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I think we should move out.
The words still echoed in Carla’s ears. Almost a welcome ringing by this point. She worried about what might happen if the words stopped flicking around in her head. A seemingly delicate loop that, if interrupted, might break the time-space continuum. Or something.
PC Tinker. Craig. He’d been caught up in Kit’s bullshit. The sweetest of souls, overrun by a web of deception and corruption. Wrong place, wrong time.
And Lisa. Her stunning, brave Lisa. She’d come home broken. Carla had seen her broken before. Too many times for her liking, in fact. But this, this was different. Like the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Only it wasn’t straw, it was trauma, and it wasn’t a camel’s back, it was Lisa. Her Lisa.
Carla wasn’t sure what to do or how to respond. Her girlfriend slumped over on the sofa, not even crying anymore, just staring at the floor. The brunette held her hand in silence, trying desperately to walk the line between being there and pushing.
The brunette had felt, even from the day she climbed into DS Swain’s car, barely even recalling the blonde’s name, that she had an innate ability to understand her. Carla hadn’t known then why Lisa was crying, but it didn’t matter. She felt a shared kinship that comes with too much tragedy for one human to possibly process.
She could see it written all over the detective’s face. Embedded in the deep tear streaks that seemed to have worn away the edges of her skin, almost imperceptibly, like a river wearing away at its banks.
From that day on, her life was undeniably changed. A switch within her had been flipped, even if it took months to truly understand the significance of the shift.
The grief they held on to when they became friends, separate yet bonding in its own way, was something Carla was accustomed to navigating. The blonde was no stranger to loneliness, and when she was deep in the trenches of grief, she needed space.
Quite the opposite of Carla, but the brunette respected that Lisa needed to deal with things in her own way. She’d tried her way, pushing her to talk, clinging to her like a koala, but it only pushed the blonde further away. So, eventually, Carla let the blonde go. Let her do what she needed to get her life together. To get her thoughts in order.
But the trauma and grief they shared was something else entirely. Her kidney failure had been their first test. Too soon, in Carla’s mind. Too soon to have to share so much heaviness. Even if she knew from the moment she tucked Lisa in on her sofa after a night of the detective’s self-loathing getting the best of her that Lisa was it for her, she didn’t expect the feelings to be reciprocated.
And if Lisa needed an out, well, a chronic illness was an easy reason to take her leave. And Carla didn’t want to trap her. She wanted her to fly. To be free of grief and trauma and pain. Not drag more of it into her life.
So she took a page out of DS Swain’s book and pushed Lisa away. Figured if it worked for the blonde, surely it could work for her, too.
Lisa wasn’t having it.
Which brought more relief to Carla than she’d ever be able to express. From that moment forward, they walked in their trauma together, side-by-side. Even the slight wobble after Betsy was shot lasted less than 24 hours (though it certainly felt longer).
After Betsy was rushed to the hospital, Carla tried to cling to Lisa. To be there for her physically and emotionally. In return, Lisa blamed Carla. Pushed her away. Again.
The brunette spiraled from the second she left the hospital. Full of self-doubt (Carla didn’t do self-doubt), wondering if Lisa was right, if drama and despair would always follow her around. She barely slept, wishing she had given the blonde space. Wishing she had noticed the change in her girlfriend, somehow gotten ahead of the inevitable.
She had (apparently optimistically) believed that they were past the push-and-pull stage of their relationship. Carla had asked Lisa to stay, permanently, when she was recovering from Rob’s attack, and they’d done well to build a sense of normalcy upon her return from the hospital.
That night she spent alone in the flat, believing she’d destroyed the only real love she’d ever known, she realized that Lisa was an enigma. That if she got the chance, she’d never make the mistake again of assuming she knew what the blonde needed.
And when she (mercifully) did get the chance to make amends, she made no secrets about how she felt. “This is it for me,” she’d said with conviction as she held the blonde’s face in her hands. In that moment, she’d believed they could get through anything, as long as they were together.
—
But on the sofa that day, Carla had run out of ways to reassure the blonde that everything was going to be alright. Carla wasn’t even sure what was weighing on DS Swain most: the fact that she felt responsible for Craig’s attack or that life was so easily snuffed out.
The brunette presumed that much of Lisa’s emotional response was because, in some ways, it felt like Becky all over again. She tried to ask, tried to get Lisa to say anything, really, but it was like she’d gone catatonic.
And when she finally did speak, all she said was, “We should move out.”
Carla didn’t know who the we were. Didn’t know what she meant at all. Was she saying that she and Betsy should move out? Implying they all should move?
She followed up with questions, but just like that, the blonde was gone again. Stifled somewhere behind her grief and disbelief.
The brunette tried to give her space. But Lisa wouldn’t let go of her hands. She tried to kiss her, but the blonde wouldn’t turn to meet her lips.
Carla was out of options. But she knew, no matter what, that she couldn’t lose Lisa. Not now. Not after everything they’d been through. The longer Lisa stayed quiet, the more Carla believed they were over. That somehow this incident had shown her that she was settling with the brunette. That there was life beyond Weatherfield. And if life was short, she was going to make the most of it.
Betsy had taken one look at Lisa, breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t her who had been involved in the assault, and then all but run back out. As much as it pained Carla to see Lisa like this, Betsy couldn’t even stomach it for a moment. She’d seen her mum like this too many times to count. She couldn’t go back there.
Carla had reassured her that it was going to be OK, and that she could stay at Sabrina’s for the night.
It was just the two of them then. On the sofa, sitting in silence. An eerie quiet that had pushed Carla into giving herself over to her negative thoughts.
“Lisa, I know you’re hurting. If you think it’s best that you and Betsy move out, then just say the word. I only want what’s best for you both,” Carla all but whimpered. She couldn’t just sit there any longer.
As she had gotten up to leave Lisa to it, she felt a strong tug on her hand. It was the first time the blonde had so much as moved in the last few hours.
The brunette turned to Lisa, her eyes filled with tears, the blonde looking up at her with a gaze she couldn’t quite decipher.
“Don’t go.” And with one smooth motion, the blonde pulled Carla onto her lap, the brunette’s thighs on either side of Lisa’s hips.
The blonde reached up and cupped Carla’s cheeks with her hands, lightly brushing the brunette’s tears away with her thumbs. They leaned their foreheads together softly. “I love you, Carla. I want us to move out of here. Get a place of our own. A place we can make into our home.”
—
A week later, the words were still banging around in Carla’s head. The words that had changed her life. The words that were a promise of something new. A life of their own doing.
She wished they could’ve gotten there without the traumatic accelerator. She knows they would have, eventually.
At least this way, everything Craig lost wasn’t in vain. Something good had come from it. Something pure, genuine, and eternal. A gift he’d given Carla. A gift he’d given her family.
And for that, she’d always be grateful.