A sob caught in her throat and before I knew it, I was sitting beside her on the sofa, holding her hand and consoling her as though I’d known her all my life.
‘Families fall apart over the most stupid of things,’ she said, her voice trembling and fierce at the same time. ‘Maybe I can’t make things right with your daddy but I can damn well take care of his little girl. I won’t make the same mistakes twice, Emily. If you’ll let me try, I would like to be a true grandmother to you. We could be a real family.’
A real family. The one thing I’d never had. The one thing I’d always wanted. I gazed into Catherine’s eyes and saw all the things I’d dreamt of gazing back. Whatever happened between her and my dad happened a long time ago and it seemed to me that she’d suffered enough. She deserved a second chance. We both did.
‘I’d like that,’ I told her, falling into another warm hug as exhaustion hit me like a tidal wave.
‘Look at me, talking your ear off when you should be resting.’ Catherine brushed my hair away from my face, her eyes full of love. ‘Emily James, you look worn slap out. We need to get you upstairs to bed.’
‘Really, I’m fine,’ I protested but when she stood, I struggled to do the same. Five minutes ago, I was so full of energy, Icould barely sit still but suddenly, my legs were useless lumps of lead.
With a protective arm around my shoulders, she led me out the parlour and up the grand curving staircase, each step like climbing a mountain. When we finally reached the summit, she turned the brass knob on a white-painted door and bustled me through it.
‘Right now, you’re going to rest,’ she ordered. ‘And first thing tomorrow, you are going to tell me everything there is to know about you.’
‘That won’t take long.’ I chased my words with a loud yawn. ‘We can probably cover it over a cup of tea.’
‘I don’t believe that for one second. You look like a girl with a thousand stories to tell and I can’t wait to listen to each and every one of them.’
Everything Catherine said sounded like singing. Each word held hands with the last as it slipped out in her sweet, soft southern drawl. I could have listened to her talk forever.
‘This will be your room,’ she said with tenderness. ‘I hope you like it.’
My tired eyes popped open as I took in my new surroundings. The cottage in Wales might have been small and dark but it was still an improvement on most of the university housing we’d lived in over the years. This was something else entirely. There was a four-poster bed in the middle of the room, smothered in blankets and quilts that were surely too heavy for the balmy summer evening, and piled high with so many pillows, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to fit in the bed alongside them. The floorboards were covered in antique rugs and across from where I stood was a real, actual, working fireplace, and the best part of all, four towering bookcases, stretching from the floor to the ceiling. Every shelf was crammed so full with books you couldn’t have slid as muchas a single piece of paper between them. I scanned the spines, all of them broken and well-loved, and felt the happiness on my face melt away.
‘This was my dad’s room,’ I said, and Catherine nodded. Dad always had a book within arm’s reach and never left home without at least two, one for fun and one for work. It was a habit I was happy to have inherited.
‘After they were married, your parents took the larger suite upstairs but this is where your daddy grew up. My boy just loved to sit in the window seat and read, gazing out onto the square and dreaming his big dreams. Always had his nose in a book.’ She trailed one finger down the broken spines of a bunch of paperbacks, stopping on a beat-up copy of a Stephen King classic before recovering herself. ‘There’s a new mattress, of course, and all the pillows and linens are new, but everything else is an antique. Some of these pieces have been in our family for more than two hundred years.’
‘It’s incredible.’ I imagined all of the people who might have sat at the desk beside the window, composing their thoughts before me. All of my ancestors.
‘Emily?’
‘Yes?’ I turned back to look at my grandmother as she pulled out the Stephen King book and held it to her chest. There was a look on her face I couldn’t quite read, somewhere between happy, sad and afraid, or maybe all three at once.
‘Was Paul happy?’ she asked, her expression settling on something like hope.
‘I think so,’ I replied honestly. ‘He laughed a lot and he loved his work. The last few months, he was kind of quiet but that’s how he got when he was working on a new project, super focused, you know? The only time he seemed sad was when he talked about my mom.’
Catherine slipped the book back in with the others, closingher eyes and breathing in deeply before she reset herself with a short, sharp clap that made me jump.
‘Even in this beastly weather, a cup of hot tea always helps me to relax before bed,’ she said brightly, her mood completely changed. ‘Let me go boil up some water while you settle in.’
‘That sounds nice, thank you.’ I offered her a grateful smile as I spotted my pyjamas folded neatly on the bed. Someone had already opened and emptied my suitcase. Only the backpack was untouched, still zipped up and bulging with all my essential items, tucked away down the side of the desk.
‘I’ll be right back,’ she promised as she retreated towards the hallway. ‘Holler if you need me.’
My dad used to say the exact same thing.
The door closed behind her and I ran my hand along the silky blue walls, tracing out one of the dozens of hand-painted birds as I drifted across the room, ending up at the window seat. I climbed up and leaned in, my face so close to the glass, I could see the evidence of my every exhalation in front of me. It was almost a relief to know I was still breathing. None of this felt real.
On the other side of the glass was my very own wrought-iron balcony and I wondered if it was safe to stand on. It looked sturdy enough but I wouldn’t be taking any chances tonight. Instead, I raised the sash window and poked my head out to breathe in the steamy Savannah evening. Bell House sat on the edge of a square, a little green park, packed with trees and people, a beautiful fountain at its heart. There was bird song and laughter on the air and the happy noises smoothed the edges of my sharper thoughts. Sliding my fingers inside the collar of my T-shirt, I felt for my most precious possession. My mother’s gold locket. I never took it off. Wherever I went, the locket came with me, the one remaining constant in my life. I closed my hand around the cool metal, shut my eyes andtook what I hoped would be a steadying breath. It didn’t help. I still felt like I was living in a fantasy.
When I opened my eyes again, he was the first thing I saw.
Right on the edge of the square, leaning against the trunk of a very tall tree, I saw a boy, hands deep in his pockets, a complicated frown on his face. His hair was wavy like mine but shorter and wilder, a deep dark ash, while his skin was tanned, golden sunshine to my spilt milk. My unruly, jetlagged mind began to wander, imagining what colour his eyes might be, how soft was his skin, how firm were his lips. Then I saw it. Without warning, the room whooshed away from me, as though I’d been yanked backwards, and everything went black. I reached out for something to hold onto as the real world was replaced by a flash of his lips on mine, my hands in his hair, my back against the oak tree and our bodies pressed so close together I could feel the warmth of his skin burning through his clothes. It was quick; just half a heartbeat passed before my eyes snapped open and I was back in my room, but the vision felt so real I had to reach for the window frame to steady myself. Just the thought of touching this stranger was enough to set sparks dancing up and down my skin. Still bracing myself, I swallowed hard and glanced back down into the square. His eyes looked directly into mine, the corners of his mouth lifted into a crooked smile that filled his handsome face and my entire body went up in flames. I pulled away from the window, embarrassed, as though he had somehow seen the same thing I had.
‘What was that?’ I asked myself, pushing away the image of the two of us entwined underneath the oak tree. In sixteen years and eleven months, I had kissed exactly one person, my friend Gianni, and since he immediately burst into tears and ran away right after it happened, I wasn’t sure it counted. All my romantic experience came from my Kindle which meantthat, theoretically, I would absolutely know what to do if I ever met a hot orc but had no idea what to do with an actual, real-life human boy. Tensing every muscle in my body, I held my breath and turned back to the window.
