Raegan emerged from the other side of the French wedding cake, shaking her head sadly. ‘Spend it with Polly and me instead,’ she said, tilting her head to one side in a move I could have sworn she’d stolen from my dog. ‘You know my kid loves you more than she does me.’
I smiled sadly and wiped my sticky hands on a cloth. ‘The feeling is one hundred per cent mutual, but even your adorable five-year-old won’t change my mind. I’d be lousy company, anyway.’
On paper Raegan and I were unlikely friends. She was eight years my junior, a single mum who’d barely been making ends meet with a collection of part-time jobs. She’d happily admitted she didn’t know creme pat from Postman Pat, and yet five minutes into the interview I’d already decided to give her the job.
‘You hired her for her sense of humour?’Adam had asked me incredulously that night.
I’d given a helpless shrug.‘Kind of,’I’d said, not regretting my decision at all. Four years later, I still didn’t.
One of the best things about Raegan was that she knew when to push and when to back off.
‘Bugger you, Lily. I knew you’d say no,’ she said, releasing the clip from her hair and running her fingers though the mulberry-coloured strands. The only thing more colourful than Raegan’s language was her hair, which changed hue practically every month. ‘My offer stays open, though,’ she said, pulling me in for quick, hard hug.
As tempting as her invitation had been, as I looked around the home that was so full of Adam and yet so empty without him, there was really only one place I wanted to be.
I hauled down an old carryall from the top of the wardrobe, happy to finally be doing something positive. Finding a forgotten pair of Adam’s black socks tucked away in the corner of the bag derailed me for a moment.
‘Socks!’ I said in disbelief, blowing my nose noisily and then throwing a wodge of damp tissues into the wastebin ten minutes later. I suppose I’d known I wouldn’t be able to get through today without sobbing, but I really hadn’t expected a pair of old socks to be the thing that took me down.
I threw some clothes into the bag, and then filled a carrier with food bowls and dog food. My parents had no pets of their own but had always referred to Fletcher as their ‘granddog’, which had made Adam laugh and roll his eyes. It had been easy to see that my parents adored Adam, and from the first time I’d brought him home my dad had called him ‘son’, which if you knew my dad, you’d realise was a very big deal. They had grieved for me and with me over the past twelve months, and I really didn’t know what I’d been thinking, imagining I’d be able to get through today without them.
I wasn’t concerned when there was no reply when I called the house, because since retiring their lives had been busier than ever. ‘We’re cramming it all in now, so we’ll be free for childminding when you and Adam have some kiddies,’my dad had jokingly told me a few years ago. It was a throwaway line that my brain still refused to discard.If only we had ...I thought sadly, as I slid behind the wheel of my car. It was hard sometimes to know if the last year would have been better or immeasurably worse if Adam and I hadn’t put off our plans for a baby for so long. How stupid we were for thinking we had all the time in the world to make that dream a reality.
The journey was uneventful and the roads busy enough to force me to concentrate only on my driving. The house I’d grown up in was disappointingly in darkness when I pulled into the driveway. Fletcher, who seemed to recognise we’d arrived at the place where he was secretly given biscuits, was already jumping up and down on the rear seat in excitement.
I glanced back at him with a smile. There might not have been children in our lives, but sharing this past year with Fletcher, who had loved Adam just as much as me, had made a totally unbearable twelve months a little less so.
I let myself into the house, and Fletcher shot past me at a hundred miles an hour, doing a totally unnecessary search for my parents. The absence of their car in the driveway had already confirmed they were still out.
I walked into the kitchen, breathing in the familiar smell of home, a fragrance so precious I would have paid a fortune to have it bottled. I filled a water bowl for Fletcher and the kettle for me. As I waited for it to boil, I unlocked the back door so the dog could make use of the garden and followed him out into the fast-fading daylight. As my feet went from the paved patio to the lawn, a vague feeling of unease settled over me. Something was wrong. Something was different. I looked up and gasped so loudly that Fletcher stopped investigating the strange flower beds and bounded back over.
The tree. The tree was gone. The old sycamore in our neighbours’ back garden, which I’d climbed a thousand times or more, should have been standing majestically beside the fence, its boughs overhanging our garden, but all I could see was sky.
I pivoted back to look at the neighbours’ house. It had changed hands several times since my tree-scaling days. I had no idea who the current owners were, but I already hated them for ruthlessly hacking down my childhood memories.
Fletcher danced excitedly around my feet as I pushed through the undergrowth to the section of fence with the loose boards. But my searching fingers found no place where younger me had crawled through the panels held aside by my old partner in crime.
‘It blew down in that terrible storm we had last November,’ my mother said as she busied herself pulling ingredients from the fridge for our evening meal.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Mum paused in her scrutiny of a sell-by date and looked at me sadly for a moment. ‘I figured you had enough things to be thinking about instead of old trees,’ she said kindly.
I nodded slowly. November hadn’t been a good time for me. It was the month of my wedding anniversary. The first I’d had to spend without Adam.
‘Even so,’ I said, aware I was making far too much out of something that really shouldn’t have mattered this much to me. Except that it did.
‘I still think it’s a miracle you never broke your neck falling out of that damn old tree,’ Dad said, ruffling my hair as though I was still that eleven-year-old fearless tomboy. ‘If I’d known what dangerous antics you were getting up to over there, with that young lad the Bakers fostered – what was his name again?’ he asked, turning to my mother, the oracle, for an answer. But I replied first. Why would I not, when his name had been in and out of my thoughts all day.
‘Josh. His name was Josh.’
With culinary wizardry, Mum conjured a dinner for two into a feast for three, which made me wonder if she’d always known I was going to turn up at their door today. It was probably no accident either that the meal was one of my childhood favourites.
The visit did all that I’d hoped it would. I’d been running on empty, and somehow being back in the place where I’d grown up restored and renewed me. Not everyone was lucky enough to have roots like these, which was something I’d learnt at a surprisingly young age. I yanked my thoughts back because Icould see where they were heading. And tonight, I wanted only to think about Adam.
The tap was light on my bedroom door. I turned my head but didn’t move from the window seat where so many of my childhood dreams and plans had been launched. It was the same spot beside the same star-strewn sky, but I was too old now to believe that wishing on them achieved anything.
‘Are you alright, sweetheart?’
