Epilogue
AJ
Iam halfway to Fellside with one of Tom’s lasagnes in the passenger footwell, a box of pastries on the back seat and a property brochure folded inside my jacket pocket like it has become legally attached to my ribs.
This is not where I expected journalism to take me.
Admittedly, journalism has taken me to some strange places. Council meetings that lasted longer than some minor wars. Flooded roads. Charity fundraisers. Court corridors. One memorable afternoon in a village hall where three separate people accused each other of sabotaging a scarecrow competition.
But I did not expect it to take me here.
Friday evening. Heading into the Lakes. Driving towards a fire station where I am welcome enough to bring dinner.
Planning to spend the night in my girlfriend’s flat while she works a twelve-hour shift, so I can be there when she comes home in the morning and remind her to eat before she tries to survive on tea, toast and professional stubbornness.
Girlfriend.
It’s been six months since we agreed to give it a try, but the word still does something to me.
Not because it is new exactly. Six months is long enough for the shape of it to have settled around us.
Long enough for toothbrushes to appear in both bathrooms. Long enough for the drive between Carlisle and Fellside to become familiar in weather, darkness, traffic and the exact lay-by where the signal drops every single time I am trying to say something sensible.
But sometimes the word still catches me.
Girlfriend.
Pippa Hart, Watch Manager, breaker of journalists, woman who once told me she did not need anyone to improve on being alone and then somehow let me try.
My phone rings through the car speakers just as the road begins to climb.
I answer with one touch on the steering wheel.
“Please tell me you’re calling to say you miss me,” I say.
“I’m calling to ask about the lasagne,” Pippa laughs.
“Romance is alive.”
“It’s alive. It’s just hungry.”
I smile. “Is this you or Kev?”
“Kev is emotionally invested.”
“Of course he is.”
“Is it from Tom’s restaurant?”
“Obviously. I’m reckless, not suicidal.”
There is a pause, and I can hear station noise behind her. Voices. A door. The faint clatter of something metallic.
“Good,” she says. “Kev says if you’d brought supermarket lasagne, you’d have to eat it in the car.”
“That seems fair.”
“He also wants to know if there are mushrooms in it.”
“If Tom served lasagne with mushrooms in his restaurant, the ghosts of his Italian ancestors would never let him sleep again.”
“I’ll pass that on.”
“Please do. With gravity.”
Her laugh is quiet.
It is not much. A breath, really. A little crack in her working voice. But I know how to hear it now.
“Where are you?” she asks.
“About twenty minutes out. Maybe twenty-five if the sheep are feeling powerful.”
“Drive safely.”
Two words.
Ordinary words.
They still settle somewhere warm and impossible under my ribs.
“I will.”
“And AJ?”
“Yes?”
“I can’t wait for you to get here.”
The road curves. The hills open ahead of me. For a second, I forget every clever thing I have ever said.
“Me too,” I say.
“See you soon.”
The call ends, but her voice stays with me for the next five miles.
This is what she does now.
Not always. Not loudly. Not in ways that announce anything. But in private, in quiet corners, on calls made between shifts and deadlines and the odd hour after midnight, Pippa has become softer with me in a way that still feels like being trusted with something important.
She will let me make her breakfast after nights.
She will sit with her feet in my lap and pretend she is allowing it only because my hands are warm.
She will fall asleep against my shoulder on the sofa, then wake up and stay there.
She will call when I am driving in and pretend it is mainly about lasagne, then give me one sentence that stays with me all the way into the village.
I can’t wait for you to get here.
She is still Pippa.
She still tells me when I am overthinking. She still looks at me as if some of my sentences are causing structural damage. She still has the ability to say “AJ” in a tone that makes me reconsider every decision I have made since birth.
But she lets me look after her now.
Not because she needs managing. Not because she has become less strong. Because she trusts me enough to rest some of the weight in my hands.
And because I am not an idiot, or at least not entirely, I understand what that means.
The station is lit when I arrive, warm against the early dark.
It is November now, the evenings drawing in, the air wet and cool, the kind of weather that makes Fellside smell of leaves, stone and chimney smoke.
I park where I am allowed to park now, which still feels like an outrageous privilege, and lift the lasagne carefully from the passenger footwell.
I have barely made it through the door before Kev appears, hands already out.
“I’ll take that.”
I shift the dish slightly out of reach. “Absolutely not.”
“I’m helping.”
Mish appears behind him, takes in the situation, and removes the lasagne from my hands with calm authority.
“Kitchen,” she says. “Before this becomes an incident.”
Kev follows her with wounded dignity. “I was being useful.”
“You were being hungry.”
“That’s a type of useful.”
“It isn’t,” Pippa says, coming out of the office.
Her eyes find mine.
The station noise stays the same. But everything in me shifts towards her.
Pippa is in uniform, dark hair all messed up, face composed in that familiar working expression.
She looks tired already, but not worn down.
Just braced for the night ahead. She has a pen clipped to her shirt, a radio at her hip and the kind of presence that still makes everyone around her settle without noticing they are doing it.
I love her even if I haven’t told her.
That is the problem.
I have known it for weeks.
Possibly longer.
Possibly from the moment she stood in a bakery and told me she lived across the road with a look that rearranged my understanding of free will.
But tonight it sits at the front of my mouth, waiting.
She walks towards me, and there is no awkward pause now. No careful pretence. The crew know. Josh knows. Half the village probably knows, because Fellside treats privacy as a charming theory rather than a practical arrangement.
Pippa reaches me, slips one hand into the front of my jacket and pulls me down to her.
The kiss is brief because she is on duty.
But it is not hidden.
Not apologised for.
Not uncertain.
Her mouth is warm against mine, and her other hand rests for one second at my waist, grounding me there in the station she once wanted to keep me out of.
When she steps back, her eyes are softer than her voice.
“Did you bring dessert?”
“Pastries.”
Her thumb brushes the edge of my jacket before she lets go.
“Good man,” she says quietly.
I take it exactly as seriously as it deserves.
Dinner at the station is loud, warm and strangely perfect.
Tom’s lasagne disappears with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious relics. The garlic bread lasts under four minutes. The pastries are moved to a separate plate with the seriousness of evidence preservation.
Someone asks about my latest piece, and for once the question does not make me think of breaking news, deadlines or who got there first.
It makes me think of Mrs Radcliffe, who runs the bereavement café in Penrith and told me grief is easier when someone makes soup.
It makes me think of the retired gamekeeper I interviewed about fell rescue paths and how maps never show the emotional geography of a place.
It makes me think of the series Marie Louise gave me after the fire service piece ran and did what none of us had quite expected.
It landed.
Successfully.
People wrote in. Firefighters from other stations shared it. A woman whose husband had died in a house fire sent a letter saying it helped her understand why the crew had moved the way they did. Josh forwarded that one to me with no message, which somehow made it worse.
Marie Louise called me into her office the next day and said, “This is what you should be doing.”
I assumed she meant more emergency service pieces.
She did not.
She meant people.
Human stories. Local lives. Work that mattered quietly. The personal angle I had spent years treating as secondary because it did not come with the same noise as breaking news.
“You’re good when you stop trying to sound fast,” she told me.
I should have been offended.
I was, for nearly six seconds.
Then I realised she was right.
Now I do a mixture. Some news, still. Some deadlines.
Enough newsroom chaos to remind me why coffee was invented.
But more features. More time with people.
More listening. More work I can write from home two or three days a week, which has turned out to be less a professional compromise and more the first sensible decision I have made in years.
Home, however, has become a complicated word.
Because my flat in Carlisle is where my books are, and my laptop, and the neighbour who plays trumpet very badly on Sunday afternoons.
But Fellside is where Pippa is.
Fellside is where I drive now without needing the satnav.
Where the bakery woman knows I panic-buy cherry tarts when Pippa is on nights.
Where Josh has started saying, “Morning, AJ,” as if I am an unavoidable weather pattern.
Where Amanda once waved at me across the square with such sisterly assessment that I nearly walked into a bollard.
Fellside is where a cottage came onto the market two weeks ago.
Small. Stone. Two bedrooms. A garden that is mostly moss and optimism. Five minutes’ walk from the station. Eight minutes from Pippa’s flat if she walks briskly, which she always does. Close enough to Amanda and Nour that Sunday lunches would not require military planning.
I have viewed it twice.
Once alone.