‘See you later, Briony, and I hope everything goes okay with the assessment,’ Matt called out to her as he stepped outside.
‘Thank you.’ It was all she could do to stop herself from telling him to give the boys a hug from her. Instead, she watched him disappear into the darkness and concentrated on her breathing to try and stop the tears from coming until she was on her own.
‘You’ve got my number, so you can ring or message me anytime, but I’ll send you updates about Merlin, so you know he’s okay.’ Tristan ran a hand over the dog’s back and the Labrador looked up at him with adoring eyes. Briony doubted he was going to miss her a millionth as much as she was going to miss him, having clearly fallen in love with his temporary owner already.
‘That’s great and thanks again for looking after him, and for everything else.’
‘It was nothing.’
‘No, it wasn’t. I’ll see you later, Tristan.’ She moved towards the door, leaving him in no doubt that she was ready for him to go. Even so, he hesitated for a moment, before leaning forward and kissing her softly on the cheek. It was perfectly chaste, but it still made her catch her breath.
‘Take care of yourself, Briony, and you know where I am if you need anything.’
‘Thank you, but I won’t. I’ve looked after myself for a very long time now and I’ll be fine.’ She painted on another smile and kept it in place just long enough to close the door behind him, as he headed off into the night with the two dogs. Her chin immediately began to wobble, but she held back the sobs until she was as confident as she could be that Tristan would be out of earshot. She already missed Merlin so much that it was hard to breathe,but she knew that wasn’t the only reason her emotions had overwhelmed her. There was no road back to the role she could have played in Bex’s family, she was certain of that now and the last shreds of hope she’d had were gone. Losing her sister first time around had almost killed her and now it was happening all over again.
14
‘Did Tristan tell you what time she was leaving today?’ Bex’s entire body was rigid with tension, making her muscles ache as though she’d spent the last twenty-four hours in the gym. A lot of it was down to the fact that the hospital would be running tests to check whether Briony could be a donor and there was so much riding on that, but it wasn’t the only reason she was tense. Just knowing that Briony was here, in the place Bex called home, made her uneasy, as if it wasn’t the same safe place it had been before her arrival. She just hoped some of the tension would lift when Briony was no longer within a few hundred metres of her house, but she wasn’t sure it would. When Briony had been out of sight, Bex had largely been able to keep her estranged sister out of mind too, but Pandora’s Box had been opened by her reappearance and it wouldn’t be easy to shut off all the feelings that had been raked up.
Briony’s appearance had changed over the years. That shouldn’t have been a surprise, because Bex’s probably had too. Although sometimes she felt as though she’d had the samehairstyle since starting secondary school and, once the boys had arrived, she hadn’t prioritised any kind of beauty regime. When she’d been working at Port Agnes Primary, she’d worn make-up every day, but even that wasn’t something she did all the time any more. She looked like exactly who she was: a busy mum of three, running a farm and campsite business; her hair windswept and her cheeks more likely to be blushed by a stiff sea breeze than a sweep of the Dior blusher she only ever wore on special occasions. She liked that about herself and felt comfortable in her own skin, knowing that Matt thought she was beautiful regardless of whether she was wearing mud-splattered overalls, with wet hair that had been stuck to her head by a sudden downpour, while they were replacing fencing, or when she was done up for the Three Ports Farmers’ annual ball, and he was wearing the dinner suit that waited patiently in the wardrobe the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year. It was always more than worth the wait to see him in that suit though, and he’d never failed to make her feel like the most beautiful woman in the room, even if she knew that wasn’t true.
After Liam, Matt had done so much to restore Bex’s confidence, but she’d refused to let her self-esteem hinge on his opinion, or anyone else’s for that matter. Doing that with Liam had made her so vulnerable and had allowed her to be blind to his behaviour and ignore all the evidence that he’d been cheating on her almost from the start of their relationship. She’d craved his validation so much, because it felt as though it had filled the gap she’d been carrying around inside her ever since she’d realised the first man she’d ever loved – her father – didn’t love her back. At least not in the way he should. So when Matt had come along, she hadn’t allowed herself to fall back into that trap. He’d undoubtedly helped build her back up, but she’d worked onherself too, forging a career of her own outside of the farm, so that she didn’t feel entirely reliant on him, growing a circle of new friends and re-establishing old friendships that she’d allowed to fall by the wayside because Liam had made her feel bad for pursuing them.
Then the boys had come along, and she’d worked hard to be the best mother she knew how to be – after all, she’d learned from an expert – and had grown even more in confidence, proud of the lovely, lively, kind and well-rounded boys all three of them were. She’d never let go of pursuing her dream of owning a campsite either, and Tristan had been a kindred spirit, like the brother she’d never had, filling another void in her life where it felt like a sibling should have been, after she’d cut Briony out of her life. When the farm side of the business was finally established enough to give her the confidence to open the campsite, it felt as if she had everything she’d ever wanted. But then Briony had returned, disrupting all of those feelings of contentment, almost as if she’d known Bex had too much happiness and it was time for her to take some away again. Deep down, Bex knew that wasn’t entirely fair. Briony was back in her life because of the transplant, but she’d agreed to come and stay at the farm long before she’d known about any of that. Briony had inserted herself into Bex’s world and hidden in plain sight, because Bex hadn’t even recognised her.
Up close, Bex would have known it was Briony. Her hair was different and she wasn’t quite as fresh-faced in her mid-thirties as she’d been in her early twenties, but she was still undeniably beautiful. There was a look in her eyes now that hadn’t been there before, the kind of melancholy you might expect in someone who’d been through trauma, as though their eyes told the story of what they’d seen and could never forget. Maybe itwas something Briony had affected to fit her new persona; this alternative lifestyle guru who seemed to think nothing of giving out advice and ‘life lessons’ to strangers online, telling them how they could reinvent themselves and live a simpler, less stressful life in the wake of tragedy or unwanted change.
Bex had sat up half the night watching videos of Briony, trying to reconcile the person she presented herself to be with the one who’d slept with Liam, but she couldn’t. Maybe Briony really had been through trauma in the last sixteen years, and maybe she really was a different person as a result, but Bex had no idea, because she was every bit as much a stranger to her as the people she clearly connected with online. And she wanted it to stay that way. It’s what she’d been telling herself over and over again from the moment her sister had landed back in her life, but it would be far easier to believe that was true once Briony was no longer living on the farm.
‘Tristan texted to say Ken isn’t picking Briony up until half nine now, because he thinks by the time they join up with the A39 all of the morning traffic will be gone.’ Matt gave her a wry smile. ‘I don’t know how he’s going to cope with the motorways when he gets to them. He’s barely been out of Cornwall his entire life and I really wish he’d let one of us drive.’
‘Me too.’ Bex placed the wraps she’d just made into her younger sons’ lunch boxes, trying to keep her tone even as she continued. ‘Triss seems to have taken quite a shine to Briony. Maybe you should warn him what she’s really like.’
‘How can I do that when I don’t know her?’ Matt’s tone was gentle, but that didn’t stop the skin on Bex’s scalp from prickling.
‘I’ve told you often enough. Unless you don’t believe me?’ Her voice was dangerously low as she spoke through gritted teeth, but irritation was bubbling up inside, making a muscle in her cheek throb as she fought the urge to scream. Somehow Briony wasdoing it again and driving a wedge between Bex and the people she loved. She couldn’t let that happen, she had to stay calm and hear Matt out, but then he dropped a bombshell she definitely wasn’t expecting.
‘I went to see her last night.’
‘You didwhat?’ The force of her response made their collies, Marge and Betty, shoot out from under the kitchen table. She couldn’t believe Matt had gone behind her back like that. She didn’t want to believe it, but she should have known this would happen as soon as Briony was back on the scene.
‘I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to upset you, but I knew I’d regret not having the chance to talk to her while she was here. According to Tristan, if the assessment doesn’t work out, she’ll be going straight back on the road, and I might have missed the chance to say what I wanted to say.’
‘Oh, and what’s that? Did you want to ask her if she offers the same service to all her sister’s partners?’ She fired the words like bullets, unable to stop herself from pulling the trigger, despite knowing the wounds they’d inflict, long before she saw the pain on her husband’s face.
‘Is that what you really think of me?’ He shook his head when she didn’t answer. ‘How can you even question my feelings for you, they’ve never wavered…’
His voice tailed off as if he hadn’t quite finished, so she did it for him. ‘Until now, you mean?’
‘It’s not that I doubt how I feel for you, but it’s got me doubting how you feel about me. Am I not enough for you? Are the boys not enough for you? Do you wish she’d never done what she did? Because if she hadn’t, you’d have been with Liam instead of me. We’d never have met when we did, and we’d never have had the boys, even if we’d met by some miracle later on and had other children. They wouldn’t have been Henry, Ollie and Tom. Iwent to see Briony to thank her, because if she hadn’t made you realise who Liam really was, I might never have met you. I can’t even bear to think about that, but you clearly don’t feel the same.’
He looked so broken and all she wanted to do was fix the pain she’d caused him, but she was hurting so much that she wasn’t sure where to start. ‘It isn’t that. I’m so grateful every day that I’ve got you and the boys. You’re more than I ever dreamt of, but I still can’t forgive her. Mum should have spent her retirement years with both her daughters around, the boys should have had a doting auntie in their lives, and instead I don’t want them going anywhere near her, because I know the only person Briony is really capable of loving is herself and that if I let her into our lives, she’ll end up letting them down and hurting our boys. Then you tell me you’ve gone to see her and I can’t help feeling terrified that she might be able to destroy my life for a second time, because this time the stakes are so much higher. I shouldn’t have to wonder whether my husband might fall in love with my sister and decide he’d rather be with her than me.’
‘You’d never have to do that, because there’s no one, not one single person in the entire world, that I’d rather be with than you, Bex. You’re the bloody love of my life and there’s nothing you can do to change that. Not even getting ridiculous ideas like this into your head and acting like a completely different person is going to change how I feel about you. You’re stuck with me for life.’ Matt pulled her into his arms, holding her so tightly for a moment that she could barely breathe, and somehow, all of the tension she’d been holding in her body seemed to drain away. He’d been right when he said she’d been acting like a completely different person since Briony had come back, one she barely recognised. She was usually the first person to look for the upside to any situation and to try and give other people a reason to smile, even on the tough days. She’d found it easy to be happy-go-lucky since Matt and the boys had come into her life, and in her old job at the school the staff and parents had often commented on her being like a ray of sunshine. It was why she’d had no qualms about setting up the campsite and dealing with customers every day. Lately though, it was as if she was a dark cloud, draining the energy out of herself and everyone else. It wasn’t Briony putting a distance between her and Matt, it was Bex, and it had to stop.
‘Well, thank God for that and I’m so sorry for being such a nightmare.’ Burying her face in his chest she saw something move out of the corner of her eye, but it was probably just Marge and Betty, returning to the comfort of their beds in front of the aga, now that the drama was over. As long as she had Matt and the boys, everything was going to be okay and she really was being ridiculous, getting so worked up about Briony being back. It would be over before she knew it and nothing bad was going to happen in the meantime.
‘We’ve looked everywhere and we can’t find him.’ Bex’s voice was so high it hurt. ‘I was just desperately hoping he might have decided to try and get himself to school under his own steam.’
