Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
TOM
The sea is loud tonight.
I stand at the harbour wall, hands in my pockets, watching the waves hit the stone.
The tide’s coming in hard – white foam catching the streetlight, spray misting the air.
I can taste salt on my lips. I’ve tasted salt on my lips for as long as I can remember.
This sea, this harbour, this crash and pull that has been the soundtrack to every version of my life – learning to walk on these cobblestones, learning to swim in this cove, standing behind the lifeboat station at fourteen thinking I understood what love meant.
I didn’t. I had no idea. I still don’t.
The café is dark. Lavender shutters closed against the night.
No light in the upstairs window. And the fairy lights – the ones she leaves on every evening, the ones I’ve been watching from my window for months, the warm persistent glow I’ve treated as proof of her, evidence that she’s there, that the distance between us is only fifty metres of cobblestone and harbour water – the fairy lights are off.
She hasn’t turned them on since the night she brought me the ring.
She won’t talk to me.
The wall she’s built between us, brick by brick, mortared with a silence more absolute than anything I’ve ever heard from Nina Ellis, who has never been silent about anything in her life.
I understand why. I carried Peter’s ring in my head for eight months and never said a word. I told myself I was protecting her, but really I was protecting myself.
It wasn’t enough. Eleven years of showing up, and the one time it mattered most, I hid.
The waves crash. The spray rises. The café stays dark.
I can’t do this anymore.
The thought arrives not as a decision but as a collapse – the final giving-way of a structure I’ve been holding up through sheer force of will. Not I’m choosing to leave. Just: I can’t stay. The distinction matters. One is brave. The other is survival.
I’m going to Scotland.
Cara’s reading when I get back. Curled on the sofa with a veterinary journal, glasses on, tea going cold. She looks up when I walk in.
‘You’re wet.’
‘Spraying at the harbour.’ I shake off my jacket. ‘Tide’s high.’
‘You’ve been gone for hours.’
‘Walking. Thinking, mainly, I guess.’
She sets down the journal and pushes her glasses up onto her blonde hair, watching me. ‘And?’
‘Scotland. I’m coming.’
She doesn’t smile immediately. I watch the hope move through her face before she catches it – the slight lift at the corners of her mouth, quickly managed, then the careful lowering of expectation that follows.
‘Not permanently,’ I say. ‘Not yet. But I do want to try. Give it a proper chance.’
Now the smile comes. Genuine. Bright. The smile I remember from uni, from library mornings and shared lecture notes and sleepy mornings tangled in bed when we were innocent enough to believe that nothing else mattered. The version of my life where things were simpler.
‘Tom. That’s—’ She stands. Crosses to me. Her hands come up to my face.
She leans in to kiss me.
I turn my head and hate myself for doing it. Her lips land on my cheek. My hands stay at my sides.
The moment freezes. She pulls back. The smile doesn’t die – it rearranges itself into something braced. Something that knows how to absorb a blow and keep standing.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I just—’
‘It’s fine.’
‘It’s not that I don’t—’
‘Tom. It’s fine.’ She steps back and wraps her arms around her middle. ‘I understand. One step at a time.’
‘The practice and our professional partnership. I want to see if it works before—’ My throat is achingly tight.
‘Before we add anything else to it.’ She nods. Her voice is steady. ‘A professional arrangement.’
‘A starting point.’ I reach for her hand. She lets me take it, but her fingers don’t curl around mine the way they usually do. They just rest there. Patient. Waiting.
‘I can’t promise more than that,’ I say. ‘Not yet. But I can promise I’ll try. Honestly try.’
She looks at me. The assessment is brief and thorough, but then she smiles, brilliant and bright, and deep inside of me I hope it’s a smile that one day I’ll be falling into and never looking back from.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘One step at a time.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me yet. You might hate Scotland. The weather’s brutal, and the midges are worse. When do you think you’ll come?’
‘A month. Maybe six weeks. Dad needs help with putting cover in place as he winds the practice down.’ My stomach twists but I ignore it.
‘I’ll go ahead. Start setting up.’ She pauses. ‘Find a flat near the practice. Two bedrooms. Separate. Very professional.’
‘Cara—’
‘I’m teasing.’ She’s not entirely teasing. ‘When will you tell everyone?’
I pause for a beat, a breath, but then, well, fuck. If I’m doing this, I’m doing this. All in, for once in my life.
‘Friday.’ I lift my shoulders, and as I let them drop the relief of finally choosing a path washes through me. ‘Everyone will be at The Ship.’
‘Friday it is.’ She picks up her journal. Opens it. Closes it. ‘Tom?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I know this isn’t—’ She stops. Looks at the journal in her hands, the veterinary text she’s been reading in my flat, in my life, waiting for me to catch up to where she’s been standing.
‘I didn’t come here just to try and steal you away.
And I know what happened between us at the wedding was just fun, but I know professionally we would be great together, and personally…
’ Her astute gaze sweeps up and down my body. ‘I think you’ll be worth the wait.’
I swear my heart is hammering. Excitement? Panic? Who knows. ‘Okay.’
‘Now go shower. You smell like the Atlantic.’
Friday night at The Ship. The whole village crammed in, the way it always is, with Ayo pulling pints, forgoing one of his gaudy jumpers for a flamingo pink Hawaiian shirt, Bill and Frankie in their corner, Dot holding court at the bar, the fishermen around the dartboard arguing about something that will never be resolved.
Isla, who’s no longer looking murderous, is wedged into a booth with Kit, one hand on the swell of her belly.
‘You look radiant,’ Kit says.
‘I’m starting to look like I’ve swallowed a space hopper.’ This isn’t true. Isla Quinn is stunning, even when pregnant and wearing fancy branded dungarees and T-shirt.
Jude waves us over. He’s at the big table near the window – Brynn beside him, Hayley and her new boyfriend, a couple of the lifeboat crew.
And Nina.
She’s at the far end of the table, wine glass in hand, listening to Brynn.
When she sees me her face goes still – not blank, not angry.
Just still. The stillness of a woman who used to be in constant motion and has been learning, painfully, to hold herself quiet.
Nina being still is the most alarming thing I’ve ever seen.
It means she’s holding on to everything she’s afraid of dropping.
‘Tom. Cara.’ Jude nods at the empty chairs. ‘Grab a seat.’
We sit, Cara sliding in first, with me behind her. The bench seems small tonight. I end up across from Nina, which is either the universe’s cruelty or Jude’s idea of poetic justice.
Nina picks up her wine. Drinks. Doesn’t look at me.
‘So,’ Hayley says. ‘When’s the big announcement?’
‘What announcement?’ Brynn.
‘Tom’s got news. He’s been weird about it all week.’
‘I haven’t been weird.’
‘You’ve been weirder than usual. Which for you is significant.’
Cara’s hand finds my back and starts to move in slow, warm and steady circles. Supportive. I feel Nina’s eyes track the movement. A fractional glance, there and gone, and then she’s looking at her glass again.
‘Go on, then,’ Jude says. ‘Out with it.’
I take a breath but it doesn’t feel enough. ‘I’m moving to Scotland.’
The table erupts.
‘Scotland?’
‘When?’
‘What about the practice?’
‘What about—’
‘Cara’s found a partnership opportunity.’ I keep my voice level. I do not look at Nina. I look at the table, at Jude, at my hands around my pint glass. ‘A practice near Inverness. We’re going to run it together.’
‘Together,’ Hayley says, looking between us. ‘Together together, or—’
‘Business partners,’ Cara says. Her hand is still on my back. Still circling. ‘For now.’
‘For now.’ Hayley grins. ‘Right.’
‘When do you leave?’ Brynn asks. Her voice is light but I don’t miss her gaze flicking to Nina; brief, worried.
‘Cara’s going back in a couple of days. I’ll follow in a month.’
‘A month.’ Jude leans back. ‘Rather quick, mate.’
‘No point dragging it out.’
‘No,’ Jude says. ‘I suppose not.’
The silence that follows has a texture. Heavy. Full of everything he’s choosing not to say in front of a table of people.
Tilly arrives, drawn by the commotion. ‘What’s happened? What’s everyone looking so serious about?’
‘Tom’s leaving,’ Hayley says. ‘He’s going to Scotland. With Cara.’
‘Scotland!’ Tilly clutches her chest. ‘So you made up your mind then? What about your father? What about—’ Her eyes slide to Nina. The slide is not subtle. ‘What about everything?’
‘Dad’s sorting a temporary replacement until he winds the practice down. Everything else—’ I shrug. The shrug costs more than it should. ‘It’s time.’
‘Time,’ Tilly repeats. ‘So the village isn’t going to have a vet’s surgery any longer?’
It hits me in the gut and I’m sure Cara pauses.
I shrug. It hurts a little, somewhere down deep in that filing cabinet I like to keep things. ‘Pencross isn’t far away. They have a surgery, it’s not far.’
‘Pencross is Pencross,’ she states with one last soul-searching glance across my face before she turns back to the bar.
I let myself look at Nina.
She’s holding her wine glass with both hands.
Not drinking. Not moving. Her bangles are silent on her wrists – no gestures, no motion, no Nina.
She’s looking at the table surface, and her face is so carefully arranged that I can see the effort of the arrangement, the way you can see the joins in plasterwork if you know where to look.
Our eyes meet.