I made enough in my practice that Jim could retire from the navy and start a business repairing old sailboats. Meanwhile my practice saw a steady stream of pets and livestock, and I hired other vets as I grew older and wanted to spend more time in the garden or with my granddaughter (who came as a surprise when Caroline was in her forties) or out on the water with Jim. Sometimes Jim and I would sit on the dock as the sun set over the river, slapping mosquitoes, and talk quietly about the children and grandchild, the tides, the foot and mouth at the Wilkinses’ place. He was stooped with his years but still handsome, and he still listened carefully to every word I said. I would retire for good in two years, we decided, and we would go on a cruise together. To Australia, he suggested, and I looked at him, surprised.

‘Isn’t it time?’ he said.

‘I thought it was too late.’

‘Oh, Sarah, I should have made us go twenty years ago.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. ‘We’ve been busy.’

‘Don’t you think it’s time we told them the truth?’

I took his hand, calloused from rope and brown against my own, spotted from the sun. As familiar as my own hand now, only dearer. We watched without speaking as a heron dived for a fish then flapped off triumphant, silver glinting in his long beak, to roost in a mangrove and eat his dinner as twilight fell and the stars began to poke their needles of light through the fabric of sky. Jim turned to me and smiled—there was so much we didn’t need words for—and arm in arm we walked up the hill through frog song and crickets chirruping, through damp grass which needed mowing, to our house which needed painting and our lives which were full to overflowing, though we hardly paused to see.

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 34

Grandpa was a bristly grey moustache kissing me on the cheek, the smell of bourbon, the twinkle of kind eyes. When I was just a girl he took me out on the water, his gnarled fingers on the ropes, showing me knots that I promptly forgot. The clank of rigging and the unfurling of a sail. He died of prostate cancer when I was twelve. I never knew that they were planning to travel. I think of how many years it has taken after his death for Grandma to see their plan through. How long this journey has sat in the back of her mind, tempting her but also terrifying her. I have never seen her so vulnerable. At work, in the clinic, even as she aged I thought of Grandma as a person with sure hands, with a steady strength.