Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
Nora is in her living room when she sees the email in her inbox. It’s been there for days but she’d not noticed it; there have been things to do, people to tell, he nearly died, we got married, I know, it’s mad, but it’s life.
It is weeks after they made it home. Weeks after they signed the paperwork at the registry office so that everything is formalised and finished.
Though is anything ever formal or finished when you’re human, she wonders aloud, to Shay and Robin and Freya, which prompts different answers, different conversations.
She wonders the same thing again, as she works from the sofa, tonight.
Robin is making dinner after insisting he was fine to do so; he feels right as rain, although when does rain ever feel right, right as sunlight, right as rainbows, he has decided to repurpose the phrase and she has decided to let him.
She is darning something into a sock; one of the many pairs she will soon stock in her art café that’ll sell like warm buttered croissants.
Items of clothing she will end up selling into gallery gift shops, which will turn into private commissions alongside her day job, though she does not know this yet.
So she puts down her needle and checks her emails and sees his name beside the subject line: LIFE CHANGED (AGAIN), and opens it, to read.
He has attached a photograph of some shortbread he’s sampled in Scotland.
There were mountains to climb much closer to home, he told her, the day that he left.
Munros to bag in honour of his dad, and this shortbread, he tells her now, is incredible, a family recipe that’s been handed down through generations and he’s going to send her some so she’ll be able to recreate it, preferably for Christmas, when he’s next home.
It’ll be nice to see you, he’s typed. Both of you.
Meaning her and Robin, or her and Josie; she is not sure; it does not matter.
She replies alongside the clang of saucepans in the kitchen, Robin singing to the song on the radio.
Says yes, us too. Can’t wait. Then she updates him on Robin’s progress, says Freya comes over almost daily, brings fresh tomatoes and big attitude and Josie sends bread and cake and handwritten notes and between them they’re saying we love you, we’re glad you’re alive, and that, she thinks, is the best thing, really; that being married is not the tragedy her mother had feared; that there are – were – far worse things out there.
I’ve been thinking a lot about our mothers, she types back to Bren. How remarkable it is that they’re still friends.
She knows he will not fully understand this, because some things are meant to stay secret.
Some things won’t be conceivable to someone who took twelve years to process his grief, or to forgive himself; he’s unlikely to comprehend the layers and shades of what love might look like between two people.
Between three.
But she sends it anyway. Ends the email with a kiss because he did, and thinks about him, and his stupid gold earring, and his red hair and green eyes and sits on the sofa with a warmth inside her when Robin calls out, ready?
And she is. Leaves her phone face-down on the cushions, wine poured, napkins out.
Hope you’re hungry, says her husband, as he lifts the pasta out of the pan, saying he added some of Freya’s peacevines, for pizzazz.
Smiling at her, mostly, Nora thinks, because he found a reason to use the word pizzazz at the dinner table.
And they sit down and they eat, and talk.
Another evening as the sun sinks behind the shed in the yard, weeds growing between the brick.
Gutters cleaned. Windows open, to let in the summer breeze.
Life happening, in this kitchen, and beyond.