“Well then, I’ll be off,” said Ryan.
The air was suddenly taut with suspense. The nighttimenoises froze into silence as they stood before one another, the space between them an invisible swirling vortex of “what-ifs” pulling them closer, even as she tried to resist. He held her gaze. It would only take the barest of movements for their lips to touch, but neither of them moved, and the longing sang out between them. Though her every impulse screamed at her to kiss him, she knew that acting on it would only complicate things when she wasn’t yet certain what she wanted, which path she wanted to take.
With an effort, she took a step back. “Thank you for tonight,” she said, feeling the weight of the spoils from the time capsule in her pockets. “I had a lot of fun.”
“Me too,” he said, smiling. “I’ll catch you soon. I’m sure I’ll find another reason to come up here.”
“Maybe I’ll invite you, so you don’t need to think of an excuse.”
“I’d like that.” He tilted his head to one side. “I’ll see ya.”
“See ya.”
He turned and began to wander back down the hill, this time in the direction of the town. She heard the crackle of his boots on the frosted path even after the darkness had enveloped him. The singing Christmas tree she’d stuffed into the bay hedge burst into song once more as she climbed wearily up the garden path. The leaves on the hedge shook as “With a hey and ahee and a ho-ho, with a hee and a ho and a hah-hah!” rang out into the night. A spooked fox darted out from behind a hydrangea and dashed away into the darkness. At this rate Fred would be digging a hole to bury the singing Christmas tree along with her feelings.
Back in the house, she divested herself of her winter layers and opened the larder. She panned her phone torch around the small, shelved room until she landed on what she was looking for. At the back, stacked up beside a sack of flour, were a dozen or more bags of Coast Roast coffee. Ryan wasn’t lying when he’d said he’d been delivering coffee as an excuse to see her. There was enough here to see them through an apocalypse.Ryan Frost likes me. She smiled to herself and backed out of the larder, snagging a half-packet of chocolate digestives as she went.
In bed, with a mug of hot tea in one hand, her feet slowly thawing beneath the thick duvet, she dunked the biscuits as she eyed her letter to her future self in the lamplight. She had decorated the envelope with shiny stickers of hearts and stars and written “To Future Fred” in curly script. After another dunked biscuit, she placed her mug and the open biscuit packet on the bedside table and took up the envelope.
As she opened the letter, a handful of pressed flowers fluttered out—daisies, violets and pansies—which she carefully dropped back into the envelope. She smiled to see her old handwriting, loopy and free, with hearts above the “i”s.
Dear Fred of the future!
How are you? I hope you live in an apartment in London or New York and have a job where you get to wear fancy clothes and go out to dinner. At the moment Idon’t know what I want to do when I leave school. Maybe I’ll be a writer like Jo inLittle Women.
My best friend is Ryan Frost, and I think I might secretly love him, but I won’t tell him until I am sure. I don’t know if loves me, though, because boys are a bit stupid about that stuff. Speaking of Ryan, I hope you are married now. I think he will be a good husband, but if you haven’t married Ryan, I hope it’s because you married Howard from Take That! Dreamy! I hope I get cooler when I’m, like, twenty. I’m not cool now, and it’s really annoying being the girl no one wants to dance with at the school disco. I hope my thighs are thinner. I hope one day there will be a school reunion and everyone will see how much I’ve changed, like a caterpillar into a butterfly.
With lots of love,
Fredricka Hallow-Hart
Aged 12
She read the letter twice. Past-Fred would be very disappointed by her lack of apartment, husband, children, job, fancy wardrobe and thinner thighs. Although she did have good tits, and even though they hadn’t been on past-Fred’s wish list, she reckoned she’d still be impressed.
Replacing the letter carefully back in the envelope, she reached for the biscuits again. Tonight had been revelatory in more ways than one. Her conversations with Ryan had thrown her into a quandary. Did she keep seeing Warren—tosee if what they had begun might have legs? Or should she see if the spark she’d felt with Ryan tonight was as combustible as she suspected it might be. Past-Fred had certainly thought it was a goer. But what if the spark was just that—a lighter with a worn flint, all spark and no flame?
One thing was certain: she couldn’t date them both. Well, she could, but she wouldn’t, that had never been her style. She was a one-man-at-a-time kind of woman. The question was, which man?
18
Monday, December 9
“Which green to go withthe red?” asked Fred, her finger hovering over the mouse. “British racing green, or forest green?”
It was Monday morning, and the Hallow-Hart women were sat around the kitchen table, making color decisions for the home page of the new website. Fred had designed it as though you were looking in through a snowy window animation, with rich crimson drapes being pulled back by two Nutcracker dolls. The view through the leaded windowpanes was of cushions in green velvet with gold brocade, upon which lay boxes of crackers showcasing Hallow-Hart paper designs from the last hundred years. Sugar Plum Fairies skipped between the boxes, carrying examples of the treats to be found within: one pulled Martha’s silver necklace behind them; another balanced a wooden egg cup on her head; two more were playing house inside one of Dr. Bayley’s match striker cottages.
“Forest green, I think,” said Aunt Cam.
“Can we see it against the racing green?” asked Aunt Aggie.
“Sure.” Fred clicked between greens on the color palette, and the cushions changed color accordingly.
“Oh, I still don’t know!” Aunt Aggie groaned dramatically.
“Mum? What do you think? Mum?”
“Huh?” Bella looked up as though waking from a dream. Steam from the mug of coffee she was hugging in both hands curled up languidly to mist her reading glasses.
