I prise her left hand from her and slide off her wedding ring. I put it in my pocket. Emma inspects her bare hand, silently, but doesn’t look at me.
After a few moments I sense her body sag.
The bird cries, looping round above us. ‘We’re not married,’ I remind her.
Emma shakes her head. ‘No.’
I take her hand back. ‘But what’s clear to me is that we should be.’
She looks at me, sharply, then looks away.
‘Emma?’
I watch her, patiently, until she turns to look at me again. In the fast-falling darkness her eyes are deep seas. Unknown oceans, but I can learn them again. They’re the only ones I want to swim.
‘I will trust you,’ I tell her.
She hesitates. The bird loops over us again, wings still as it rides a current.
‘I will trust you,’ I repeat.
‘But will you? Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘But – really?’
I nod.
‘I know you, Leo,’ Emma says.
‘I also know me. Better than you might think.’
The bird disappears into the inky horizon, still calling.
‘I want us to get married. Properly. With Ruby in a sweet little dress, stealing the show. We don’t have to tell anyone, if you don’t want to have to explain it. But I want us to be married.’
After a long pause, she drops down onto her elbows. I drop down onto mine.
‘When Ruby and I were driving up here, I was trying to imagine shuttling her between two different houses for weekend custody. Us learning to become friends, trying to co-parent. One day meeting someone else. And it felt miserable. I don’t want that, I want us. I’ve only ever wanted us.’
Emma nods, almost imperceptibly.
‘Do you?’ I ask, when she doesn’t say anything. ‘Do you want us?’
She switches round to face me, resting on one elbow. Then: ‘Yes,’ she says, quietly. ‘More than anything.’
There’s inches between our faces. I feel her breath, I see her hair, still tucked behind her ear.
Emma has endured more pain in her thirty-nine years than most people do in a lifetime. And yet she’s still someone everyone’s secretly in love with, someone everyone wants to talk to at a dinner party. She’s still the funniest person I know, still the woman my boss would sack me for if she ever wanted a career change.
Yes, she’s complicated; she retreats from time to time to a dark place. She has ever-worsening problems with hoarding, a compulsive need to check Ruby is breathing and many other things besides. But she’s still Emma: vital, brilliant, infuriating Emma.
If she can hold on to herself after all she’s suffered, I can too. I must.
And now it’s just as it was the first time we were this close, in her friend’s yurt in a field in Cornwall in the middle of the night, surrounded by specimen pots and hair straighteners and half-eaten snacks and marine biology journals.
We are inches apart, and I have never in my life wanted to kiss someone so much.
This time, I lean in first. I kiss her, and this is what comes next.
Epilogue
EMMA
Six months later
A dead flower hat jelly is an unremarkable sight on the beaches of the Northwest Pacific: a colourless mass of sand-pocked gel in among the cuttlefish bones and dead seaweed sprayed along the strandlines; something for a child to poke at with a spade.