ChapterThirty-One
NATE
I told Holly I’m okay with things, but that doesn’t stop the stupid flutter of nerves darting around my stomach as we pull into the small cul-de-sac where my parents’ red brick Victorian detached house is located.
A million memories flood back. Playing on the central communal lawn on a balmy summer day. Constructing makeshift goals with our t-shirts, and kicking a football until the sun went down, or we got hungry. Building snowmen in the winter, stealing whatever items of clothing from the coat hooks we could find.
I blink them away and refocus on the house with a gleaming gold number seven plaque on the open front gate. Mam’s Volkswagen Golf is parked on the grey paved driveway to the left of the house, with Dad’s Transit van beside it, both facing forwards. Dad has always enforced a strict reverse-in, drive-out policy since they became grandparents, and toddlers were liable to be running loose.
With six bedrooms and a generous-sized garden, it more than meets their needs, but that doesn’t stop me wishing they’d let me spoil them. Let me buy them something four times the size. But that’s not what they want.
Mam’s words from all those years ago roll through my mind.‘This is our home. It’s always been our home, and always will be our home.’
Of course, that’s not the only reason I wish they’d move.
I will my eyes not to look at the terracotta tiled house next door as I park on the road outside instead of blocking my parents in.
‘This is where you grew up?’ Holly’s eyes roam over the neatly manicured gardens, the symmetrical hedging that dad spent years preening to perfection, and the hip-height potted plants flanking the black front door.
An intricately woven Christmas wreath comprising crimson holly berries and lush green ivy hanging on the front door welcomes us.
Images of the last Christmas I spent here infiltrate my brain like a swarm of fireflies. It’s a battle to swat them away.
It was the most amazing Christmas.
Too good, as it turned out.
Sally-Ann’s parents had emigrated to Australia, and their Christmas present to her was their house to do with as she wished. As an only child, it was always going to be hers one day, but I assumed she’d rent it out or sell it. We’d been living in Santa Monica for almost a year. I’d just been cast as the lead in my third movie that year. Things were going great.
Or so I thought.
I was due to start filming the first week in January, so we’d booked flights to the States on the twenty-ninth of December. My suitcase was packed, waiting by the front door, ready to go, when I heard muffled sobs coming from up the stairs.
With a tear-streaked face, Sally-Ann confessed she wasn’t coming with me. That she couldn’t hack the pressure of being relentlessly pursued by paps, the lack of privacy and the continuous speculation about whether I was sleeping with my co-stars.
It was my dream to make it big in America. And she respected that. But it was never hers.
The worst thing about it?
I didn’t see it coming. Didn’t get any inclination that my world was about to blow up spectacularly in my face like an action stunt in one of my movies.
It would almost have been easier if she’d broken up with me because she didn’t love me, but it wasn’t even that.
It was life that broke us apart.
As my career progressed upwards, my personal life spiralled downwards. The drugs took the edge off, for a while at least.
I didn’t expect Sally to marry my best friend less than a year later.
In my mind, we had unfinished business. I thought she’d come back to me at some point. After all, we split because of the outside pressures, not because we didn’t love each other.
The day Mam informed me Sally was getting married, I dragged my sorry stoner ass to American Addicts Support Society and vowed to turn my life around.
She’d moved on.
It was time for me to do the same.
Hopping out of the Audi, I round to the passenger side to open the door for Holly. Her chestnut hair is not entirely dissimilar to Sally-Ann’s, a fact which hasn’t really registered until this moment. But other than that, they’re nothing alike. Sally also has blue eyes, but Holly’s are ten shades brighter, and twenty times more playful.
