Page 118 of People In Love

My karaoke song, he says. Tell Robin for me?

Her smile, then, over her shoulder, that perfect shoulder he’d not noticed years before, and she’s gone. And it is as he’s leaving the hospital, typing a message to his mother to say he’ll be back for breakfast, that Nora’s text comes through in reply, and for once he isn’t hoping for anything, isn’t hoping for a change of heart or an answer to a question as she says:Historically, Bren?

Looks like you do the right thing.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Six weeks, you have to spend at home. A recovery period which you repurpose as an indoor honeymoon, hibernating in the house. Breakfast in bed and shared bathwater and twisted sheets. Soup, because you love soup. Croissants, of course, seeing as Henry who runs the bakery down the road hears what happened and plies you with pastry because you are his best customers and karma is a freshly baked pain au chocolat handed over, warm, in a brown paper bag.

Get-well cards and bouquets of flowers pour through the door. Niche animated movies play on repeat except when you’re sitting in the May-June sunlight in the yard; the day you sign the official marriage paperwork you watchSong of the Seawith takeaway noodles and fall asleep by nine, wake to your wife, still sleeping, beside you, in one of your old T-shirts she’s stolen without asking.

And throughout this period, you print photographs, because it’s you: and you itch to work, to preserve, to capture what’s occurred. Task your brother with finding a leather-bound album with the perfect page thickness.Tack in the engagement party invite which Nora inked at her craft desk, three months ago. Photographs of the pair of you at various parties and on nights out and nights in, at graduation, when she opened her café with Shay, when she first met Horace who looks like a baby horse, not a dog, when you went to God’s Own Junkyard with Freya. And amid the photos, Nora also Sellotapes in two receipts. One for the pizza order from the party, and one for the bagels the day you did not propose but she said yes yes yes, by the river.

You remember all of that, before the fall. Before the long, low-level headaches and fatigue. Before you stopped recognising familiar things, your keys, her face – a symptom, you’ve since learned, of the fluid that built against your brain – before you lost theyouin your emotions – became forthright or argumentative or else disorientated, unable to fathom what was wrong.

Things had blurred, for a while, but are now, thank the universe, the luckiest stars, back in focus.

You turn a page while she makes lunch. While Motown music plays from the speaker. Your hospital bracelets are here, too, tacked in beside a selfie taken outside the hospital chapel. No flowers. No bow tie. No champagne flutes or big hats but a shaved head and a walking miracle and Nora’s eyes, half closed in a smile. A redhead behind the camera, taking the picture. Say subdural haematoma, he’d said. And you’d both laughed.

Like the first time you saw her. She was laughing at something someone had said, and you did not know what she was laughing at; did not know what was coming.

Just as you do not, now.

Which leaves space for a new photograph, in the album.

Which is lucky, again. Or miraculous. Synonyms, really, for the same thing, and if you were a songwriter or a poet you’d write something down about that, but you’re just a photographer, just a normal guy, just a husband with a brain that didn’t bleed out and a heart that wouldn’t give up on what it knew, and that certainty alongside all the unknowns is the real luck, you think. The real lasting miracle, here.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Nora is in her living room when she sees the email in her inbox. It’s been there for days but she’d not noticed it; there have been things to do, people to tell, he nearly died, we got married, I know, it’s mad, but it’s life.

It is weeks after they made it home. Weeks after they signed the paperwork at the registry office so that everything is formalised and finished. Though is anything ever formal or finished when you’re human, she wonders aloud, to Shay and Robin and Freya, which prompts different answers, different conversations. She wonders the same thing again, as she works from the sofa, tonight. Robin is making dinner after insisting he was fine to do so; he feels right as rain, although when does rain ever feel right, right as sunlight, right as rainbows, he has decided to repurpose the phrase and she has decided to let him.

She is darning something into a sock; one of the many pairs she will soon stock in her art café that’ll sell like warm buttered croissants. Items of clothing she will end up selling into gallery gift shops, which will turn into private commissions alongside her day job, though she does not know this yet. So she puts down her needle and checks her emails and sees his name beside the subject line: LIFE CHANGED (AGAIN), and opens it, to read.

He has attached a photograph of some shortbread he’s sampled in Scotland.

There were mountains to climb much closer to home, he told her, the day that he left. Munros to bag in honour of his dad, and this shortbread, he tells her now, isincredible, a family recipe that’s been handed down through generations and he’s going to send her some so she’ll be able to recreate it, preferably for Christmas, when he’s next home.

It’ll be nice to see you, he’s typed. Both of you.

Meaning her and Robin, or her and Josie; she is not sure; it does not matter.

She replies alongside the clang of saucepans in the kitchen, Robin singing to the song on the radio. Says yes, us too. Can’t wait. Then she updates him on Robin’s progress, says Freya comes over almost daily, brings fresh tomatoes and big attitude and Josie sends bread and cake and handwritten notes and between them they’re saying we love you, we’re glad you’re alive, and that, she thinks, is the best thing, really; that being married is not the tragedy her mother had feared; that there are – were – far worse things out there.

I’ve been thinking a lot about our mothers, she types back to Bren. How remarkable it is that they’re still friends.

She knows he will not fully understand this, because some things are meant to stay secret. Some things won’t be conceivable to someone who took twelve years to process his grief, or to forgive himself; he’s unlikely to comprehend the layers and shades of what love might look like between two people.

Between three.

But she sends it anyway. Ends the email with a kiss because he did, and thinks about him, and his stupid gold earring, and his red hair and green eyes and sits on the sofa with a warmth inside her when Robin calls out, ready?

And she is. Leaves her phone face-down on the cushions,wine poured, napkins out. Hope you’re hungry, says her husband, as he lifts the pasta out of the pan, saying he added some of Freya’s peacevines, for pizzazz. Smiling at her, mostly, Nora thinks, because he found a reason to use the word pizzazz at the dinner table. And they sit down and they eat, and talk. Another evening as the sun sinks behind the shed in the yard, weeds growing between the brick. Gutters cleaned. Windows open, to let in the summer breeze. Life happening, in this kitchen, and beyond.