Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
TOM
Three weeks later, the sun decides to cooperate.
It’s been threatening rain all week – grey skies, sharp winds, the kind of October weather that makes tourists regret their choices. But this morning, I wake to golden light streaming through Nina’s curtains and the sound of gulls screaming their approval.
Launch day. Lavender Dreams. The whole village is coming.
Nina’s already up. I can hear her downstairs, clattering around the café kitchen, probably stress-baking her third batch of scones.
She’s been like this for days – nervous energy crackling off her like static, unable to sit still, which is Nina’s natural state amplified to a frequency that makes the dog nervous.
Even Chips – returned for the weekend by his owners, who seem to have accepted that the dog has two homes now – is watching her from under the counter with an expression of concerned resignation.
I reach for my jacket on the chair. Check the pocket.
Still there.
The box is small. Velvet. Dark blue. Inside, a sapphire ring.
Not aquamarine, like Peter’s. A different stone.
A different man. But the same woman – the woman who told me once, walking past an antique shop in Truro, that sapphires were the colour of the sea when it catches the light.
Peter never knew that. That memory is mine.
‘Back again?’ she’d said. ‘For yourself this time?’
‘For myself this time.’
I stood in that shop and I thought about the last time I was there – watching Peter’s face as he chose, the shape of joy of a man about to change his life.
And I thought: I’m not replacing him. I’m continuing what he started.
He chose the aquamarine because of me. I’m choosing the sapphire because of her.
Not today, though. Today belongs to Nina and the boat. The ring stays in my pocket. I’ll know when.
The harbour is transformed by noon.
Bunting everywhere – strung between lampposts, draped along the quay, fluttering from masts.
Someone’s set up a speaker that’s playing sea shanties, which is either festive or aggressive depending on your feelings about maritime folk music.
There are tables laden with food, a makeshift bar courtesy of The Ship, and what looks like half of Cornwall gathered on the cobblestones.
‘Bloody hell.’ I stop at the top of the lane. ‘Did we invite these many people?’
‘I invited twelve people,’ Nina says beside me. ‘Dot invited everyone else.’
‘Of course she did.’
‘She says it’s good for tourism. “A floating café launch is exactly what this village needs. Puts us on the map.”’
‘We’re already on the map.’
‘Not Dot’s map. Her map is very exclusive.’
We make our way down through the crowd. Every few steps, someone stops us – congratulations, good luck, can’t wait. Mrs Henderson from the bakery. Old Malcolm from the chandlery. A cluster of teenagers who seem to know Nina.
‘Miss Ellis! Is it true you’re serving coffee on a boat?’
‘That’s the plan.’
‘Can we get jobs? We’re very responsible.’
‘You’re fifteen.’
‘Responsible fifteen-year-olds.’
‘Talk to me in three years.’
They disperse, disappointed but not defeated. Nina watches them go with an expression that’s half-amusement, half-recognition – seeing herself at that age, already dreaming about coffee on the water. Peter thought she was mad.
She was. That’s never been mutually exclusive with brilliant.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Let’s go see your boat.’
Lavender Dreams looks incredible.
The sage-green paint gleams in the sunlight.
The fairy lights – not lit yet, but ready – are strung along every rail and rafter.
The serving hatch is open, revealing the espresso machine within, polished and gleaming, the twin of the one in the café.
On the deck, cushions in shades of purple and blue.
Weatherproof. Inviting. The kind of place that makes you want to sit down and stay.
‘Nina.’ I stop at the gangway. ‘It’s perfect.’
‘It’s not. The awning’s crooked and I think one of the cushions is already stained and Marcus says the wiring might still—’
‘It’s perfect.’
She looks at it. Really looks – maybe for the first time today, through the fog of anxiety and logistics and the three-hundred-item checklist she’s been carrying in her head.
‘Yeah,’ she says softly. ‘Maybe it is.’
I put my arm around her. She leans into me.
We stand there looking at what she’s built – this woman who eight months ago couldn’t walk past a shuttered café without flinching, who six months ago couldn’t step onto this boat without crying, who has taken a dead man’s fishing vessel and turned it into the most beautiful thing in the harbour.
My hand drifts to my pocket. Touches the box. Not yet. But soon.
‘Right,’ Nina says. Puts on her game face. ‘Let’s do this.’
The launch is chaos in the best possible way.
Nina’s behind the hatch, pulling espresso shots like she’s been doing this her whole life – which, in a way, she has. Just on water now instead of land. The coffee is excellent. The lavender shortbread is beyond imagination.
Brynn’s on crowd control. Jude, who’s skipped classes for the day, is manning the till, looking baffled by the card reader but gamely trying.
Emmett from Newquay is standing by the gangway with the quiet pride of a man whose carpentry is being admired by a hundred people, and he keeps running his hand along the serving-hatch frame the way you’d pat a dog you’re proud of.
Kit appears at my elbow, baby Peter strapped to his chest in one of those complicated carrier things that makes every man who wears one look simultaneously heroic and ridiculous.
‘All right?’
‘All right.’
‘Big day.’
‘Massive.’
We stand there watching the crowd, two men who’ve never needed many words between them. Baby Peter makes a sound that could be approval or wind. Difficult to tell.
‘Nina,’ Kit says. Just the name. But the way he says it – the weight of it, the respect – says everything else.
‘Yeah,’ I say, and there’s a sigh there, and no, it’s not very manly, but it’s what I feel. I want to spend the rest of my days sighing with contentment.
‘Peter would’ve been down here with a paintbrush and the worlds proudest smile.’
‘He would.’
Kit adjusts the carrier. Looks at the boat. Looks at Nina through the hatch, laughing at something a customer’s said, her hair escaping its bun, chalk dust still on her apron from the specials board. ‘I’ll always regret the fact I changed the course of her life that night in the storm.’
I shake my head. ‘You can’t think that. It is what it is.’ Maybe if there hadn’t been a storm, maybe if Kit hadn’t been thrown from his boat into the water, maybe if I’d been the one to jump into those black depths and save him, not Peter. Maybe all of this would be different.
But it’s not.
‘Don’t be too patient,’ he says. ‘That’s all I wanted to say. Life’s short. You know that. I know that.’ He touches the top of baby Peter’s head. ‘He’ll know it, when he’s old enough. Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Just make the moment you’ve got count.’
My hand is in my pocket. On the box. ‘Yeah. I know.’
He claps me on the shoulder. Walks away. Baby Peter’s head bobs gently with each step.
Ellen arrives at two.
She’s wearing a blue dress and a wide smile, and when she sees the boat, she stops in the middle of the harbour and presses both hands to her heart.
‘Oh, Nina.’
Nina climbs down from the deck, wipes her hands on her apron, and crosses to Peter’s mother.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think—’ Ellen’s voice wobbles. ‘I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I think my son would have been down there with a paintbrush before you finished explaining. I think—’ She pulls Nina into a hug. Holds on. ‘I think you’ve done him proud.’
I watch them. Two women bound by a man who isn’t here anymore, building forward from the place where he left them. Ellen’s hand on Nina’s hair. Nina’s face on Ellen’s shoulder. It’s the tenderness of people who’ve survived the same loss and found their way to the other side of it.
When they separate, Nina reaches into her pocket.
‘I wanted to give you this.’
The ring box. Peter’s ring. The one Nina found in the sock drawer. The one that started everything.
Ellen’s hands shake as she takes it. Opens it. The simple gold band. The aquamarine – the first ring, the one I helped Peter choose, the one that was meant for Nina’s finger and ended up in a drawer because the sea took him before he could ask.
‘Nina—’
‘It should be with you.’ Nina closes Ellen’s fingers around the box. ‘It’s not goodbye. It’s just making sure he’s with the right person.’
Ellen looks at the box in her hand. Then at Nina. Then at me, over Nina’s shoulder – a long, steady look that says she sees the shape of my jacket pocket, or guesses it, or simply knows, the way Ellen always knows.
‘Thank you,’ she says to Nina. But her eyes are on me. ‘For loving him. And for loving well, after.’
By four o’clock, the coffee’s sold out and the pastries are nothing more than scattered crumbs.
Nina collapses onto one of the deck cushions. Exhausted. Glowing. The look of a woman who’s dreamed about something and watched it become real.
‘We did it,’ she says. ‘We actually did it.’
‘You did it.’ I sit beside her. ‘I carried trays.’
‘Very important trays.’
‘Essential trays.’
She laughs. Leans her head on my shoulder. The harbour stretches out before us, the village settling into evening, the light going golden.
‘Thank you,’ she says.
‘For what?’
‘For being here. For believing in this. For—’ She stops. Shakes her head. ‘For eleven years of everything. Even the years I didn’t know.’
She turns her hand over in her lap. The finger where Peter’s ring never sat. The finger I keep imagining a sapphire on. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking this is a good day,’ I say.
‘Yeah?’
‘The best day.’ My hand is in my pocket. On the box. The velvet warm from my body heat, the shape of it as familiar now as my own keys. ‘One of the best days.’
‘One of?’
‘There might be better ones coming.’
She looks at me. Her eyes narrow slightly – the Nina look that says she’s caught a thread and is deciding whether to pull it.
‘Tom Darcy. Are you being mysterious?’
‘I’m never mysterious. I’m a vet. Vets aren’t mysterious.’
‘You’re being something.’
‘I’m being optimistic. It’s been known to happen.’
She studies my face for another moment. Then decides to let it go. Leans back against me. Watches the harbour.
‘I could stay here forever,’ she says. ‘On this boat. In this village. With you.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
My fingers close around the box. Not yet.
But soon. When the day has settled. When it’s just us and the water and the fairy lights.
When the moment is right – not perfect, because perfect doesn’t exist, but right.
The way things are right when you’ve waited long enough and loved hard enough and finally, finally learned that the brave thing isn’t the grand gesture.
The brave thing is the staying.
‘Me too,’ I say. ‘Me too.’
The fairy lights come on as the sun goes down.
One by one, like the village is waking up in reverse – not into day but into the warm, golden glow of a Sea Salt Bay evening.
The boats nod. The water turns silver. Somewhere in The Ship, someone starts laughing, and the sound carries across the harbour like a bell.
Nina’s hand finds mine. Her fingers lace through mine. The ring in my pocket presses against my hip, patient, certain, waiting.
Like me.
Always like me.
But not for much longer.