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“How old were you? The first time?”
If he’s being honest—Alec can’t even really remember. But he knows what’s expected of him, so he replies: “Seventeen.”
Not too young. Not so old that she’ll guess he’s making it up. It’s also the age at which—he tells everyone—he started driving. At which he started fucking. At which he started drinking.
He did start driving at seventeen.
Miller coughs a little, exhales smoke through her nose, and hands it back to him. “God,” she says, “bit young. Think my parents would’ve killed me if I’d tried it on like that at that age. You’ve got a wild card hidden deep inside you, Hardy.”
His parents wouldn’t have noticed if he’d dressed up as the lion from the Magic Roundabout and run down the street blaspheming. Dorset is really a whole different world.
The next drag of the cigarette is smooth, sits like a velvet mist in his lungs, and feels dangerously like he’s finding some sort of inner peace. “If I ever catch Daisy smoking, I’ll ground her for a month. No—I’ll tell her I’m disappointed in her, then I’ll ground her. And I’ll take her debit card.”
Next to him, Miller giggles—an audible reminder of how much they’ve drunk between them. Alec doesn’t have much of a tolerance for this anymore—especially not since he’s been unwell—but at the very least he’s not giggling.
“She’s nineteen. You can’t do a thing anymore. D’you remember what it felt like, being nineteen?”
Of course he does. He was nineteen when he left home—a year older than he’d ever really thought he’d reach—looking for a place to run to, a place to hide, a place to make sense of his mother’s last words to him. He’s still not sure he’s found any of that, but this little bench by the beach in Broadchurch feels like it might be a step in the right direction.
The bottle of cheap whisky he picked up in Sainsbury’s lies between them, near-empty. Neither of them will be doing anything of any significance tomorrow morning.
“Felt like freedom,” he says honestly. “Hope it feels the same for her.”
“Probably does,” Miller says lightly. “After everything you’ve all been through, being on her own in London, out there making her own choices, she probably feels she can do anything.”
“‘Cept smoke, hopefully,” he says, taking another drag. He doesn’t offer it back to Miller. She doesn’t ask for it.
“Except smoke,” she says.
“I hope she’s happy,” he says.
“I’m sure she is. She’s doing well, you always say she’s doing well.”
“She is.”
“And Tess is doing well.”
“She is.”
“And you’re doing well.”
Alec snorts and stubs out the rest of the cigarette on the whisky bottle. Her statement isn’t even trying to hide the fact that it’s a question. He has a very brief internal debate about lighting another one, and then flicks the lighter alight and brings the next one to his lips. “I’m alive,” he says around it.
She nods, then takes the whisky bottle and hides it away in her bag. “That’s why we’re smoking and drinking on a bench by the beach, is it?”
“I’m smoking, you’re drinking. And we started in a pub, if you’ve not forgotten.”
“You shouldn’t be smoking. I haven’t forgotten. First time you’ve ever invited me out after work.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. What happened?”
Alec racks his mind. It might be true—or he might be even more susceptible to the effects of alcohol than he was aware of, and Miller is taking shameless advantage of that fact. (It might be true.)
“My dad died,” he says. “Same way that would’ve taken me, if I’d not had the stress of the case giving me an advance warning.”
“Oh, fuck, Hardy, I’m sorry.” Miller moves her hand as if she wants to place it on him somehow, and then thinks better of it. As though they aren’t smoking and drinking on a bench on the beach in the early hours of the morning.
“I’m not.” He stubs out the fresh cigarette and immediately regrets it. “It’s all finally over.”
“You weren’t close, I take it.”
“Top-class detective work, that.”
“Still,” she says, "still. Losing a family member hurts. Is there anything I can do?”
“We’re smoking and drinking on a bench by the beach, aren’t we?”
“That’s it?”
“Doesn’t deserve more.” He stares at the cigarettes in his hand, then puts them back in his pocket. He’ll bin them later.
“Well,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’m glad it didn’t happen to you that way. I’m glad you’re still around, Hardy.”
He almost says thanks. But what’s the appropriate response to that, anyway? “Me too,” he says, and mostly means it.
She’s tipsy enough that she’ll probably forget she said it tomorrow. And he’s grateful for that; here they are, smoking and drinking and being vulnerable. It’s a temporary thing. It’s not something he wishes would last. Tomorrow, they’ll be back to normal. And that’s the way he wants it.
When he gets home, an hour or so later—after Miller has convinced him to dip a toe into the freezing-cold sea, after he’s offered her his scarf and she’s taken it and they’ve said goodnight—he doesn’t throw out the packet of cigarettes. They stay in his coat, and he doesn’t smoke them, and somehow, it feels like he’s keeping some sort of promise.
And they go back to normal.