“I talk to you!”
“About rugby and beer,” Jane replies. “Not my dreams.”
“We’ll discuss this later,” Callum mutters.
“Nate and Lily?”
Nate writes something down, hesitates, then adds more detail.
“To open a bed-and-breakfast in the Highlands.”
Lily stares at him in surprise.
“You look at real estate listings every night before bed,” he explains. “And you draw room layouts on your iPad.”
Lily lifts her notebook, emotional.
B&B in the Highlands.
“One point!” Maggie says. “Everyone’s incredibly romantic today. Except Callum.”
“Thanks, Grandma,” he grumbles.
And then I remember a conversation from a few nights ago.
We’d been coming back from an emergency call. It was dark. Finn was driving while I watched the landscape blur past outside the window when he murmured, almost to himself:
“I wish I had somewhere that felt like home.”
He’d said it so quietly I almost missed it.
And when I turned toward him to ask what he’d said, the distant, professional doctor mask had already slipped back into place.
But I heard him.
I write carefully:
To have somewhere that feels like home.
My heart pounds too fast. My palms are damp.
“Mary and Finn?” Maggie asks.
I lift my notebook.
“To have somewhere that feels like home.”
Silence falls over the room.
Finn looks at me, and something flashes in his eyes.
Something vulnerable.
“Finn?” Maggie says softly.
He slowly raises his notebook as though it weighs a hundred pounds.
To have somewhere that feels like home.
