The Moment You Were Gone by Nicci Gerrard

it incessantly through GCSEs and A levels – for luck, as an omen, a ritual of superstitious distraction. Before each exam, he’d have to get all his cards out. And then there were those grey Sunday afternoons; those rainy camping holidays in Scotland and Wales. Fish with flabby, salted chips, damp clothes, and inside the humid tent, the cards tipping on the rucked sleeping-bag. He laid out seven more cards, liking the plasticky snap they made. Once he’d got out in a game, he told himself, he would do something. He’d go and knock on doors, meet neighbours, phone friends in other halls of residence. When the cards told him.
    At last Gaby stood up, paid for the coffee and pastry, pulled on her jacket and left the café. Outside, the sky had darkened and it was trying to rain. A few large drops landed on her cheek and hair. Turning back on to the main street, she quickened her pace and headed for the station. She’d have time before the 16.22 arrived to buy a magazine or book, and she’d settle down in a window seat, drink brown tea, go home. It made her feel dreary, the thought of returning to her old life, as if nothing had happened. She pictured Ethan’s dark, stripped room, fluff balls in the corner and dead flies on the windowsill, bare spaces along the shelves, and silence thick in the room, like an odour. She had insisted that Connor should go on his long-planned sailing trip, yet now she knew that he should have been there to mark this event. After so many years they were a couple living on their own again. They should have said goodbye to their son together, then taken a wild walk or gone swimming in the sea, got drunk, been undignified, booked into a hotel for sex, got on to a plane that would take them away to an unknown destination. Anything, rather than a dutiful return, back in time for a glass of wine and an early night.
    She bought a single ticket to London, Paddington. She gazed round her, but nothing made sense and the crowds and bright lights wavered in her vision. Putting her fingers to her cheeks, she found she was weeping. The tears slid down her face in sheets, her throat ached, her heart was heavy. And then, over the loudspeaker, she heard an announcement: the 16.18 was due to arrive on platform two, calling at Plymouth, Liskeard, Par, St Austell, Truro, Redruth, St Erth and Penzance.
    For a moment she stood, at a loss, while passengers flowed past her in both directions. Then, clutching her one-way second-class ticket to London, she went towards the train that would take her in the opposite direction, and sat down in the empty first-class carriage. She held her breath and pressed her nose to the window. Small rivulets ran down the glass; outside, figures wavered in the strengthening rain. She felt the engine vibrate and the people on the platform fell away as the train began to move towards Cornwall, slowly at first but soon picking up speed.
    Sitting back in her capacious, illegal seat, she looked past her own fugitive reflection in the streaming window, out on to the sodden patchwork green of the countryside that flooded by under the leaking grey sky. In the incessant rain, it resembled an Impressionist painting, all smudged colour and light, like a landscape inside her head. A tremble ran through her, whether of happiness or sorrow she could not tell, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, it was her younger self she was looking at in the vague mirror of the window – the one she thought she had left behind, but who had been waiting for her to return. The train shuddered on, carrying her back into her past.

Four
    It was Connor’s watch. Stefan slept down below, wrapped in an old tartan blanket with his feet sticking out and one large hand curled round the side of his face, as if he was comforting himself. Every so often he flinched, shifted, half woke. The sea was quite calm tonight, the moderate waves lifting and dropping the boat, up-up and down again in a lethargic waltz.