Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
JUDE
I’ve memorised the pattern on the ceiling tiles.
Seventeen holes across. Twenty-three down. Three hundred and ninety-one holes per tile, give or take the ones obscured by the light fitting. I’ve counted them three times now. Got the same number twice.
It’s something to do. Something that isn’t thinking.
Dad’s been asleep for hours. Or pretending to be.
Hard to tell with him – he’s always been good at shutting people out, and what better way than unconsciousness?
The doctors come and go, check his charts, adjust his drips, speak to me in calm, measured tones about recovery and prognosis and lifestyle changes going forward.
I nod. Say the right things. Don’t process any of it.
The chair has moulded itself to my body. Or maybe my body has moulded itself to the chair. Either way, we’ve become one entity – me and this plastic seat and the view of my father’s slack face and the smell of antiseptic and recycled air.
I should eat. Should shower. Should change out of these clothes that still smell like salt water and fish guts and the worst morning of my life.
I don’t move.
I told the boys you didn’t want them.
The words keep circling. Vultures over carrion.
The letters. I burned them. Every one.
Twenty years.
And it was a lie.
She wrote to us. She tried. And he burned the evidence, one letter at a time, until there was nothing left but ash and silence.
I look at him – this man I’ve spent my whole life trying to please. Reuben Harding, pillar of Sea Salt Bay, keeper of tradition, captain of the family ship. I gave up the dream of Plymouth for him. Stayed here instead, hauling nets and sending invoices, balancing books, and slowly losing my mind.
For what?
For a man who looked his nine-year-old son in the eye and said, Your mother doesn’t want you anymore.
The door opens.
I don’t turn. Probably another nurse, another doctor, another person with a clipboard and a careful expression.
‘Christ, Jude. You look like shit.’
Kit.
I’m on my feet before I know I’m moving. He’s standing in the doorway – my brother, three thousand miles from where he should be, looking rumpled and exhausted and exactly like home.
‘Kit.’
He crosses the room in three strides and pulls me into a hug. Tight. Fierce. The kind of hug we haven’t shared since Jess’s funeral, when we held each other in the church car park and pretended we weren’t falling apart.
I let myself lean into it. Just for a second.
‘When did you land?’ My voice comes out rough. Unused.
‘Couple of hours ago. Dropped Maisie with Nina, she wanted to come straight here, but…’ He pulls back, studies my face. ‘I thought we should talk first.’
‘How is she?’
‘Knackered from the flight.’ Kit’s mouth twists. ‘She’s got opinions about aeroplane food. And she’s not afraid to voice them.’
That sounds like Maisie. I almost smile.
Kit moves past me, toward the bed. Stands there looking down at our father with an expression I can’t read.
‘He looks old,’ he says quietly.
‘He is old.’
‘No, I mean—’ Kit shakes his head. ‘I still picture him the way he’s always been. Indestructible. Now look at him.’
We stand there in silence. The machines beep. Dad doesn’t stir.
‘Have you talked to him?’ Kit asks. ‘Since it happened?’
‘No.’
‘Jude—’
‘I can’t.’ The words come out sharper than I intend. ‘Not yet. Not after what he said.’
Kit turns to look at me. ‘What do you mean? What did he say?’
Right. He doesn’t know.
I sink back into the chair. My chair. The one that knows the shape of my spine now.
‘Sit down,’ I say. ‘This is going to take a while.’
Kit doesn’t interrupt.
That’s always been the difference between us. I talk too much, fill silences, make jokes when things get heavy. Kit just listens. Takes it in. Processes.
I tell him everything. Brynn appearing in the doorway. Dad waking up, confused, calling her Helen. The confession that poured out of him – the affair, the ultimatum, the letters he burned.
Kit’s face doesn’t change as I speak. But his hands do. They start loose in his lap and gradually tighten, knuckles going white, until he’s gripping his own thighs like he’s trying to hold himself in place.
When I finish, the silence stretches.
‘She tried to contact us,’ Kit says finally. His voice is flat. Careful. ‘For years.’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘And he burned the letters.’
‘Yes.’
‘Every one.’
‘Yes.’
Kit stands up abruptly. Walks to the window. Stands there with his back to me, shoulders rigid.
I wait.
‘I used to check the post,’ he says. ‘When I was thirteen, fourteen. Every day, I’d get home from school and check the post before Dad could get to it. I thought maybe—’ He stops. Swallows. ‘I thought maybe she’d write. Explain. Tell us why she left.’
There’s this heavy thudding behind my heart. An ache. ‘Kit—’
‘She did write. She did explain.’ His voice cracks. ‘And I never saw it. Because he made sure I wouldn’t.’
‘I know.’
‘Twenty years, Jude. Twenty years of thinking she didn’t want us. Of thinking we weren’t enough.’ He turns around, and his eyes are wet. Kit, who never cries. Kit, who held it together through Jess’s diagnosis and treatment and death. ‘Do you know what that did to me? To us?’
I don’t answer. Don’t need to.
‘When Jess got sick,’ Kit says, ‘I kept waiting for it to feel different. For the grief to be … clean, I suppose. Just about losing her.’ He laughs, but it’s bitter.
Broken. ‘But it wasn’t. Every time she got worse, every time the doctors had more bad news, there was this voice in my head saying, You’re going to be left again.
Like I couldn’t even grieve properly because it was all tangled up with Mum. ’
‘Kit—’
‘And Isla.’ He shakes his head. ‘When we first got together, I almost sabotaged it. Kept waiting for her to realise she could do better. That I was too much baggage, too much grief. Because that’s what I learned, wasn’t it? People leave. One way or another, people always leave.’
‘But she didn’t.’
‘No. She didn’t.’ Kit wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand. ‘She stayed. She’s still staying. And I spent so long not trusting that.’
I think about Brynn. About the way she saw through me from the start – the bravado, the jokes, the good soldier routine.
She noticed when I looked at the boat like it was a prison sentence.
Asked questions no one else bothered to ask, like what I actually wanted, what I’d do if I wasn’t tied to Harding and Sons.
She saw the real me. The one who doesn’t want this life. The one who feels like the spare son, filling in gaps around the size and shape of my big brother.
And I let her see it. I let her in.
‘What do we do?’ Kit asks. ‘About him. About Mum. About any of it.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We could find her.’ His voice is tentative. Testing. ‘Mum. She might still be—’
‘Sad thing is, Kit.’ I haul in a deep breath.
‘Brynn and I aren’t the first Harding and Trelawney.
Brynn found letters. From Mum to her father.
’ I can’t believe I’m saying the words. ‘Mum and Brynn’s dad had an affair, from what I can gather.
’ I shake my head. ‘Nothing is making any sense.’ I look at him wildly.
‘Is any of this making any sense to you?’
‘Brynn?’ Kit’s gaze sweeps across me, big brother concern, and shameless reading between the lines in the expression on my face. ‘The woman you’re in love with? The one you were telling me about when—’
‘Yeah.’
Kit stares at me. ‘Of all the women in Cornwall. Of all the women in the entire world. You picked a Trelawney?’
‘I didn’t pick anything. It just happened.’
‘Things like that don’t just happen.’ Kit runs a hand through his hair. ‘Dad must have been thrilled. No wonder he had a bloody heart attack.’
‘That’s not funny.’
‘It’s not meant to be.’ Kit shakes his head. ‘A Harding and a Trelawney. Wow. Do you have a death wish?’
I don’t say anything.
‘Where is she?’ Kit asks. ‘Brynn. Why isn’t she here?’
The question lands like a stone in my gut.
‘I told her to leave.’
‘You what?’
‘After Dad – after he said what he said.’ I stare at my hands. ‘She was standing in the doorway and I could see it on her face. She already knew. About Mum and her father. About all of it.’
Kit’s quiet for a moment.
‘How long had she known?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t let her explain.’
‘You didn’t—’ Kit stops. Rubs his forehead. ‘Jude. You didn’t let her explain?’
‘What was there to explain? She knew the truth about our family and she kept it from me. She lay next to me every night knowing what her father did to our mother, and she never said a word.’
‘Like Dad kept it from us?’
The words land like a slap.
‘That’s different.’
‘Is it?’
‘He lied for twenty years. She—’
‘Kept a secret for how long? A few days? A week?’ Kit shakes his head. ‘I’m not saying she was right. But there’s a difference between decades of deliberate deception and someone struggling to find the words to tell you something devastating.’
‘She had plenty of time to find the words.’
‘Did she? Or did she spend that time trying to figure out how to tell you without destroying you?’ Kit looks at me, and there’s something in his face – not judgement, exactly.
More like recognition. ‘I know what it’s like to carry something you can’t say.
To wake up every morning thinking, Today I’ll tell them, and then finding a reason not to. ’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Jess’s diagnosis. I knew for three days before I told anyone.
Three days of smiling and pretending everything was fine while inside I was—’ He stops.
Breathes. ‘Dad found out. Asked why I hadn’t told him immediately.
And you know what I said? I said I was trying to protect everyone.
Give myself time to process before I had to deal with everyone else’s reactions. ’
I don’t say anything.
‘Maybe that’s what she was doing,’ Kit says quietly. ‘Maybe she was trying to protect you. Or herself. Or both.’
‘It’s not the same.’