“So what?”
“Are you going to tell me what keeps you awake at night? I mean, you don’t have to, but you canif you want. It might help.”
“Help me sleep?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I didn’t know either, but as hard as I tried to keep them in, words tumbled out of me before I could stop them. “I’ve had insomnia for years. It comes and goes, and I’ve slept pretty well since I came here, but the last few nights, I’ve been at one with my bedroom ceiling. There’s no rhyme or reason, I’m just... awake.”
Toby kicked a stone along the path.
It came to rest in front of me, and it was so perfectly smooth I picked it up. “I like stones,” I said. “I keep them in a box so I have one from everywhere I’ve been.”
“That’s nice.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah. I’ve never been anywhere.”
He’d told me that before, but I was willing to argue he’d seen plenty that I hadn’t. Journeys weren’t literal.
I slipped the stone into my pocket and glanced back at the house. I couldn’t see Ella, but then, the house wasn’t on fire either, so I had no reason to run back for her.
Toby nudged me. “She’s safe with Joe. And Rhys is there too. He’s a paramedic.”
“I know, I know. There literally couldn’t be anyone safer for her to be with.”
“So why do you keep looking back?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just feel guilty every time I hand her off to someone. Like, I’m a part-time parent as it is, so I should be grateful for every minute I get with her.”
“Doesn’t mean you can’t take ten minutes for yourself.”
“Right.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Oh, I do, on the surface, but I spent a long time feeling guilty about not being good enough at really important shit. Being a crappy parent feels like a rite of passage.”
“That’s what keeps you awake?”
“Maybe.”
Toby slowed to a stop by a gate that led away from the farm. He hoisted himself up to sit on top of it and hit me with eyes that never seemed to end. “When did it start?”
“Which bit?”
“The insomnia.”
I huffed out a sigh. “You really want to hear this?”
“Yes.”
I wanted to go back to the place where he gazed at me with wonder and awe as I made him shiver in ways he never had before, not drown under the weight of his sweet empathy. But there was witchcraft in the way he looked at me. “I had a nervous breakdown when I was working as a paramedic. I couldn’t handle it, and I was really ill for a long time after I quit. And even after I was better, I couldn’t sleep sometimes.”
“Because of the things you’d seen?” Toby asked, nodding, because he’d heard bits of this before.
I shrugged. “Sometimes, but mostly it was the guilt at having failed in the first place. It’s why I ran off to India. Me and Rhys were still friends, you see. So I saw him getting on with his life like he always does, and it just seemed to highlight what a basket case I was because I couldn’t do the same.”