am starting to understand that the right moment doesn’t exist.
I sit in the dark until dawn steals through the window.
Then I pick up my phone and I look at the listing Cara sent me. The practice in Inverness. The photographs – green hills, a stone building, a view of the loch. A whole different life, laid out like a road.
I don’t decide anything.
But I don’t close the page either.