A Week of Small Repairs

Greer Maddox comes back to the north Norfolk coast to be a witness at her best friend’s wedding, and finds that the bride’s brother has arrived four days early for the same reason she has: a job. Cleo has split the week in two and handed them one half each. Greer is the tree — a two-hundred-year-old holm oak with a crack in its fork and eighty-four people due to stand under it on Saturday. Elias is the tide. Neither half works without the other, which is how a woman who has spent five years being extremely capable ends up on the end of a rope with the man she loved in secret for twenty-one months and has never once talked about since.

It ended badly, and not because of a misunderstanding. He promised three times to tell his sister and never did. She kept an exit open for four months and never asked him to close it. Both of them were relieved when it was over, and both of them have spent five years pretending otherwise. Now he is thirty-seven and argues with her in front of an insurance company, and she is thirty-two and still does not know why he came to her father’s funeral and left without speaking to her. Wanting him again is not the difficult part. The difficult part is that the only way to keep him is to say out loud, for the first time in her life, exactly what she wants and let somebody have the chance to refuse it.