Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
NINA
The first three days are easy.
We text constantly. Stupid things, mostly. Photos of his terrible Scottish coffee. Updates on a donkey’s digestive saga. A selfie of him looking miserable in the rain with the caption: Miss you. Miss the sun. Miss everything.
It’s raining here too, I text back.
Yeah but it’s Cornish rain. Cornish rain has character.
Rain is rain.
Wrong. Cornish rain is romantic. Scottish rain is aggressive. It’s horizontal. It has intentions.
I laugh out loud in the middle of the café. Dot looks up from her crossword.
‘Something funny, dear?’
‘Just Tom.’
‘Ah.’ She goes back to her puzzle. ‘The boy finally pulled his head out, did he?’
‘Dot.’
‘What? I’m old. I’m allowed to be blunt.’ She fills in a word with great satisfaction. ‘I thought you’d both die of stubbornness before anything happened.’
‘We weren’t stubborn.’
‘You were the dictionary definition of stubborn. Both of you. Dancing around each other like a pair of nervous pigeons.’ She looks up again. ‘But you got there in the end. That’s what matters.’
I don’t argue. She’s not wrong.
Day four, the texts slow down.
Busy day, Tom writes. Surgery backed up. Talk tonight?
Of course. Good luck with the animals.
Thanks. Miss you.
Miss you too.
That night, he calls. He sounds tired – the bone-deep tired of a man who’s been on his feet for twelve hours and hasn’t sat down.
‘Long day?’
‘The longest. Remember I told you about Mrs Buchannan when I was back home? Apparently that insane King Charles spaniel of hers, Sir Archibald, has been looking at her suspiciously again.’
‘Maybe he’s just judging her life choices.’
‘That’s what I said. She didn’t appreciate it. Maybe they are both as insane as each other.’ He yawns. ‘How’s the boat coming?’
‘Good. Emmett finished the serving hatch today. It actually looks like a café now. A floating café.’
‘Send me pictures.’
‘Tomorrow. When the light’s better.’
‘I want to see it.’ His voice softens – drops into a register that I’m now learning is just for me. Because he loves me. ‘I want to see everything.’
‘You will. Soon.’
‘Eleven more days.’
‘Eleven more days.’
A pause. I can hear him breathing. Can picture him in the magnolia cottage, lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling in the silence where the sea should be. I try hard not to think about him sharing the cottage with Cara.
‘I hate this,’ he says.
‘I know.’
‘I hate being here when you’re there.’
‘I know.’
Another yawn. ‘Sorry. I’m knackered. I should sleep.’
‘Sleep. Call me tomorrow.’
‘I will.’ A pause. Longer this time. The quality of the silence changes – thickens, becomes deliberate. ‘Nina?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I love you.’
The words arrive down the phone line and land in my chest like a key turning. I press my hand flat against my sternum. Close my eyes.
‘I should have said that before I left,’ he says. ‘I should have said it eleven years ago. But I’m saying it now.’
‘I love you too.’ My voice comes out rough. Cracked at the edges. ‘I love you too, Tom.’
‘Good. That’s…’ I can hear him smiling. The shape of it in his voice. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
Days six and seven blur together. The texts get shorter. The calls get briefer. He’s busy, he says. Wrapping things up. Handing over patients. Saying goodbye.
I tell myself it’s fine. He’s got a lot to do. He’s coming back. He promised.
But there’s a knot in my stomach that tightens every time I check my phone and find nothing new.
‘You’re being paranoid,’ Brynn says the following afternoon. We’re on the boat – Lavender Dreams, my boat now – painting the cabin walls a soft sage green. Paint on our hands, paint on our jeans, the harbour rocking gently beneath us. ‘He said he’s coming back. He’s coming back.’
‘I know.’
‘So stop looking at your phone every thirty seconds.’
‘I’m not—’ I look at my phone. No new messages. ‘I’m just checking.’
‘Paranoid.’ She dips her brush. ‘He loves you. You love him. It’s going to be fine.’
‘What if Cara—’
‘Cara’s not a threat. She’s his colleague. His ex-almost-something. She’s not you.’
‘But she’s there. And I’m here.’
‘For a couple of weeks, if that. Then he’s here too.’ Brynn sets down her brush. ‘Nina. Look at me.’
I look at her.
‘Tom Darcy has been in love with you since before I met you. He’s not going to throw that away for some Scottish vet with good cheekbones.’
‘She does have good cheekbones.’
‘Everyone has good cheekbones in the right lighting. Stop spiralling.’
I try to stop spiralling. I paint sage-green walls and sand rough edges and imagine Tom here, beside me, helping. His sleeves rolled up. His dry commentary on my brushwork. The specific, unhurried way he’d do everything – measuring twice, cutting once, getting it right.
Nine more days.
I can wait nine more days.
Day eight. No call.
I text: Everything okay?
Three hours later: Sorry, crazy day. Talk tomorrow. Promise.
Day nine. A brief call. Five minutes. He sounds distracted. There’s noise in the background – voices, music, laughter.
‘Where are you?’
‘At the surgery. We’re having a goodbye thing. Drinks after work.’
‘Oh.’ I keep my voice light. It takes effort. ‘Sounds fun.’
‘It’s fine. Everyone’s being nice.’ A pause. ‘I miss you.’
‘I miss you too.’
‘Six more days.’
‘Six more days.’
‘I have to go. They’re doing speeches. Apparently I’m supposed to look moved.’
‘Go. Be moved. Call me later.’
‘I will.’
He doesn’t.
Day ten.
I wake at four in the morning with the knot in my stomach pulled so tight it’s hard to breathe and I’m covered in sweat.
This is stupid. I’m being stupid. He loves me. He said he loves me. He’s coming back.
But the silence is loud. And every hour that passes without hearing his voice makes the space between us feel less like distance and more like a gap that’s widening. More like the depth of the ocean.
I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the harbour, and I make a decision.
I’m not waiting five more days.
The drive to Scotland takes eleven hours. I decide to drive because I don’t want to ask anyone for a lift to the airport and I don’t fancy the thought of changing planes at Gatwick. Driving seems easier.
I don’t tell anyone I’m going. Not Brynn, who’d try to talk me out of it. Not Mum, who’d worry. I just pack a bag, leave a note for Dot to open the café if she can, or not if she can’t, and drive.
The landscape changes as I travel. The green softens past Devon.
The hills flatten through the Midlands – miles of grey motorway and average-speed cameras and the kind of scenery that exists only to be driven through.
I stop for coffee near Birmingham, in a services that smells of floor cleaner and reheated sausage rolls, and I sit in the car park drinking it and wondering if this is brave or insane.
Both, probably. Both is fine.
North of Manchester the hills return – steeper, darker, the heather-bruised greens Tom described.
I roll down the window and the air that comes in is cold and sharp and smells of earth and rain.
Not the sea. Not home. There’s a bleak wilderness up here and I wonder what Tom’s first impressions were.
I cross the border in the late afternoon.
I swear the light in Scotland is different – the sun sits lower.
My back aches. My hands are stiff on the wheel.
I’ve been driving for nine hours and I haven’t listened to the radio once – just the road and my own breathing and the steady churn of thoughts I can’t switch off.
I’ve never been to Scotland. Never had a reason to go. But I’ve got a reason now, and his name is Tom Darcy, and I’m done waiting for him to come to me.
I park. Check my reflection in the mirror. Tired – eleven hours of driving will do that. Meh, it’s not terrible. My hair’s a disaster. I don’t care. I get out. Walk towards the entrance.
And then I see them.
Through the window. The big glass window that looks into what must be the staff room.
Tom and Cara.
She’s hugging him. Her arms around his neck, her face pressed against his shoulder. And he’s hugging her back – his hands on her waist, his chin resting on her head, his eyes closed.
I stop.
They pull apart. She says something – I can see her lips moving, a smile on her face. He laughs. Reaches up. Tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.
The gesture is small. Unconscious. The kind of thing you don’t think about because your hands know where they belong.
I watch his fingers against her hair and the world goes very quiet.
Not silent – I can hear the car park, the wind, a bird somewhere – but quiet like when someone stops breathing.
Like when they fall to the bottom of the ocean and never come back.
The ambient noise continues. Something fundamental has stopped.
I step backward. One step. Two. The gravel crunches under my feet, and for a terrible second I think he’ll hear it, look up, see me through the glass.
But he doesn’t. He’s looking at Cara. His hand drops from her hair and he says something else and she laughs, and the ease between them – the comfort, the familiarity, the absence of eleven years of longing and complication – is the thing that breaks me.
Not the hug. Not the hair. The ease.
Cara is easy. Cara is simple. Cara is the life that makes sense.
I turn. Walk back to the car. Get in. Close the door.
My hands are on the steering wheel. I can feel the leather under my fingers. I can see the practice through the windscreen, the lit windows, the two shapes inside.
I start the engine. Pull out of the car park. The village passes – grey houses, grey hills, grey sky – and I drive south, and I don’t look back.
I don’t cry until Carlisle.
Then I have to pull over because I can’t see the road. I sit on the hard shoulder with lorries thundering past and I press my forehead to the steering wheel and I cry the way I cried when Peter died – ugly, total, ending.
I sit there until the tears stop. Until my breathing steadies. Until the shaking in my hands subsides enough to grip the wheel.
Then I pull back onto the motorway, and I drive.
Through the dark. Through the Midlands and the southwest and the narrowing lanes.
Past Exeter, where, Tom whispered in the depth of night, his chest loosened on the drive home.
Past every mile I drove this morning in the opposite direction, full of hope, full of the reckless certainty that I was finally doing the brave thing.
I arrive back in Sea Salt Bay at half past six in the morning. The village is dark. The harbour is still.
I let myself in to the café. Lock the door behind me.
Walk through the dark without turning on the lights – past the counter, past the chalkboard, past the pink bear in the corner that Tom won at the fete, which I’ve kept because I keep everything he’s given me, because apparently that’s what I do; I collect the evidence of a love I was too blind to see and too late to hold.
Upstairs, the flat smells of him. His aftershave on the pillow.
The sheets I haven’t washed because I’m pathetic, because I wanted to keep the smell of him a little longer, because I am a twenty-eight-year-old woman who drove eleven hours to surprise a man and found him with his hands in another woman’s hair.
I sit on the edge of the bed. I don’t cry again. I’m empty of it.
I take out my phone. No messages. No missed calls. The last text from Tom, two days ago: Sorry, crazy day.
I put the phone face-down on the nightstand.
I take off my shoes. Lie down on the bed, on top of the covers, fully dressed.
The harbour sounds come through the window. The gulls. The waves. The halyards. The sounds of home, carrying on regardless, the way they always do.
I close my eyes.
And I try very hard not to think about the ease on Tom Darcy’s face when he looked at Cara, and how it looked nothing like the way he looks at me, and how maybe that’s the point – maybe ease is what people actually want, and the rest of it – the eleven years, the waiting, the desperate midnight drives – is just a story I told myself because the truth was too simple to bear.
He chose the simple thing. The easy thing.
And I drove eleven hours to watch him do it.