“No. I think they’ll end up with a barbecue at Max’s if Killian and Nick are there.” Killian was Claire’s husband. They’d first been involved when she was eighteen and at university and he was Max’s best friend. It’d been kept secret when they were younger, and they’d finally gotten together a few years ago. Nick was his brother, and between them they ran a security firm. I had a lot of time for Killian and Nick O’Hara and adored Nick’s wife, Katie and their kids.
“We’ll go there with them then. Save cooking.” Grant topped up his wine. “And we can wind the kids up so they’re hell when they get them home.”
“That’s evil.”
“That’s revenge.”
The video tour went as well as I’d expected it to. Doctor Collins was a surgeon, currently working in New York and moving over here because of a transfer and a promotion. I didn’t need to know any more information but he was exactly as I expected a surgeon to be, slightly aloof and arrogant, which I assumed you needed to be to cut into a living person’s flesh with the confidence you could fix them.
He asked questions I would’ve expected, including what furniture we could leave. There were some pieces I knew the kids would want, and some that would be moved to the house in Oxford or the London apartment we had and that would be our base now when we were in the capital. He also wanted ourtimescale and how fast our conveyancer could work as he was time pressured, moving here with his wife and son and wanting his son settled for September when the schools returned.
The call ended, a further exchange that the surgeon’s wife led on around what we could leave and when I could confirm it, and whether she could send an interior decorator round as soon as we’d exchanged contracts.
I sat down in the chair on the second floor that looked out over the street. It was the same chair where I’d cuddled Callum when he’d had a nightmare, nursed Payton and Seph and Ava. The same chair I’d sat in listening to teenage woes and worries and then adult trial and tribulations.
The chair would need a new home. I doubted the new occupiers would want to keep it.
I would keep hold of the memories.
MEMORY ONE
MARIE
It was too early for this shit.
Yellow sunlight pattered through the windows, one of the benefits of working from a building that faced Bryant Park rather than another row of skyscrapers. The thrill of working in New York was starting to wear off quicker than a hangover, and I wasn’t a person who suffered with hangovers, so make of that what you would.
I stood next to the reception desk, half listening to what Dessy was enthusiastically telling me about her weekend, catching sentences about something being big and something else not working, which I guessed had something to do with the two dates she’d scheduled for the same time.
“How was your weekend? Did you manage to do something other than go through that file?”
I liked Dessy, otherwise known as Desdemona or Des. She’d worked at my father’s law firm since she’d dropped out of college when she was nineteen, knowing she couldn’t go back home to Oklahoma. Dessy liked country music and cowboys, big hair and big dicks and said she wanted to be Dolly Parton in her next life. She was fascinated with my Irish accent and the number ofswear words I knew, and openly confessed that she never wanted to visit my home country because it would rain too much.
She was right, of course, because it did rain too much, which was why it was so green.
I missed the green.
“I had a date,” I sighed, wishing I’d been re-reading the file instead.
“How was he?” She leaned on the desk, all interested. More interested than I was.
“Tall. Boring. Asked lots of questions about Greens and whether I’d inherit it.” I shrugged. This wasn’t the first time my inheritance had received more interest than me and it wouldn’t be the last.
“Was he the accountant or the lawyer?”
“The lawyer. I should stop dating lawyers. All we end up talking about is work. Cases. Files. Clients. Judges.” It was making me feel drowsy just thinking about it.
“You should date a cowboy. Then you just won’t talk.” Dessy looked dreamy. “I know some from the bar who’d like to wrangle you, a little Irish beauty queen.”
I rolled my eyes, having heard all this before. “I have no idea what you mean by cowboy. I just think of films and hats and men in boots.”
“Don’t knock it. It does the trick. Did I tell you about -”
We both quietened as the familiar figure of my father strode in, his usual navy blue suit crisp and creaseless, his hair that was once the same shade of almost black as mine now sprinkled with silver and his eyes the same shade of grey as the Irish sea on a stormy day.
My mam fell in love with him because he reminded her of Ireland, or so she said. I’d realised when I was old enough she’d fallen in love with him because their chemistry was off the scale,their marriage setting a standard that I was beginning to think was unattainable for a mere mortal like myself.
Joseph Green was not Irish. He was one hundred percent American, born and bred in New York, a perfect mix of German, Swedish, French and Spanish somewhere along the way, not that he spoke anything but English. He’d met my mother when she was summering on Cape Cod, her and her three sisters visiting their aunt, who’d also married an American. Joseph had dived into the water when Bridget’s hat had blown off, striding out soaking wet, with his drenched shirt giving my mam an eyeful and by the end of the summer she’d agreed to marry him.
