‘Okay, you’ve got me, but it’s the people I’m going to miss more than the work. Especially Rowan.’
‘You’ll be fine, I promise, and think how many interesting people you’re going to meet once the campsite opens. Not to mention the fact you’ll get to work with me.’
‘That’s the best bit by far.’ Bex slipped an arm around her mother’s waist and gave it a squeeze. She was delighted that her mother had agreed to come up and work in the campsite reception and shop on a part-time basis, as and when she might be needed. Eventually Bex was hoping to open a cafe too and increase the sort of things they sold in the shop, but for now itwas baby steps, and having her mum’s support meant the world to her. The two of them had always been very close, and the only time their relationship had ever been under any real pressure was when Bex had split up with Liam after finding him kissing her sister.
It had felt like the bottom had fallen out of her world, but she’d expected Liam and Briony to spring apart and for her fiancé to tell her it wasn’t what it looked like – to explain away what she’d seen so that she could believe she was wrong – or at least to say it was a mistake, a moment of madness. Except he didn’t.
‘I’m sorry Bex, you weren’t supposed to find out like this.’ Liam had remained where he was, sitting so close to her sister they were touching. She wanted to scream at him and ask how the hell shewassupposed to find out, but she’d been rooted to the spot, unable to move, let alone speak. So instead, Liam had continued. ‘I’ve been wanting to find a way to tell you for weeks that I can’t go through with the wedding.’
He stopped then, before turning towards Briony, who’d given just the smallest nod of her head, and then he’d said the words that could never be unsaid. They were burned into her brain forever. ‘I can’t marry you, because I don’t love you. I love Briony.’
Bex couldn’t be certain what had happened after that. There’d been vicious words – hers – and lots of tears – hers and Briony’s, maybe even Liam’s. But it had felt like she was in the eye of a violent storm, unable to hear or see anything properly, and she’d known she had to get out. Somehow, she’d got into her car and driven to her parents’ house through a haze of tears. She had no idea how she’d done it, and it had been stupid and dangerous looking back, to drive when she was so upset, but she’d felt as though she’d die if she didn’t get to them; to the comfort only they could provide. And they had comforted her. They’d told her none of it was her fault and that they couldn’t believe what Liamand Briony had done. In that moment, Bex had known they were completely on her side, and her mother had seemed ready to turn her back on her younger daughter. But then Briony had eventually turned up, begging to be heard out and telling them all that what she’d done had been for Bex’s sake, to save her from making a mistake and marrying the wrong man.
Bex had started laughing, but it had quickly turned into something close to hysteria and then she’d started to throw up. Over and over again until she felt like she was just a husk of the person she’d been a few hours before. She didn’t want to listen to Briony’s lies about having done this for her, and she’d been certain her parents wouldn’t either. They’d sent Briony away, and Bex had wept again, this time with relief, but the feeling hadn’t lasted long. Over the days that passed, as Bex had faced the humiliation of cancelling the wedding, and her stepdad had contacted everyone to say it wouldn’t be taking place, her mother had begun urging her to hear Briony out, to at least let her try to explain.
‘I can’t believe you’re taking her side.’ Red hot tears of rage had burned Bex’s eyes, and she’d been convinced when she looked in the mirror that they’d be bright red, rather than their usual hazel.
‘Oh, my love, I’m not, I can promise you that. I just can’t bear the thought of you two falling out forever over a fool like Liam Corrigan.’ Donna had shaken her head. ‘You’ve been each other’s everything and you were like a second mum to Briony, looking out for her when I was working. Don’t let that idiot take that from you.’
‘He didn’t take it. Briony gave it to him, in fact she probably begged for it, lying on her back with her legs open wide.’ Bex had seen the look of utter horror cross her mother’s face and she’d known how much the words had hurt her; how difficult shefound it to hear her speaking so coarsely about Briony, but she was in too much pain to care. It had been the weeks and months that followed that had pushed the relationship between Bex and her mother to its limit. For a while she’d even considered leaving Port Agnes for good. Even when Briony had subsequently announced to their mother that she was going abroad to work, things hadn’t been easy. Bex had wanted Donna to take the opportunity to choose her, completely and utterly, over her younger sister, and to say she wouldn’t see Briony any more, even when she eventually came back from her travels, but her mother couldn’t do it.
‘If you loved me, you would,’ Bex had said through gritted teeth, but Donna had shaken her head again.
‘I do love you, sweetheart, more than you’ll ever know, because a mother’s love is unconditional and there’s nothing you could do to ever change that. But what that means is that I love your sister unconditionally too, and you can’t ask me to choose between you, because that would be impossible. I couldn’t give either of you up and ever be happy again. You’ll understand that one day, when you have children of your own.’
Bex’s eyes had flashed in anger. ‘Well, that’s probably never going to happen now, is it? Me having kids, because my bitch of a sister stole my fiancé.’
She’d really thought it was true back then too; that Liam had been her one chance of happiness and of having a family of her own. Even through all of Bex’s angry outbursts, her mother had never stopped reassuring her that there would be better times ahead and that one day she might even look back on this and be glad it happened. She’d been utterly convinced that Donna was wrong about that, but she’d been right all along. Bex wouldn’t swap what she had with Matt and their boys, not even if someone offered her all the money in the world to sweeten the deal. Hermother had been right about the unconditional love thing too, and she couldn’t imagine ever being able to choose between her sons.
The arrival of Henry had been the culmination of Bex getting her relationship with her mum fully on track again, and leaving the past in the past, where it belonged. It had been made easier by the fact that Briony had never come home to Port Agnes. Bex had eventually came to terms with the fact that her parents would go off on holiday every so often, to visit her estranged sister, but she no longer felt jealous or threatened that her mother had maintained a relationship with Briony, she just didn’t want to hear about it. She had a new life that Briony had never been a part of and that made things easier too.
Three months to the day after her wedding to Liam should have taken place, Bex had met Matt. Six months after that they’d flown to Las Vegas to get married, and having her own family had suddenly felt like a certainty again. Her mother had been right about all of those things, but Bex still couldn’t forgive Briony, because Donna had been right about something else too. Bex had been like a second mum to her sister and had been devoted to her. Losing Liam was easy to get over in the end, even with the humiliation of having to call off their wedding so close to the day, but what she could never forgive Briony for was forgetting that they were sisters, with a bond that should have meant the world to her, just as it had to Bex.
These days she barely gave Liam a thought. He’d been married and divorced twice already according to a mutual friend she was still in contact with, and he was about to embark on a third marriage to a woman fifteen years younger than him. All of his previous relationships had ended because of him cheating, so he’d shown Bex who he was the day she’d found him on the sofa with her sister. But Briony had shown her who she was too, andsecond chances were only for people who deserved them. Eventually Briony had seemed to get the message and had stopped reaching out begging for forgiveness, or for Bex to hear her out. Even her mum and Ken had stopped trying to convince her that Briony had her reasons for doing what she did, and they’d settled into a status quo of not talking about Briony when they were together. Occasionally one of them would let something slip, like the fact that Briony was living on a canal boat, or had moved to Wales for the summer to try her hand at sheep farming, but Bex would always just shut the conversations down.
When the tenth anniversary of Briony moving away came around, her mother had broken the unwritten rule and suggested that perhaps it was time to let bygones be bygones. It had been the catalyst for the rarest of things, a row between Bex and her parents, which had ended when Bex had told them she didn’t want her three boys knowing all the details of what had happened, and if they didn’t stop trying to intervene, she’d have to distance herself from them. After that, the mentions of Briony became close to non-existent. They’d all come to terms with this double life and found a way for their two worlds to co-exist, without them ever colliding.
Bex wondered if her mum even knew the significance of the date for the official opening of the campsite, when the first paying customers would arrive. It was the same date she should have married Liam. She wanted the tenth of April to be something other than a painful reminder of the wedding that never was – and of the fact that her sister should have been standing by her side as Maid of Honour, but had instead chosen to do something so awful that they hadn’t seen one another for sixteen years. Opening the campsite would wipe away the last vestige of hurt that was associated with that date.
‘Where are Ken and the other boys?’ Bex removed her armfrom her mother’s waist and shook off the memories of the bad old days. They were well and truly behind them now. ‘I’m surprised Henry and Ollie aren’t sitting here with their tongues hanging out waiting for a chocolate chip cookie too.’
‘They’re playing cricket in the back garden, but Henry put a timer on his mobile, because I told him the cookies would be ready to eat half an hour after they went outside.’ Donna glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘In fact, it should be going off any minute now.’
‘Shame they’ll miss out on the biggest cookies then.’ Bex whipped two of the slightly bigger cookies off the plate and handed one to Tom, who looked beside himself with delight to be in on something that let him get one over on his big brothers for once. Bex had seen how hard that was for him to do as the youngest.
‘There’ll be no Easter basket for you, my girl, if you carry on like that.’ Donna wagged her finger at her daughter, but she couldn’t keep the smile off her face. ‘The Easter bunny has eyes everywhere you know. Doesn’t he, Tom?’
‘Oh Nan, I’m too old to believe in all of that.’ Tom gave a dramatic roll of his eyes, suddenly sounding more like forty-nine than nine, and Donna heaved an equally dramatic sigh.
‘Oh, don’t say that, Tommy, please.’ She moved to stand behind her grandson and wrapped her arms around him. ‘I’m not ready for my last grandbaby to be so grown up. How about you keep believing in the Easter Bunny and I’ll make sure that there are more chocolate eggs than you can carry when we do our egg hunt?’
Tom beamed and slipped out of his grandmother’s arms, holding out a hand for her to shake instead. ‘You’ve got yourself a deal.’
Watching them together, a wave of loved flooded Bex and shepushed down the flash of unease that had accompanied her mother’s words about her ‘last grandbaby’. Donna seemed to have reached the conclusion that her other daughter would never be having children of her own and Bex found herself wanting to break her own rule and bring up Briony’s name. Why was her mother so certain that Briony would never have kids of her own? Was it because of what had happened with Liam? They barely seemed to have lasted for the duration of Bex’s drive to her parents’ house, the night she’d discovered them kissing on the sofa, so she couldn’t believe he’d had that much impact on her. Had Briony ever got close enough to someone else to even consider starting a family? She didn’t know any of those things, because she’d refused to let her parents talk about Briony. It was better that way, and this nagging sense of curiosity would pass if she just pushed it down deep enough. Briony was no longer a part of her life, she hadn’t been for sixteen years, and Bex had every intention of keeping it that way.
2
One of Bex’s favourite games as a child had been to play shop. She’d empty the kitchen cupboards of all the tins and packets, line them up on the table, and make her own price stickers. Although back in the 1990s some of them still had price stickers already. Owning her own shop had been one of her ambitions back then, as well as being a vet, and a movie director, although she hadn’t known that’s what a person who made films was called. She’d just known all three jobs involved things she loved, and she’d seen no reason those occupations couldn’t exist side by side and neither had Briony. Her younger sister hadn’t wanted the vet part, but she had wanted to be an actress. Briony had always had a flair for the dramatic, and could make a slight graze seem like a life-and-death experience if she wanted to. It had earned her the nickname Hollywood and she’d loved it. So it had seemed perfectly reasonable that Briony would grow up to star in the films that her sister made, and they’d agreed they’d take turns to work in their shop on the weekends. They’d been about ten and seven when they’d laid out this manifesto for the future, and Bex and genuinely thought it would come to fruition.
