When the Tide Brought Him Back Chapter 03
Thomas arrived the next evening exactly when he said he would, carrying a toolbox and wearing a clean shirt, as if he had thought about what to wear and then pretended he had not. He looked at the blue shutters, tested a hinge, and said the wood was sound, it only needed care. Elena made tea, and they worked in a companionable silence that was also, underneath, a careful negotiation. She held a shutter steady while he tightened a screw. He showed her how to sand without tearing the old paint. Their hands brushed once, and both of them pretended it had not happened, and Elena thought that pretending was becoming a habit she would have to break.
When the work was done, they walked down to the harbour, because the evening was too beautiful to waste indoors. The sun was low, and the wall where they had once sat was still there, its stones warm from the day. Thomas stopped and pointed, almost reluctantly, at a place near the end of the wall where two sets of initials were carved into the stone, half worn away by weather and time. E. M. and T. H., with a small, uneven heart around them. Elena had forgotten she had carved them, on the last summer evening before she left, with a key she had borrowed from Rose’s kitchen drawer. She had meant it as a joke and as a promise, both at once, and seeing it now made her eyes sting.
“You never wrote,” Thomas said quietly, not looking at her. It was not an accusation, exactly. It was a fact he had carried for ten years, stated plainly, as if he had finally decided to put it on the table. Elena felt heat rise in her face. “I did write,” she said. “Once, in my first year in the city. A long letter. I told you about the school and the flat and how much I missed the sea.” She had never sent it, and she knew, even as she spoke, that the distinction mattered. She had written it, and then she had read it back, and it had sounded lonely and uncertain, and she had been afraid that he would read it as a plea, or worse, as proof that she had made a mistake. So she had put it in a drawer, and then in a box, and then she had told herself that silence was kinder.
Thomas was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “I waited for a letter that summer. When none came, I told myself you had chosen your life, and I should choose mine. I stayed, I learned the yard, I built something here. I don’t regret that.” Elena nodded, because she did not regret her own choices either, not exactly. She regretted the way they had made them, separately, without ever saying the frightening thing out loud: that they had both been afraid, and that fear had done the choosing for them. “I was afraid too,” she said, and the words felt like a door opening. “I thought if I asked you to come with me, I would be asking you to give up everything. And if I stayed, I would be giving up everything. I couldn’t see a third way.”
They sat on the wall until the light changed, talking in the careful, honest way of people who have not spoken truly in a very long time. Thomas told her about the yard, about his father retiring, about the young apprentices he taught on Saturdays. Elena told him about the city, about the photographs she was proud of and the ones she was not, about how she had stopped taking pictures for herself. Neither of them pretended that ten years could be undone in one evening. But when Thomas walked her home, and when he paused at the gate of the blue house, he said, “I’m glad you came back, Elena. Even if it’s only for a week.” She watched him walk away down Harbour Lane, and she stood at the gate for a long time, looking at the house with its newly fixed shutters, and wondering what a week in Seabrook might actually be for, if not for this.