I sigh. What am I doing? Talking to a dead man who can’t talk back?
“I met this woman, Da. And she was bright. Looking at her felt like a light in the dark. And I can’t help but wonder, is that how you felt about Ma? Like she put the colour back in your world?”
Rowan’s smile. Rowan’s laugh. Rowan’s face going lax in sleep. Rowan’s freckles. Her obnoxious clothes, and her stubborn grimace, and the way she closed her eyes when she swayed to the beat.
Nothing, I said. But she isn’t nothing to me. She’s everything. It isn’t rational, and it isn’t reasonable, and it doesn’t make any sense, and I drove her away because I’m not scared, I’m terrified,of feeling that way, of loving someone and losing them and never being able to crawl out of that hole, and now I’m the one who has nothing.
Nothing at all.
I stare at the farm. The thought of going back there, of all the work we have to do, of the phone calls I have to make, of dismantling the wedding, piece by piece, of putting it back to rights exhausts me.
The farm exhausts me.
Every memory I’ve ever made is here. I grew up among these walls: I played hide and seek in the haystacks, and waddled after Ma in the garden; I called the cows in with Da, and, when I was old enough, sat by the fire with him nursing a beer. My initials are carved in the Den’s door frame at various heights. My blood stains the kitchen flagstones where I cut myself peeling carrots. Every floorboard knows the weight and step of my tread.
The shadows of my past pass through me like ghosts, boy, teen, man, the loss and the anger and the guilt, the salt sweat and the tears, the echo of Da’s voice, the touch of Ma’s hand on my back, my brothers calling my name. I know the exact brick where Da smashed his beer the day Ma left, can taste the promise I made, barely ten, that I would never be like her. That I would never do the same.
No matter how far I try to wander, that promise always calls me back.
I love this land with every fibre and inch of my being.
I hate it with equal venom.
I’ve worked so hard, for so long, to keep the farm alive. To keep us afloat.
I don’t know if I can do it anymore.
I look back at Da’s grave.
“What do I do, Da? Where do I go from here?”
He doesn’t answer.
Only the memory of my own voice floating back on the wind.
Nothing.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Rowan
One year later
Shepherding twenty women onto a train is perhaps not in the same league as sheep-herding, and certainly many times easier than if they were children, but it is still no simple feat.
Train tickets are procured, lunches bought, and then there is the inevitable rush and stress as Suzy from Margate needs another coffee and Heather from Brighton needs to pee, but somehow there we are: racing through the barriers at Euston, my neon-pink hiking shirt and trusty ocean-blue bag leading the charge.
My phone buzzes with a text from Sophie:Good luck out there! Go get ‘em, tiger!
I laugh.
“Fuck me, I’m exhausted already,” Marnie jogs down the platform next to me, holding her side as if she’s about to fall apart.
“You don’t have to come, you know.”
“And miss Single Woman Walking’s first expedition? Absolutely bloody not.”
Single Woman Walking. I didn’t expect anything like this when I opened the account. I didn’t really expect anything at all. All I knew when I got back to London was that something needed to change. So I quit my job and started working in a café instead. I found a new place to live. I forced myself to go outside.
