“You don’t have anything to be sorry for, Rachel. Life is hard.”
Rachel just shook her head and then took a sip of tea. Claire perched on the edge of a chair, half listening for Nathan.
“Thank you,” Rachel finally said. “I could use your help. If you wouldn’t mind cleaning.”
“Cleaning? You mean, for your housekeeping business?” Rachel nodded, and relief made Claire almost buoyant. “Absolutely. Cleaning is actually something I can do.”
Rachel smiled sadly. “You can do a lot of things, Claire.”
“Well, I’m adding to my repertoire every day. Just tell me when and where. I have Tuesdays free, and on other days I’m finished at the shop at four. I like cleaning, actually.”
“I have noticed that I haven’t had to do much up at Four Gables,” Rachel said, and then gave her a proper smile. “Okay, then. Thank you. I can shift some of my jobs to Tuesday and you can start then, and try to tackle Henry Price’s horrible loo.”
Chapter twenty-seven
Rachel
It had been an emotional roller coaster of a day, and Rachel was ready to get off. She remained in the sitting room after Claire had left, finishing her lukewarm tea and savoring the silence. On Tuesday Claire would take her cleaning jobs and Rachel would try to sort out the home front. And maybe, just maybe, she could figure out some way to move forward. As a family, as well as a person. She wasn’t ready to let go of her dreams, buried as they were beneath an avalanche of worry. She just wasn’t sure if she could find them again.
The door to the dining room opened and Lily came out, looking subdued. Rachel straightened.
“Mum okay?”
“She’s sleeping. I think.” Lily sat opposite Rachel, her hands tucked between her knees. “It’s kind of hard to tell.”
“I know.”
Lily was silent for a moment, her hair sliding forward to obscure her face. Rachel didn’t press; Lily hadn’t visited their mother much in hospital in the last two weeks, because of school, and the reality of Janice’s condition had to be a shock.
“She’s not going to get much better, is she?” she finally asked, her head still bowed.
“Honestly? I don’t know. I’ve never dealt with a stroke victim before. But I’m not optimistic.” Rachel abandoned her tea on the coffee table and leaned her head back against the sofa. “I have no idea what the future is going to look like, Lily. Or how any of us are going to cope. But the important thing is for you to focus on your exams. They’re coming up soon, and you can’t afford to—”
“Don’t worry about me, Rachel. Exams seem kind of trivial, considering—”
“But they’re not trivial.” Rachel leaned forward, her exhaustion replaced by an urgency that was tinged with anger. “Lily, these exams are everything. I know you don’t believe me, that you don’t even want to go to uni, but trust me, please, that I know better in this case. That I know you want to do better than live here forever and work in the pub or cleaning houses for the rest of your life.”
Lily was silent for a long moment; Rachel couldn’t see her face. “I don’t have to go to university to make different choices than you and Meghan did.” She looked up, and her blue eyes, the same blue as Rachel’s, as their father’s, blazed. “There are more options than uni or working in a pub, Rachel.”
Rachel swallowed down the angry words that bubbled to her lips. “Maybe there are, but do they involve making a living? Being independent?”
“Is that why you want me to go to uni?” Lily exclaimed. “So you don’t have to support me?”
She made Rachel sound selfish, and her instinct was to deny it. She’d sacrificed so much for Lily. This wasn’t about her. “It’s part of it,” she finally admitted. “Of course it is. We’re struggling already—”
“And university costs nine thousand pounds!”
“I don’t care about that. There are student loans—”
“If this is about money, I should just quit school and start working.”
“Lily, that is the last thing I want.” Rachel closed her eyes briefly and pushed a hand through her hair, which had fallen out of the messy knot she’d put it in this morning. It had been an unbelievably long day. “Look, I don’t want to argue. I don’t think I can take it on top of everything else.”
“I don’t want to argue, either. Actually, I want to help.”
“You could help by studying—”
“With Mum.”
