But Willow didn’t feel better off without Lucy and Simon’s friendship.She felt terrible about the whole thing, especially after they’d gone through the heartache of a miscarriage and then discovered Cedric’s decomposing body the way they had.
Shuddering at the gruesome thought, and the memory of the photo Lucy had sent her, Willow played with the diamond ring on her left hand, turning it round and round. It still felt strange to her, wearing something so obviously expensive. She was terrified of losing it, goodness knows how much it was worth. It was certainly worth so much more than she deserved.
To stop the bubble of guilt that was pushing against the cork inside her and threatening to burst free, she told herself that while she didn’t deserve to be given such a beautiful ring, her daughter was the reason she wore it. So surely that made it okay?
She was now twenty-eight weeks pregnant and Rick couldn’t wait for the big day when she would give birth.
‘I’ll be right there with you every second of it,’ he repeatedly assured her whenever she admitted to feeling nervous.
She knew it was something she had to face, but the thought of labour utterly terrified her. She wasn’t good with pain. She was such a pathetic wimp.
Martha, on the other hand, wouldn’t be scared. She’d probably yell and scream and boss everyone about and swear the roof off, but she wouldn’t be frightened.
Wishing she could be more like her sister, Willow drank the rest of her illicit coffee and with a few more minutes to go before her breaktime was up, she checked her mobile for emails. For one in particular.
She and Ellis’s stepson Lucas had recently struck up an email exchange. Curious about him, she had tracked Lucas down on Facebook and messaged him,not sure how he might react. Would he think she had been stalking him?
Thankfully he’d been only too pleased to hear from her and almost daily now they were in touch. His emails were refreshingly humorous and were a happy distraction for her. He was clearly very fond of his stepfather and had nothing but good things to say about Ellis. When Mum and Ellis had announced that they weren’t marrying after all, that being permanently engaged suited them much better, Lucas had asked Willow if she knew why there had been a change of plan. She wrote back saying that from what her mother had told them, she just didn’t fancy dealing with the palaver of organising a wedding and the difficulties it generated.
‘I can relate to that,’ Lucas replied to her. ‘And who needs marriage these days anyway?’
Rick did. Ideally, he wanted them to marry before the baby was born, but realistically he knew that it would be better to wait until they had more time to plan the wedding. ‘One thing at a time,’ he’d said. ‘Baby first, then we’ll marry.’
He was so full of confidence and optimism about the future, something Willow didn’t feel. She wished she did, she truly did. Increasingly she felt her old self, and her confidence, trickling away from her.
Disappointed that there wasn’t an email from Lucas in her mailbox, she took her empty coffee mug through to the kitchen, washed it up, then returned to her desk. Where, surprise, surprise Kyle was hovering with a pointed look on his face.Slave driver, she thought. Even though she was still regularly hitting her targets, and even though he knew she was pregnant and would be leaving soon, he was hellbent on extracting his pound of flesh from her.
Yet for all that, as she slipped on her headset and dialled up the next telephone number on her list, she knew she would miss all this when the time came. She would even miss Kyle.
Chapter Forty-One
The call that Ellis had been dreading had come shortly after he and Naomi had been to see his mother.
There had been nothing out of the ordinary to indicate it would be the last time he would see Rose, although invariably when he drove away from the West View Care Home the thought would cross his mind that he might have just said goodbye for the final time. Yes, she had grown frailer as September drew to a close, and increasingly spent more time asleep, but then he had been observing those changes in her for a good while now.
The end when it came still shocked him. He was told that she had died peacefully in her sleep about the time he and Naomi arrived back at Anchor House after their visit. It was what he had feared would happen, that Rose would choose her moment to die when she was alone, as if she didn’t want to burden him with her departure, that she could manage quite well without him, thank you very much. She had never been a sentimental woman, she’d been a pragmatist to her core, and right to the last she had done things her way. Her final words to them had actually been to Naomi.
‘Take good care of my boy, won’t you?’ she’d said.
‘Mum,’ he’d protested, ‘I’m sixty-five, I’m hardly a boy!’
With a slight nod of her head, she’d tutted. ‘You’ll always be my boy, Ellis. Always.’
‘Of course I’ll take good care of him,’ Naomi had said. ‘I promise.’
With hindsight, that exchange should have alerted Ellis to what lay ahead. He had often heard that in many instances those close to death choose their moment to die, and often they want to die alone. They’ve said all their farewells and want to slip away on their own terms.
In contrast, Ellis’s wife had died in his arms. Diana hadn’t wanted to be alone at the end and he had vowed it wouldn’t happen. The minimal time he had not spent at her bedside, in the hospice while she was having palliative care for the remaining days of her life, had been a torture for him, filling him with the fear that he might break his promise to her. Death, when it came, was a welcome relief for Diana, for him too if he were honest. He had hated to see her beautiful body so utterly destroyed by cancer. She had fought so hard against it, but ultimately the disease had been the victor.
But thank God his mother had not had that type of battle to endure, just a slow but steady decline. Rose had frequently said that the last thing she wanted was a drawn-out deathbed scene. ‘I don’t want an audience,’ she’d said. ‘I want a quiet, dignified end.’
Now, as Ellis stood between Lucas and Naomi on a windless autumnal afternoon in the churchyard of St Saviour’s and watched Rose’s coffin being lowered into the ground, he hoped that she would have approved of the service, that it had been suitably dignified.
Rose had specified that she wanted a burial, not a cremation,but she had not made any stipulations as to where it should be. With Lucas’s agreement, Ellis had opted for the church here in Tilsham. Maybe subconsciously he saw the church as cementing his future – this was where he intended to spend the rest of his days, with Naomi.
The Reverend Veronica Carlyle hadn’t known Rose, but she had taken the information with which Ellis had provided her and made a decent job of celebrating his mother’s well-lived life. Amongst those who had come today to pay their respects had been care workers from West View and most heart-warmingly of all, a fair number of the pupils Rose had taught, many of whom had travelled a long way to be here and were middle-aged and pensioner-age. Much like himself, he thought with a wry smile.
Where did the years go? One minute he was a child, then he was a grown man and married to Diana and with a young stepson, then he was a widower mourning the death of his wife, and now … now he had been given another chance. Another bite of the cherry. And he was determined to make the most of it, because not everyone was that lucky in life.
