He looks up at me and for the first time in days I feel like I’m fully seeing him. His face is soft. Gently I move the chair from in front of the small desk and sit down beside him.
‘What do you mean?’ I say quietly, glancing at the bed again, but Lorna continues to sleep soundly.
‘All these years I’ve blamed her for losing touch. But she wrote to me. I just never wrote back. I could have done, but I didn’t. I think maybe because I was still angry with her or maybe because it felt too hard. But I guess it must have been hard for her too.’
I consider this for a moment.
‘I suppose it’s hard on everyone when there are things unsaid,’ I say, ‘when there’s any stretch of time when you’re not communicating. It becomes harder and harder to say the words aloud.’
I swallow hard, and he nods.
‘There was a party in the woods once, with all the island teenagers. She invited me. And I so wanted to go. But instead I told our parents about it. I didn’t mean to, but it was like I didn’t even know how to be the kind of child who would sneak out and have fun with the others. I desperately wanted to but I couldn’t. I couldn’t be like her and I hated it.’
I reach across and place a hand on his knee and he places his palm on top.
‘You were young. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘But maybe it wasn’t hers either. I’ve spent years thinking it was. But she was just a child. When I was young I always thought of her as an adult in a way, because she was older than me and was confident in ways I wasn’t. But she was just a kid. When Lorna was fourteen I thought she knew everything there was to know, but I look at Molly …’
His voice cracks now and I know without him having to say anything that like me he’s thinking about that awful journey across the sea in the storm, discovering the oar and the broken hull and finally finding our daughter huddled under a tree.
‘Molly needs us to protect her,’ he continues. ‘Lorna needed that too.’
We both watch her for a moment, the blankets rising and falling with her breaths.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ I say gently.
He nods and we turn out the lights and walk hand in hand to our room, stopping via Molly’s bedroom to open the door a crack and peer inside at the two girls sleeping. Ever since arriving back on Kip I’ve found myself checking on Molly each night, just to make sure she is there and she is OK. Despite being back on dry land I still have a lingering sense of being on that boat in the storm, as though my stomach is still out at sea even if the rest of me is back here at home.
‘They’re so alike, aren’t they?’ says Jack. ‘Not just in the way they look but in their personalities. They could be sisters, not cousins.’
I lean my head on his shoulder and he kisses my hair.
Alone in our room we undress and slip in next to each other like we have thousands of times before. He passes me my glass of water which I set on my bedside table as he places his down on his.
And then I say the words I should have said months ago.
‘Jack, there’s something I need to tell you.’
We sit side by side in our bed, our hands held across the covers, as I tell him about Jean and about what it means for the school and the island too. I tell him about the hospital appointments Jean did her best to cover up, the way she’s steadily grown too unwell to attend my classes and how much we miss seeing her there every week, and about the job advert for the headteacher position that has gone unanswered, despite myself and the other governors sharing it with the local islands and anyone else who we think might be interested. By the time all the words are out my cheeks are streaked with tears, my body exhausted from all the emotion. But there’s a sort of lightness too, a feeling of having shared my load, of not having to carry it alone anymore.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he says, wiping my tears with his thumb.
I shuffle slightly, uncomfortable now.
‘I didn’t want to worry you, you have enough going on.’
He shakes his head, his grey eyes glinting in the lamplight.
‘But that’s not the way it works. Alice, it’s not your job to take on everything, to be the one telling everyone that things will be OK. I love you for it, and Molly does too, but we can help you too. I want to know when you’re worried, when you’re upset.’
He looks at me with such concern, the hardness and distance of the past few days gone. But I can’t forget that it was there, and that so often it is, pulling us apart from one another.
‘But, Jack, so often I get the feeling that you’re holding things back from me too. I guess it makes it harder to open up when there are things you don’t tell me.’
He sighs deeply, reaching a hand up to rub his jaw.
‘I know. I know, and I’m sorry.’ He reaches an arm around me again, pulling me close to his warm, familiar body, this place that has always felt so safe.
