Swirling tree with hearts and quote

I found the old tree house plans in the back of Mr Haddow's desk drawer at the reunion, the ones we sketched on the inside of a dinner register in Year Nine. You had drawn the oak in the corner of the playing field as a tangle of spirals, like a fern unrolling, and written beneath it that we would live up there when we were grown. Everyone else was pretending they had forgotten those years, drinking warm white wine from plastic cups in the sports hall, and I stood by the trestle tables holding that paper like a ticket I'd been told had expired.

Nobody mentioned the storm that brought the oak down. Tom Pryce cried about it, actually cried, and I liked him more for that than I had in fifteen years. He asked after you. I said you were in Penzance now, painting boats and sending postcards, which is what you would have wanted me to say. He wrote your address on a napkin and folded it into his jacket pocket as if it might blow away.

On the way out I walked past the field. Someone had planted a sapling by the fence with a small brass plate, and the grass around it was still raw where the turf had been lifted. I stood there longer than I meant to, thinking of the two red hearts you used to draw beside our names on every page of that register. Then I rang you from the car park, and you answered on the first ring, which is how I knew you had been waiting for me to ring.