Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
NINA
The text arrives at seven in the morning.
In Cornwall. Fancy lunch? E x
I stare at it for a long moment, brain still fuzzy with sleep.
E. Ellen. Peter’s mother. Whom I haven’t seen since the funeral.
She’d held my hand through the service, dry-eyed and steady, then disappeared back to Plymouth before I could fall apart properly.
We’ve texted occasionally, only awkward messages on birthdays, Christmas, the kind of stilted communication that happens when two people share a grief too big to fit into words.
And now she’s here, in Cornwall and fancying lunch.
The café at 12? I text back.
Perfect. I’ll bring gin.
That’s so Ellen. I almost smile.
She arrives at noon exactly, sweeping through the door with a bottle of Hendrick’s in one hand and sunglasses pushed into silver-streaked hair that’s been cut shorter since I last saw her.
‘Nina.’ She pulls me into a hug which is brief, firm, and intoxicated with expensive perfume. ‘You look tired.’
‘Thanks. You look—’
‘Incredible. I know. Lisbon for a month. Vitamin D and cheap wine.’ She releases me, sets the gin on the counter like she’s planting a flag. ‘Highly recommend it.’
She looks around the café. The chalkboard menu. The fuchsias in the window box, still going despite my neglect.
‘This place hasn’t changed,’ she says. ‘I like that. Everything else changes too bloody fast.’
I make her a gin and tonic – heavy on the gin, the way Peter always made them for her, the way she taught him – and a coffee for myself, even though I probably need what she’s having. We settle at the table by the window. The one with the best view of the harbour. The one Peter always liked.
Ellen notices. Doesn’t comment. Just runs her finger along the edge of the table and sits down.
‘So.’ She takes a sip. ‘How are you? And don’t say fine. I hate fine. Fine is what people say when they don’t want to answer the question.’
‘I’m…’ I search for a word that isn’t ‘fine’. ‘Surviving.’
‘Surviving.’ She considers this. ‘That’s honest, at least. Surviving is underrated. People expect you to be thriving six months in, posting inspirational quotes about resilience. Bollocks to that. Surviving is enough.’
‘How are you?’
‘Better.’ She says it simply. ‘Not good – I don’t think good is coming back, not fully. But better. I can get through a day without crying now. Most days.’
‘That’s progress.’
‘It is progress. I went to see someone – a therapist. Don’t make that face.’
‘I’m not making a face.’
‘You’re making a face. You look exactly like Peter when I suggested he eat a vegetable.
’ She takes another sip. ‘It helped. Genuinely. She reframed it for me – grief isn’t a tunnel with an end.
It’s a room you carry with you. Some days the room is enormous and you can’t find the door.
Some days it’s small enough to fit in your pocket. ’
‘Which is today?’
‘Pocket-sized. Just about.’ She turns back to me. ‘What about you? What size is your room?’
Outside the window, a fishing boat is coming in – slow, heavy, nets piled on the deck. The harbour water is flat and grey-green, barely moving. I think about the empty flat upstairs. The space where Chips used to sleep. The harbour wall where I stood and watched Tom’s car disappear into the mist.
‘Depends on the day,’ I say.
‘That sounds about right.’ Ellen turns her glass on the table, the tonic catching the light. Then, without preamble: ‘Tell me about this vet of yours.’
I blink. ‘What?’
‘The vet. Tom. The one who was with you at Peter’s funeral? Peter talked about him constantly. Tom said this, Tom thinks that, Tom’s the best man I know.’ She waves her hand. ‘I always assumed he was exaggerating – Peter exaggerated everything – but he seemed genuinely fond.’
‘Tom’s not—’ I stop. Start again. ‘He’s in Scotland now. He left a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Scotland.’ Ellen’s eyebrows rise. ‘That’s quite a distance. Work?’
‘A partnership. With a woman. Cara. They’re setting up a practice together.’
‘I see.’ She watches me over the rim of her glass. ‘And this woman. Is she—’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.’ I look down at my coffee. ‘We’re not really speaking at the moment.’
‘You and the woman?’
‘Me and Tom.’
Ellen sets down her glass. ‘Now that’s interesting. Peter always said you two were thick as thieves. Inseparable, he said. I think he was a bit jealous, actually – not in a bad way. Just aware that there was a history there he wasn’t part of.’
‘There’s no history. We’re just friends. Were just friends.’
‘Were.’ Ellen tilts her head. ‘Past tense.’
I don’t answer. I pick up my coffee instead, and it’s gone cold, and I drink it anyway because it gives my hands a purpose.
‘What happened?’ Ellen asks.
‘He kept something from me. About Peter. About – it doesn’t matter what. He kept it from me, and I found out, and now everything’s different.’
‘Different how?’
‘I don’t know.’ I set the mug down. ‘I trusted him completely. That was a pretty big secret to keep, Ellen. And I get it, at first when I was so bad and in such a dark place, sure, keep it secret to protect me. But what about now? I realised he didn’t tell me because he thought I was too broken to take it.
He didn’t have faith in my own strength to heal.
How could my best friend think that?’ This is the first time I’ve articulated these words to anyone.
Strangely, they are freeing. Once they are out, their power over me weakens.
Ellen is quiet for a moment. Watching me with that steady, assessing look that’s so like Peter’s it makes my chest hurt.
‘You miss him,’ she says. Not a question.
‘Of course I miss him. He’s my best friend.’
‘I meant the way you miss him.’ She turns her glass on the table.
‘Peter used to talk about you and Tom. How you’d finish each other’s sentences.
How Tom would drop everything if you called.
He said once – and I remember this because Peter didn’t say things like this – he said, Mum, those two don’t know what they’ve got.
’ She looks at me. ‘I always wondered what he meant by that.’
The café is very quiet. The coffee machine ticks and settles.
‘He was just being Peter,’ I say. ‘Reading into things.’
‘Maybe.’ Ellen picks up her gin. ‘Or maybe Peter could see something you couldn’t.
He was good at that – seeing people clearly.
Better than he was at seeing himself, God knows.
’ She takes a sip. ‘All I’m saying is, a woman who looks the way you look right now when she talks about her best friend moving to Scotland might want to sit with that for a minute. ’
‘Ellen—’
‘I’m not pushing. I’m observing.’ She leans back in her chair. ‘Peter loved you. That was real and true and I’m grateful for every day you had together. But he’s gone, Nina. He’s been gone for over nine months now.’ A beat. ‘And I didn’t raise my son to be a ghost that haunts the living.’
The words land a punch behind my ribs. I press my lips together and look at the table. Then look at the harbour. Look at anything that isn’t Ellen’s face, because Ellen’s face is full of a kindness I haven’t earned and can barely stand.
‘I know you’re not keeping a shrine,’ she says, quieter now. ‘I know you’ve kept the café going, kept yourself moving. But there’s a difference between surviving and living. And I’m not sure you’ve figured out which one you’re doing.’
I look at her. This woman who lost her only child. Who somehow found her way to Lisbon, to vitamin D and cheap wine, to pocket-sized grief. Who is sitting in her dead son’s favourite chair telling me to stop holding on.
‘How did you do it?’ I ask. ‘How did you start living again?’
‘I decided to.’ So simple. So direct. ‘One morning I woke up and I thought, Ellen, you can lie here and feel sorry for yourself, or you can book a flight somewhere warm and drink sangria until you remember what it feels like to be alive. So I booked the flight.’ She shrugs.
‘It’s not about forgetting him. I’ll never forget him.
But he’s not here anymore, and I am. That has to count for something. ’
The fishing boat has been tied up now. Two men on the quay, sorting nets, their voices carrying faintly through the glass.
The café smells of coffee and warm pastry and gin, and the light through the window has shifted from grey to something almost gold, the way it does in Sea Salt Bay when the cloud cover thins and the sun finds a gap.
‘I haven’t been to his boat,’ I say. ‘Not properly. Not since—’
‘Jenny’s Dream.’ Ellen tilts her head to read my face. ‘I wondered about that. What are you going to do with her?’
‘I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d want her. Or want me to sell her, split the money—’
‘God, no.’ Ellen laughs and it’s a proper laugh, startled out of her. ‘What would I do with a boat? I get seasick looking at the bath. No, she’s yours. Peter would have wanted you to have her.’
‘I can’t just leave her sitting there forever.’
‘Then don’t.’ Ellen sets down her empty glass. ‘Do something with her. Sell her. Sail her. Burn her, if it helps. But don’t let her rot at the mooring like some kind of monument. That’s no good for anyone.’
‘I’ve thought about—’ I stop. The idea feels fragile. Half-formed. Not ready for air.
‘Thought about what?’
I shake my head. ‘It’s stupid.’
‘Try me.’
‘There’s this thing I saw. In Bude. A floating coffee shack.
Someone converted an old boat, set up a little café on the water.
People row out to get their morning coffee, or they moor up alongside.
’ I’m talking to my hands now, not to Ellen.
‘It probably wouldn’t work here. The harbour’s too exposed in winter.
And the licensing would be a nightmare. And it’s Peter’s boat, I can’t just—’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s his.’
‘It was his. Now it’s yours.’ Ellen leans forward, elbows on the table. ‘And you’re a woman who runs a café, looking at a boat she doesn’t know what to do with. Seems like the universe is being fairly obvious about this one, Nina.’
‘But—’
‘Peter would have loved it.’ Her voice softens.
The sharpness drops away and underneath it is the voice of a mother who still knows her son, present tense, always.
‘He really would. You know what he was like – always had some scheme or other, always dreaming up ways to make things work. If you’d told him you wanted to turn Jenny’s Dream into a floating café, he’d have been down there with a paintbrush before you finished the sentence. ’
I can see it. That’s the thing. I can see him – sleeves rolled up, paint in his hair, grinning at me over the gunwale while he suggests some ridiculous addition like a karaoke machine or a slide.
The image doesn’t hurt the way it used to. It aches. But it’s a warm ache. The ache of a thing you loved that’s becoming a memory instead of a wound.
‘I’d rename her,’ I say quietly. ‘I couldn’t keep the name. Not for that.’
‘What would you call her?’
The answer has been sitting in the back of my mind for weeks. Maybe longer. I didn’t know it was there until Ellen asked.
‘Lavender Dreams.’ I say it and it feels real for the first time. Solid. ‘It combines – it’s both. The café and the boat. Peter and what comes next.’
Ellen looks at me for a long moment. Her eyes are bright – not with tears. Recognition. The look of a woman seeing someone take the first step out of a room she knows intimately.
‘Lavender Dreams,’ she repeats. ‘That’s perfect, Nina. That’s absolutely perfect.’
‘You don’t think it’s—’
‘I think my son fell in love with a woman who builds things. Who takes what’s broken and makes it whole again.’ She reaches across the table, takes my hand. ‘I think he’d be so proud of you. And I think it’s time you started being proud of yourself.’
My throat closes. I press my thumb into the edge of the table, hard, and breathe through it. Ellen doesn’t let go. She just holds my hand and waits, the way people who understand grief always do – without rushing, without fixing, just present.
She lets go of my hand. Picks up the menu.
‘Now. I’m starving, and I’ve been craving your cheese scones for eight months. Feed me, and then we’re going to look at this boat of yours. I want to see where my son spent all those hours pretending to fish.’
I laugh. It comes out rough. Unpractised. Like a door that’s been closed too long and sticks when you push it.
‘He was actually fishing. Sometimes.’
‘He was hiding from the world and calling it fishing. I’m not stupid.’ Ellen smiles. ‘But I loved him anyway. That’s what you do with the people you love. You let them be ridiculous, and you love them anyway.’
‘Ellen, wait.’ I stand before she can flag me down for scones. ‘I’ve got some of his things. Upstairs. I packed them a few weeks ago. His books, his binoculars, some clothes. I thought you might want them.’
Ellen looks at me for a moment. Then she taps her forehead with one finger.
‘I’ve got all the memories I need up here, love. An old jumper won’t make them any clearer.’ She pauses. ‘Keep them, if they bring you comfort. Donate them, if they don’t. But don’t hang on to things for my sake. I’ve got photographs. I’ve got thirty-two years of him driving me mad. That’s enough.’
‘Are you sure? The binoculars were expensive. And his bird book—’
‘Give the binoculars to someone who’ll use them. The bird book too.’ She shrugs. ‘Objects are just objects, Nina. They’re not him. He’s—’ She presses her hand flat against her chest. ‘He’s in here. For both of us. That doesn’t need a drawer.’
I nod. My eyes sting but nothing falls.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Okay.’
‘Good. Now. Scones. I wasn’t joking about being starving.’