The Last One I Have

She tells Nell on the deck as they come back into the fjord, because the boat is loud and the wind takes half of it and it is easier to say difficult things when the weather is doing some of the work.

"It's happened before," she says. "Three times. Same conversation. Somebody at the end of a channel apologising for closing it."

"And it came back."

"Every time. Not soon they were very clear about not soon, and their not-soon is not our not-soon." Veira watches the black cliffs go past. "But it's not an ending. I've been carrying it as an ending for a year."

Nell is quiet for a while.

"Can I say something you won't like," she says.

"You will anyway."

"You've been treating this whole thing like you're the last one. Since Aberdeen." Nell has her hands in her pockets and is not looking at her. "Every time you talk about the channel closing you say it like the door's shutting behind you. And there's nine of us and there's a school and there's an empty chair in Geneva that Zofia's going to sit in when she's forty, and you're still doing the thing where you're the only one."

Veira does not answer immediately.

"That's a fair hit," she says.

"It's not a hit. I'm just" Nell makes an irritated gesture at the sea. "You spent four days in my bedroom telling me I wasn't alone and you've been operating like you are for five years."

"Yes."

"So stop."

"It's not that simple."

"It's exactly that simple, you just don't like it because you'd have to work out what you want, and you'd rather be necessary." Nell says it with the specific brutality of a twenty-one-year-old who has been taught to be precise by the person she is being precise about. "Sorry. That was harsh."

"No," Veira says. "That was accurate."

They stand at the rail.

"What do you want," Nell says. "Actually."

Veira looks at the fjord opening ahead of them and the low October sun on the water and thinks about a question Croft asked in a farmhouse kitchen five years ago that she has still not answered.

"A case," she says. "A flat with a garden. Sunday dinner at a table on the Canongate. Somebody who's been asking me a question for five years that I keep not answering because I've been waiting to find out whether I'd survive."

"And now?"

"Now I've got about a year of channel left and I'm going to survive it," Veira says. "So I've run out of reasons."

Nell nods, satisfied, and does not press it, which Veira registers as the single greatest kindness anyone has done her in months.

Then, after a while: "Is it Sebastien or is it Emre?"

"Nell."

"Everyone at Braehead has an opinion. Aoife runs a book."

"Aoife runs a book?"

"There's a spreadsheet," Nell says. "I'm not showing you the spreadsheet."

Emre asks her in November, and he asks her properly, which is to say he asks whether he may ask.

They are walking on the shingle beach below the Braehead lodge and it is cold and neither of them has said anything for eleven minutes.

"I'd like to say something," he says. "And I'd like to say it in a way that you can decline without it costing either of us anything, and I have thought about the wording for two years, which you should factor in."

"Go on."

"I have been in love with you since I was twenty-three." He says it looking at the sea. "I have never once said it, because for eight years I had blurred your memory and it would have been obscene, and for five years since I have been in a working relationship with you and the imbalance was still there." He stops walking. "It has been a long time. You are at eighteen per cent and I am no longer certain what I am waiting for, so I am saying it now, once, and then I am going to stop."

Veira stops too.

"Emre."

"Please let me finish the sentence, because it is the important part." He turns to her. "I am not asking you for anything. I am telling you so that it is not a secret, because I have spent my entire adult life keeping things from you for your own good and this is the last one I have."

The sea does what the sea does.

"That's the whole thing?" she says.

"That's the whole thing."

She looks at him for a long moment.

"Thank you," she says. "For doing it that way."

"You are going to say no."

"I'm going to say something more complicated than no and I'd like you to hear all of it." She sits down on the shingle, which surprises him, and after a moment he sits too. "You are the only other person on earth who is what I am. That is never going away and it means something that nothing else means. I got those two months back five years ago and they were the best thing anybody had ever done for me and they were done by a frightened twenty-three-year-old who then did the worst thing anybody has ever done to me, and both of those are you."

"I know."