Joe

I didn’t expect Harry to come after me—to chase me down and match my pound-shop declaration—but I was kind of taken aback when I came back from the barn to find his car gone.

“Peeled out of here an hour ago,” Sal said. “Didn’t say where he was going, but he had a bag with him.”

My heart sank. Deep down, I knew Harry would never up and leave without telling me, but the fear was still real.

I spent the afternoon catching up on the little jobs around the farm that never seemed to get done. Keeping busy kept my mind quiet and my heart steady, but when I returned to the house that evening and found Harry still gone, the disquiet came back.

Exhausted, I threw myself into a chair at the table and slumped forward with my head on my arms. Sal brought me tea and rubbed my shoulders, but her comforting touch wasn’t enough for me anymore, and she seemed to know it.

“Any news from your dad?”

As if on cue, the phone rang. I hauled myself up to answer it and listened to Jonah as he reeled off his dire straits. “So they’re not giving you bail?”

“Nope. Just as well, though, eh? ’Cause I reckon Dicky will have burned my place down by now.”

I couldn’t figure out if he was talking metaphorically, and I didn’t much care. Jonah had long ago lost, broken, or pawned anything that meant something to him. “What about the horse he was going to kill? Do I need to do something about that?”

“Don’t expect so. Reckon the geezer had time to sell his horses while Dicky was coming after me.”

Was that your plan all along? But I didn’t bother asking. Jonah’s plans never panned out. Any positive outcome was a stroke of pure luck. “How long will you be on remand for?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Do you need anything?”

“Nothing that they’ll let me have down the prison, lad. Look after your ma, like you always do. Everything else will come right.”

And then he hung up, leaving me with another rock of despair in my gut. I put the phone back and closed my eyes, trying to claw back the bliss I’d felt with Harry on the edge of the cliff. When he’d pushed inside me and speared me with a gaze so piercing I’d felt it scrape my bones.

But I couldn’t find it, so I retreated to the table and went back to sulking until I remembered my own phone in my pocket. It was switched off, my newfound habit when I was with the horses. I powered it up and tossed it on the table to sort itself out—damn thing was running an operating system so old that it took about a week.

Sal came to the table with a sandwich and tutted when I pushed it away. “You’re getting as bad as Harry, going off your food when you’ve got a flea in your ear.”

“He doesn’t have a flea in his ear, Ma. He just doesn’t like food when he’s stressed.”

“Why’s he stressed? Have you fallen out?”

“Hope not. I told him I loved him.”

I hadn’t meant to spill my guts to my mother, but sometimes it went down that way, and I wasn’t ashamed. How could I be when my ma was a fucking angel?

Sal heard me out—I spared her the gory details—and said nothing until I’d talked as much as I was ever going to. Then she drew the teapot across the table and topped up my mug. “Sweetheart, I don’t know much about romance these days—if I even ever did—but if that big boy doesn’t love you right back, I’ll eat my yard boots.”

“You never wear your yard boots.”

“So? Doesn’t make them any tastier, does it?”

“You fucking loon.”

Sal cuffed me playfully. “Don’t talk to your mother like that. You know I’m right.”

Perhaps I did, but was that really the problem? “I know he cares about me . . . about all of us. But he’s got a life in London, Ma. A job at a hospital—patients and stuff. Even if we did some lame co-dependent, long-distance thing, we’d never see each other. He works as much as I do.”

“What do you want him to do?”

I rolled my eyes, because if she didn’t know the answer to that, she was as daft as me. “It doesn’t matter what I want. It can’t happen.”

Sal gave me a look—the look, which meant that she was about to say something that I’d better not dare argue with. “Joe, this farm doesn’t keep going with us thinking that things can’t be done. If you want that boy to stay here and share this life with you, you’ve got to tell him. Give him the choice. Nothing is impossible if you want it enough.”

“Bollocks. I want a new stable block and a credit account at the organic feed place. Can’t have that, can I?”

“Not right now. But things change. If they didn’t, none of us would still be here.”

My ma could be a wise woman when she wanted to be, but on this occasion, I couldn’t see how she could possibly be right. Asking Harry to live on the farm was easy. I’d do it in a heartbeat if I didn’t know how much it would kill him to refuse. Whether he loved me or not, I couldn’t be sure, but—

The phone rang again, the ear-splitting peal startling me out of my introspective melodrama. Sal answered it and passed it over when the caller identified themselves.

It was Newquay police station and I couldn’t help but laugh as they explained the reason for the call. “You’ve just locked my dad up for the foreseeable and now you want me to do you a favour?”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” the policewoman said. “The RSPCA can’t come out until tomorrow, and there’s all kinds of animals on this property.”

“How many horses?”

“I’m not entirely sure.”

“I don’t have the space for more strays as it is. I’m still housing the last lot.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Carter, but if we can’t round some of these animals up, we’ll have to call a vet . . .”

And so it went on. Luckily for the nags, wherever I was going, two of our younger horses had been donated to a riding school the week after I’d come home from hospital, freeing up a couple of stalls if some old timers went back to sharing. Maybe it wouldn’t come to that, but who the hell knew anymore?

I took the location down and relayed the message to Sal. “I’m heading out. Did George put diesel in the horsebox? It conked out on me yesterday.”

“I don’t think so, luv. He got caught up trimming hooves. Said he’d do it tomorrow.”

Damn it. Though I couldn’t really complain. Bending to trim hooves had been impossible for me in the weeks after Shadow booting me, and George had picked up the slack. Keeping the vehicles running was my responsibility, and I’d fucked it up.

Again.

“I’ll take the van,” I said. “If there’s anything to come back, I’ll pick some diesel up on the way.”

I left Sal in the kitchen and hit the road, driving out of town and all the way down to Redruth where the police waited for me at a sprawling property that was nothing like the shit holes they usually dragged me out to.

A sergeant showed me inside, and for the first time in years, I was truly shocked by what I saw. Most of the house was empty, but a living room that was larger than the entire ground floor of my house housed a gang of more cats than I’d ever seen in one place. Dozens of them, all in various states of health, and the room stank to high heaven. “Erm, you know I run a horse farm, right?”

“There’s a horse here,” the sergeant said. “Goats too. They’re out the back.”

I shook my head and followed him outside. In the garden were six pygmy goats and a gangly old horse. I clicked my teeth and the horse came to me like a dog, nosing automatically at my hands for treats. He turned up a hay cube and some stale biscuit crumbs, and when he was satisfied that my pockets were bare, dropped his bucket head on my shoulder.

Fucker. Like I needed another reason to take him home. With a heavy sigh, I fished my phone out of my pocket. A message flashed up, but I dismissed it without reading it and called home.

Emma answered. “How bad is it?”

“I’ve seen worse, but I’ve got an old boy to bring home and a load of pygmy goats.”

“What?”

“You heard.”

“Joe, we’ve only just got rid of the last goat, and that one ate my favourite saddle.”

“Shouldn’t have left it lying about then.”

“Joe—”

“All right,” I snapped. “They’ll have to go in Ma’s garden then. Just tell her I don’t give a witch’s tit about her vegetable patch.”

“You will when there’s no potatoes on your plate.”

“Whatever. I’m going to see if I can secure the animals and then come back for the horsebox.”

“Okay—” Emma broke off and spoke to someone else at her end. “Don’t worry about coming back. George just rocked up with some diesel. He says he’ll come to you.”

It was the best news I could’ve hoped for. I tied the old horse to a sturdy tree and studied the lively goats. There was nowhere to herd them, so I’d have to round them up when it was time to go. Brilliant. Catching goats had never been my strong point.

I poked my head back in the house to tell the police that I was taking the horse. A woman from a local cat charity was scooping cats into carriers. “Where are you going to take them?”

The woman shrugged. “Home, I’d imagine. My husband is clearing out the garage.”

“This lot is going to fit in your garage?”

“Not quite,” the woman admitted. “But we’ll make it work. Always do.”

I liked her. I helped round up the stinky cats and loaded them into her van. When she was gone, I went back to the garden and stood with the cuddly old horse as darkness fell around us. The police ignored me entirely, and I was pretty much asleep on my feet when I heard the horsebox pull into the driveway.

“Took your time,” I called out when footsteps approached me from behind. “Hope you’re feeling up to chasing goats in the dark.”

There was a pause and then a low chuckle that wrapped around me like the warmest embrace. Harry reached around me and patted the old horse. “Knack to it, is there?”

“If there is, I’ve never found it. Where’ve you been all day?”

“I’ve been into town to poach Wetherspoon’s WiFi. Yours is down and I had a lot to—uh—sort out.”

“Sounds ominous.”

“Not really.” Harry grinned. “Let’s get this squared away and I’ll tell you all about it on the way home.”

We rounded up the goats and led the old horse into the horsebox. He seemed unfazed by the gaggle of goats penned in beside him, and I shut the box with a rueful grin. If only all rescues were as simple as this one had turned out to be.

“Um, Joe?”

I glanced at Harry over my shoulder, my skin tingling at his close proximity. “Yeah?”

“I thought you said someone else had taken all the cats?”

“They did.” I turned to find Harry with his big arms full of kittens. “What the fuck? Where did you find them?”

“In that shed. I think they’re hungry. There’s some kitten food in the feed store, isn’t there?”

“Are you taking the piss?”

Harry smiled as one of the kittens scaled his broad chest and took up residence on his shoulder. “No . . . the police told me that you were taking all the remaining animals. We can’t just leave them here.”

“We have a bazillion cats already.”

“So, a few more wouldn’t hurt?”

My life had become a permanent reinvention of The Twilight Zone. I’d gone from chasing my dad around the moors to herding goats in a dead guy’s back garden. And now the only person I’d ever truly fallen in love with was waving a bunch of kittens in my face like he wasn’t going back to London in just a few short weeks. “Don’t go.”

Harry blinked. “What?”

“Don’t go,” I repeated, desperation suddenly spilling from me in a torrent of words I couldn’t have stopped with a goddam mountain. “Don’t go back to London, to your job, to your empty flat—to the gym that makes you feel like shit. Don’t go back to the life that makes you so lonely. Please . . . don’t go anywhere. Stay here . . . with me, with all of us. We love you—I love you—”

Harry deposited the kittens into a wire carrier I hadn’t noticed at his feet and clamped his hand over my mouth. “Jesus. Stop, will you? Do you honestly think I want to go back to London? That I’m not completely fucking in love with you?”

I fought his hold on me, but I had nothing on his brute strength, and he backed me up against the horsebox with his hand still over my mouth, and his other arm on my chest.

“Joe.”

The way he said my name terrified me. Like the end of the world loomed behind the single syllable. I stared at him, trying to read the molten eyes that felt like home. He loved me. Of course he did. I knew that—it was in everything he’d ever said and done for me. But what the fuck did we do now?

Like he’d heard the panic in my mind, Harry pressed his hand harder against my mouth and his forehead against mine.

“Joe,” he said again. “I’m not going anywhere, okay? I mean—I have to at some point, to sort my life out . . . That’s what I’ve been trying to do today, but I’m not leaving you, Joe. I— I couldn’t even if you wanted me to.”

His hand slipped from my mouth, but it took me a few seconds to process what he was saying. “You’re not going back to London?”

“Not permanently. I’ve got some things to clear up, and I have to give notice at the clinic and find something else down here, but I want to stay on the farm—with you—if you’ll have me?”

“What?”

“You heard me,” he said gently. “And I heard you this morning when you told me you loved me. This trip has been a crazy experience for me in so many ways, but I’m not ready for it to end, and the harder I try to contemplate it, the less likely it seems that I will ever be.”

“You’re staying?” It came out as a whisper but was punctuated by a chorus of discontented meows from the carrier on the ground.

Harry laughed and swept me off my feet, spinning me in a dizzying circle until I didn’t know which way was up. “Joe, for fuck’s sake. I’m staying, so let’s go home so I can feed those cats.”