Sometimes I find myself wondering what would happen if Joel and Finn met—whether they’d be wary of each other or hit it off straightaway.
But, like Joel, Finn is thoughtful too, alwaysinterested. He listens to what I say, rubs my feet while I talk, remembers the small details—that I prefer coffee on top of milk, love raspberries and Ryan Gosling, never remember my umbrella, can’t stomach tequila.
All the ways he reminds me of Joel are comforting, and all the ways he doesn’t are charming. Like his unexpected passion for acid-house music, the library of nature books even bigger than mine that takes up almost his entire living room, that he can tolerate Scotch bonnets without so much as blinking. He has a gift for naming birds in flight—seriously,anybird—plus a secret and much-underrated talent for baking. He’s passionate about local and regional politics too, in a manner that makes me think of Grace.
This isn’t the first time Finn’s asked me to move in. His argument is that he owns his flat, so it makes more sense for me to live here. It’s set back from the seafront, on the top floor of a large Regency apartment block. The proportions are minuscule, but we’re only minutes from the sea. We can see it, just, from two of the rooms.
And I do love it here. I adore throwing open the windows, listening to the seagulls, breathing in the salty air. My memories of the first few weekends I spent here are deliciously primal—we barely left the bedroom, resurfacing only to eat or drink, pee or shower. We consumed everything in the flat—why waste time shopping or eating out?—took semi-ironic bubble baths, worked our way through everything on Finn’s iTunes, laid our heads in each other’s laps, and talked about the future.
It’s been only six months, so, yes, we’re moving fast. But fast can be exciting—like when a plane’s about to take off, or a roller coaster plummets. Scary, but exhilarating. Finn told me he loved me after only a fortnight, so when he brought up the idea of moving in together just a few weeks later, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
•••
I still think of Joel sometimes, especially when I’m back in Eversford. I’ve even ventured into the café a few times, sat in his old window seat and ordered a thick slab ofdrømmekage. I’ve thought about how he is—whether he’s happy, what he’s doing now, if there’s been any change to his dreaming. Dot’s assured me he’s not been in since we broke up, so I don’t need to panic about running into him. Which is good, because I have no idea what I’d do, or what I’d say, if I did.
Occasionally I find myself questioning if I did enough—if perhaps I should have fought harder—for us. Maybe he needed more from me and I let him down, failed him when it mattered most.
But then I run through all the reasons we let each other go, and I try to feel at peace again. Let it settle back down, the sadness that sleeps quietly inside me.
Slowly, I come to realize, Joel is strolling away. And in his place stands Finn, a lighthouse of a man, committed to loving me one hundred percent.
•••
“Champagne?” Finn calls from the kitchen.
The bottle in the fridge is an expensive one, Finn’s birthday gift from a jet-setting uni friend who always does her shopping in duty-free.
Because I’m moving to Brighton. I said yes. In the end, I couldn’t think of any reason to keep saying no. Six months is long enough, I reminded myself, and Finn says he’s got plenty of contacts who can help find me a job (which I don’t doubt). I’ll miss Mum and Dad, of course, and Esther and Gav and their gorgeous new baby, Delilah Grace. But they all adoreFinn, so I’m sure they’ll be thrilled. And, in the end, Finn’s right—all the back-and-forth was starting to seem slightly crazy. Because I want to be with him. I do. How strongly I feel about him... it’s nothing short of chemical.
So I said yes, and the joy on his face could have lit up a continent.
He reappears in the bedroom now, a T-shirt on like he thinks the occasion deserves that level of formality, at least. He’s brought the bottle with him and two glasses, pops the cork. The champagne erupts all over the carpet, and I laugh as he swears, chuck him a towel from the pile on the bed. Murphy, who comes with me whenever I’m here to stay, sniffs the wet patch suspiciously.
“Well,” Finn says, as he passes me a full glass, “let’s just say, I’m really glad I stumbled across you on a beach in Latvia, Callie Cooper.” We toast and I take a sip. It’s fresh from the fridge, sumptuously cold.
I look into his pool-blue eyes. “Me too. You were an excellent find, Finn Petersen.”
“These past six months have been the best of my life,” he says, his smile filling the room.
I smile back at him. “I’ll drink to that.”
•••
In the small hours of Monday morning, something shakes me awake. I had to catch the late train back to Eversford last night because until I can make the move to Brighton, normal life must resume.
I pull on a hoodie, head out into my cottage garden with Murphy at my heels, and blink into the dense blackness of the sky. I can’t see any stars tonight, maybe because of light pollution, or maybe it’s cloud.
There’s a cloud inside my mind too. It’s not guilt, exactly—more a sense of quiet unease.
I’ve never betrayed Joel by telling Finn about his dream, and I don’t intend to. But if we’re committing to a life together, I can’t help wondering if Finn has a right to know.
Trying to picture how he would react, I find myself imagining he’d simply laugh it off. It’s not that he’d trivialize it—more that he wouldn’t dwell on something he couldn’t change. His view of life is laissez-faire, philosophical. He doesn’t worry too much about money, or being punctual, or what other people think of him. I already know he’d see no need to get to the bottom of the thing, shine a torch into all its dark recesses. He’d accept from the start that no answer exists—or, if it does, that it’s as ephemeral as air.
I could have one year left, or ten, or fifty. Finn and I are creating our own future now, and the idea of that dwarfs everything. Joel’s dream has already started to dissipate, slip slowly into the shadows of my memory.
No. I won’t trouble Finn with something that seems less and less palpable with each new day that dawns.
When we first met, Finn asked why Joel and I had broken up. I told him, quite truthfully, that we’d wanted different things. Finn smiled in recognition, said the same thing had happened with his ex. And then we carried on walking, and we never discussed it again.
