Which won’t be for hours.
Days.
Weeks.
At least, it feels that way.
“Come on.” Jack catches me moping at the window. “Time to go.”
To therapy. Except, no one in the cosy place we wind up in calls it that. It’s Regiment blokes—there’s a lot of them round here—drinking bad tea and pretending they came for the woodwork. It’s talking, listening, and not minding if no one ever finishes a story.
Some faces I know.
Some I don’t.
Everyone knows Jack, even if he doesn’t know them.
We stay all day, the dogs we brought with us running riot in the big old house in the sticks. Can’t say I feel much different by the time we go home, but the rage that still descends on me over the stupidest fucking things…it’s less ever since I starting coming here with Jack, and Vinnie’s ghost bollocks me less.
I drive us back, settled in Jack’s muddled company—he’s tired—and nursing Sol’s shit car along the winding roads, wondering how he’d feel about me pushing it off a cliff.
I’m still wondering when we get home. But Saint Malone is waiting for us, and Jack’s heavy sigh brings me back to earth.
“This is the right thing for them, isn’t it?”
“It was your idea,” I remind him. “I don’t mind taking them all out a thousand times a day.”
“You’re just trying to get out of pulling pints.”
“Never going to happen.”
Jack chuckles, accepting it. I’ve taken over all the admin for the pub, everything bar the social media devilry, and I’ll do anything else he needs—fix walls, mend fences, clean the fucking toilets. But I’m not built for customer service, and every fucker in Porth Luck knows it.
We join Saint at the back door and lead him inside. It feels weird to see him indoors, don’t know why. Just that he has the air of every nomadic shepherd I’ve ever met. Talks like them too. As in, it’s hard to draw a word from him.
I watch him regard the two light-coated pups, tilting his head as they rough each other up, hassling their mam, before they sniff him out for a sucker and fall asleep in his lap. “Which one are you keeping?”
Saint points to the smaller pup. The male. He’s the same silver as sunlit river stones and eats every shoe he gets to first.
“He have a name?”
Saint shakes his head and points to the female pup. The one he’s bringing home for Folk and his family—the soldier who served in Mali and a little girl who calls meMalcombecause fucking Skylar told her to. “Ariel.”
“Like the mermaid?”
He shrugs and it’s time to say goodbye. To the pups, not him. Saint doesn’t have my number and I don’t have his, but I see him more than Whitlock these days. Cam too, since his family construction firm started rebuilding the burned-out lifeguard base.
“I can drop you in Truro.”
I blink, not expecting Saint to speak again. We’re outside by now, and he’s loaded the pups into a crate on the back seat, strapped it down like he’s planning to fly the SUV he rocked up in to the fucking moon. “Truro?”
Saint tilts his head, waiting for me to catch up. When I don’t, he points to the sky…
Skylar.
Fuck yeah.
I check in with Jack—he’s already keeping busy to distract himself. Then I take Saint up on his offer and endure the quietest road trip on earth into Truro.
