“Where are you?” she asks.
“About twenty minutes out. Maybe twenty-five if the sheep are feeling powerful.”
“Drive safely.”
Two words.
Ordinary words.
They still settle somewhere warm and impossible under my ribs.
“I will.”
“And AJ?”
“Yes?”
“I can’t wait for you to get here.”
The road curves. The hills open ahead of me. For a second, I forget every clever thing I have ever said.
“Me too,” I say.
“See you soon.”
The call ends, but her voice stays with me for the next five miles.
This is what she does now.
Not always. Not loudly. Not in ways that announce anything. But in private, in quiet corners, on calls made between shifts and deadlines and the odd hour after midnight, Pippa has become softer with me in a way that still feels like being trusted with something important.
She will let me make her breakfast after nights.
She will sit with her feet in my lap and pretend she is allowing it only because my hands are warm.
She will fall asleep against my shoulder on the sofa, then wake up and stay there.
She will call when I am driving in and pretend it is mainly about lasagne, then give me one sentence that stays with me all the way into the village.
I can’t wait for you to get here.
She is still Pippa.
She still tells me when I am overthinking. She still looks at me as if some of my sentences are causing structural damage. She still has the ability to say “AJ” in a tone that makes me reconsider every decision I have made since birth.
But she lets me look after her now.
Not because she needs managing. Not because she has become less strong. Because she trusts me enough to rest some of the weight in my hands.
And because I am not an idiot, or at least not entirely, I understand what that means.
The station is lit when I arrive, warm against the early dark. It is November now, the evenings drawing in, the air wet and cool, the kind of weather that makes Fellside smell of leaves, stone and chimney smoke. I park where I am allowed to park now, which still feels like an outrageous privilege, and lift the lasagne carefully from the passenger footwell.
I have barely made it through the door before Kev appears, hands already out.
“I’ll take that.”
I shift the dish slightly out of reach. “Absolutely not.”
