The Secret Art of Forgiveness (3 page)

He, too, found another smile and, God love him, took the hint and moved on from the tricky subject of her difficult family ties. ‘I think Dad might be out of town tonight; he said something about a conference in Philadelphia. I'd like to call when they're together. I know… we could drive up and see them this weekend?'

‘Okay. Yes. Why not? A weekend in Boston sounds lovely.'

‘In the meantime…' His fingers tiptoed up her arm and tickled the back of her neck. ‘I have ideas about how we could celebrate. Lots and lots…' His breath fanned over her cheek and
she leaned into his broad frame. Then he jolted back. ‘Shoot. Wait… That's my phone beeping… I'll leave it.'

‘No, take it. It's fine, really.'

He grabbed his cell, then frowned. ‘Steve Lyons. Better Beer.'

‘Take it. Don't worry, seriously.'

‘No. We said no work.' But his eyes lingered over the phone and she knew he wouldn't settle until he'd talked to his client; he was already starting to look twitchy.

‘Since when would we ever really consider that? Work's in our DNA.'

‘Which is why we're perfect together.'

‘Absolutely.' She nodded towards the phone. ‘So… take it before he hangs up.'

‘Thanks, babe. You're the best. It'll only take a minute.' He turned away slightly and she took a few deep breaths to try and calm herself. She was getting married.

Married!

Living together. Sharing her space, her life.
Forever.

‘Ah, sorry, man. I got held up… Can you hold a sec?' Brett covered the handset. ‘I was supposed to meet him at six-thirty to go over the campaign. It completely skipped my mind. He's at the office.'

‘Go. Go. It's fine.'

‘No. I'll postpone.' He looked genuinely deflated.

Em laughed, because it was so unusual to see Brett flustered. ‘Aren't you rolling out the campaign next week, in time for the international beer festival?'

‘I can meet him tomorrow, if I shuffle some appointments around.'

‘Won't that look unprofessional? Go. It's fine.'

‘Sure?' He spoke to his client then put his phone back into his pocket. ‘Not exactly the way I'd been planning to celebrate our engagement. I'm sorry, babe. It'll be a late one; you know what he's like. Branding, bonding and, of course, lots of beer. I could come round after… no. No, second thoughts I probably shouldn't. I don't know what state I'll be in.'

‘Look, it's not a problem. But you're right, it's probably best if you stay at yours. I have an early start tomorrow.' There was a brief flutter of relief in her chest coupled with a strange feeling in the pit of Emily's stomach. The sand of her life was shifting. Space to think things through was probably a good call.

He had a sheepish grin as he squeezed her hand. ‘I'm sorry. I wanted tonight to be special.'

‘It is. This…' she looked down at the glittering ring. ‘This is very special. Go! Go out and drink beer.' She blew him a kiss then finished the rest of her wine. ‘See you tomorrow. Hope your head won't be too sore.'

‘Love you,' he called as he strode towards the door. The words were a balm to her heart.

How did love feel?

Did it feel like a nice warm glow, a comfortable pair of slippers, that post-bubbles bliss?

Was it lazy, Sunday-morning sex? Because they were very good at that. Very good indeed.

Was it the ease with which she let him go, knowing he'd be back tomorrow?

She finished the rest of her glass, picked up her bag and promised herself not to analyse anything too deeply.

Of course she loved him; how could she not?

***

Feeling a bit tipsy and ever-so-slightly anti-climactic, Emily made her way to the subway, texting Frankie before she went down the steps and out of cell phone range:
Apricot it is. Frou-frou obligatory. Sorry, not sorry!!!

Then she ran down into the dry thick air and jumped on a train almost immediately, finding a seat. Miracle! And finally let out a long, slow breath.

What a day.

What a very strange week indeed; it was as if a zillion stars were all colliding to make things happen for her. After such a bumpy start to her life things were finally settling. She was settling down.

Well, wow. That was not what she'd been expecting when she woke up this morning.

The ride home took no time and she emerged from the subway blinking into the last throes of daylight. Some sort of rap music came from one of the basements giving a sultry buzz to her commute, then the mellow pitch of a saxophone running up and down scales came from across the street, mingling with laughter from children in the play park. In the weak spring sunshine people were starting to shed layers and with them the heavy weight of a long winter.

Fifty yards from her apartment her phone buzzed. She pulled it from her bag, grinning. Frankie no doubt, with a clever come back.

Withheld number.
Oh. Not Frankie. ‘Hello?'

‘Emily? Is that you? Is that Emily Forrester?'

‘Yes. Who is this?'

Clipped English vowels worried their way into Emily's tummy. ‘It's Tamara.'

Well, today was just full of surprises. The giddy, champagne-fuelled, bride-to-be buzz fizzled out. Because, like the dreaded phone call in the middle of the night, any rare call from her stepsister usually meant bad news. Emily's poor heart, which had already taken quite a battering today, bumped a little. ‘Oh, hi, Tam, what's up? Is everything all right?'

‘Not really, I'm afraid, Emily.'

‘Oh. Why? What's happened?' Watching the last dying rays of sunshine dip behind trees, she tried and failed to control the tightening sensation in her stomach. She'd reached her apartment now, nodded to Freddie, the doorman, and started the climb to her first-floor apartment. Her words echoed off the plaster walls as she tried to walk and talk and breathe. ‘What's happened?'

‘This call is expensive, so I'm going to just cut to the chase here. You need to come home.'

‘What? Why?'
Home?
She hadn't called it that for a very long time, and even when she'd lived there it hadn't felt much like a home should.

There was that long-distance static delay and echo that made it sound as if Tam was considering everything very deeply and then speaking down a hollow pipe. ‘It's Daddy.'

‘The Judge? What's wrong?' Em's heart jittered. She couldn't walk and talk and now fret, too, so she sat down on the concrete step outside her front door and leaned back against the cool grey wall, her body refamiliarising itself with all the strange emotions she had whenever she spoke to one of her extended family; frustration, anger, sadness…

‘He's sick, Emily. We need you. Here.'

‘Umm…'
Go back to England? After all these years? After what happened?

As always, when thinking about The Judge she felt ripped in two. How many times had she tried to please him? How hard had she worked for a glimmer of a smile her way? When she'd needed a dad he'd been so busy being one to his other girls that he'd had nothing left when he looked at her. And yet, even now, after all these years, she felt the same hopeless need to please him. Yet she knew it was pointless, because when he'd married her mother he'd just wanted a wife, not another daughter, too.

She didn't want to say the words,
is he dying?
‘How bad?'

There was that weird pause where she could hear her own words echoed back to her. A crackle. ‘Bad enough that we've sat down and discussed it and decided to call you.' More pause. Static that screeched like the white noise in her head at the thought of going back, at the thought of a zillion stars all converging right now, today, for this. ‘Can you hear me, Emily? Are you still there? Emily…? You have to come back to Little Duxbury.'

Chapter Two

Tam's voice started to rise a little hysterically. ‘Daddy's… well… how to put it? He's gone downhill over the last few months.'

Emily had never called him Daddy. Mainly because he wasn't hers, no matter how many times her mum had told her to ‘
call him Dad, Emily Jane. He'd like that.
' She'd had a perfectly good father, who just happened to have died – and she certainly hadn't been in the market to replace him any time soon. Or at all, really. She'd just wanted his car accident to have been a huge mistake and for him to come back to her. She'd missed him so much. Still did.

And, sad fact of the matter was, The Judge hadn't seemed to care about anything Emily thought or needed anyway. And yet, even so, there was a clutch in her chest. He was the only parent, no matter how spurious the connection, that she had left. She hadn't seen him for years, but the thought of him being gone filled her with surprising dread. ‘So, how bad?'

‘Up and down, to be honest. He has good days and… not so good days.'

Her heart was thumping now. ‘Is he dying? Oh, Tam… is he dying?'

Her stepsister tutted. ‘You always were overly dramatic, Emily Jane. No, he's not dying. He's chronically ill.'

‘Oh, good, thank goodness…' Then she realised that must sound pretty shallow. ‘Not for the chronic illness, obviously, but for the fact he's not at death's door.' And great, now she was babbling again – funny, her stepsisters had always had that kind of effect on her, made her nervous, on edge, as if by filling the silences she was filling the void where normal sisterly love should have been.

To say things had never been easy between Emily, Tamara and Matilda was an understatement. She'd entered their lives kicking and screaming and grieving for her father. Then later, sullenly and silently grieving for her mother.

By the time she was twelve and an orphan in the truest sense of the word – both blood parents dead – she'd been bundled off to boarding school, out of sight, out of mind.

By age thirteen she'd been left on her own to rattle around that huge cold house in the long holidays, Tam and Tilda choosing to visit their glamorous mother in Paris rather than stay in the Cotswolds with a brittle, younger stepsister. She could hardly blame them; she hadn't exactly been the world's nicest child to be around. They probably hadn't, she realised now, known what the heck to do with her.

‘Chronic illness is not a good thing, Emily. Do you know how hard it is being here with him? Tilda and I are exhausted. It's been a terrible year with Daddy, and now Mummy is going
into hospital for cataract surgery. We need to be with her and we can't be in two places at once.'

‘Is she still in Paris? You're going to Paris to be with her, then? Both of you?'

‘Yes.' There was a heavy sigh and Em felt it all the way across the Atlantic. ‘We did have a carer booked for him, but she's fallen and broken her leg and so now we're stuck. And don't ask if one of us can stay in Little Duxbury, because we just can't, okay? Tilda really needs to get away and it looks as if I'm going to have to look after everyone. As usual.'

Emily had clearly missed an awful lot of their lives. She felt a little pang in her chest. ‘I'm sure you'll do a sterling job. What's wrong with Tilda?'

‘Nothing that a few days away won't fix, I'm sure. She just needs some time out from that useless husband of hers. So, as you can see, we have no one else to ask. We need you to come back and do your bit.' There was another pause. Then a very quiet, and somewhat difficult, ‘Please'.

Emily knew what that single word would have cost Tamara. They'd never wanted her before. They'd definitely never begged her to come home. ‘I don't know, Tam. It's been such a long time, I doubt he'd want me there, honestly. Is it high blood pressure? Because, I might even make it worse. You know how it is between us.'

‘Now, now, we need to put all that water under the bridge. We need to pull together.'

She was right, of course; it would be selfish to think otherwise, but a large part of Emily – admittedly, the cowardly part – really didn't want to go back and confront their past. Not at all. It wasn't just about how she'd left things with The Judge either… it was pretty much the whole village. She'd probably succeeded in offending all of them at some point, in one way or another.
Troubled
, her head teacher had labelled her in yet another parent-teacher interview.
Disruptive, manipulative…

And yes, she'd been all those things, but mostly she'd just been a sad little girl who missed her parents and their hugs so badly it physically hurt. Moving to New York and reinventing herself had meant she could leave all that hurt behind. But no matter what she did, it was still there in her memories of Little Duxbury and, no doubt, in its memories of her.

But maybe it was being around Brett and his lovely supportive family that made her yearn for something like he had, or maybe it really was just time to try to make things better between them all. She found herself saying, ‘Yes, yes, you're right, we do need to move on.'

Which would be a whole lot easier said than done.

Tam sighed. ‘Good. Well, I should tell you, he's changed a lot… not been himself for a while.'

‘So, why didn't you tell me before now?'

‘It's been insidious, a bit of memory loss here, an easily explained confusion there. A tendency to repeat himself. Christ, don't we all? But now we can't ignore that he's actually got a real problem. He's fine physically, you know, he can manage his…
self-care
– that's what they call it – if you remind him. But he can't cook or… anything much.' Another pause. Then, ‘So you'll come?'

‘I don't know…' But as she said the words, guilt rolled through Emily's stomach. Even though he'd done as little of his duty towards her as he could, he'd at least not seen her be homeless.

‘When do you leave for Paris?' She began to mentally pack things for a cooler climate.