Page 173 of Pull Me Under

‘You’re not alone.’ I keep my eyes on the road. ‘We’re brothers. Whatever happens next, we face it together.’

The headlights cut through the darkness. Somewhere ahead, Bristol waits. Helen. Lily.

Brynn.

I press the accelerator a little harder.

Chapter Thirty-Three

BRYNN

Aweek.

Seven days of sleeping in the spare room with the yellow curtains and the view of the neighbour’s apple tree. Seven days of Helen’s cooking – proper meals, the kind I forgot people actually make – and Lily’s endless questions and the strange, disorienting feeling of being somewhere I belong.

It can’t last. I know that.

I’m folding my clothes into my bag when Lily appears in the doorway.

‘You’re leaving.’

Not a question. She’s got her arms crossed, hip cocked against the frame, looking so much like me it smacks the air out of my lungs.

‘I have to go back eventually.’

‘Why?’

I tuck a jumper into the corner of the bag. ‘I’ve got a cottage. A boat that’s half-restored. A lifeboat crew that made space for me when they didn’t have to.’

‘So? Sell them.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘It could be.’ Lily pushes off the doorframe, comes to sit on the edge of the bed. ‘You could stay here. Mum’s already said so – you heard her at dinner. The spare room’s yours as long as you want it.’

I did hear her. Helen, clearing the plates, saying it so casually: You know you don’t have to rush off, Brynn. This is your home too, if you want it.

Your home too.

The words had lodged somewhere behind my ribs and stayed there.

‘I can’t just move into your spare room.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m twenty-seven years old and I don’t—’ I stop. Take a breath. ‘I don’t run away from things. Not anymore.’

‘Who said anything about running away?’ Lily pulls her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. ‘Maybe it’s running towards something. Towards us.’

She’s nineteen. Too young to understand that sometimes there’s no good direction. Sometimes every path leads somewhere painful and you just have to pick one.

‘There’s the lifeboat crew,’ I say. ‘I made a commitment. They’re counting on me.’

‘Are they? Or is this about Jude?’

She says it lightly, but her eyes are careful. We’ve been over this – at length, at volume, at two in the morning with mugs of tea going cold between us. The tangled geometry of what we are to each other.

Here’s the thing we’ve worked out: Jude and I share no blood. Not a drop. His mother is Helen. My father is Gareth. We’re connected only through the affair that produced Lily – the bridge between our families, the child neither family knew about.