‘Don’t you even dare start making any kind of excuse.’ Her sister was visibly shaking, but her voice was scarily calm, the door to the van still wide open behind her. ‘We’ve been out of our minds searching for Tom for the last forty minutes. Did you evengive a moment’s thought to whether we knew he was here, and why the hell he was sitting in here with you, when he was clearly wearing his school uniform?’
‘It was only meant to be for a few minutes but?—’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’ Bex cut her off for a second time. ‘It’s nothing less than I expect from you, because the only person you’ve ever cared about is yourself.’
‘That’s not true, Mum. Auntie Briony showed me all these photos of?—’
‘She’s not your auntie.’ The calm in Bex’s voice had deserted her as she cut her youngest son off.
‘Yes, she is, and it’s not her fault I came here. I wanted to do it because you won’t let me talk to her.’
‘There are some things you’re too young to understand, Tom. Reasons why not spending any time with Briony is for the best, and you just have to trust me and your dad on that.’
Tom made a huffing sound, his bottom lip sticking out, making him look much younger than he had just moments before.
‘Oh thank God, you’ve found him!’ Matt had suddenly come jogging up the campsite field, with two border collies trailing in his wake.
‘Can you take him back to the house please and I’ll be down in a minute, so we can talk to Tom together about the consequences of the stunt he’s pulled this morning. Then I’ll drive him into school.’ Bex turned towards her husband and he nodded in response.
‘Of course. Right, come on, Tom, get your shoes on.’
‘But I don’t want to go home. Auntie Briony hasn’t finished telling me about when she went to Switzerland and camped right by a huge lake.’
‘I said get your shoes on, Tom, this isn’t a negotiation.’
‘You and Mum are so boring, and we never get to go anywhere fun like Auntie Briony does.’ Tom did a remarkably good impression of Kevin the teenager as he huffed towards the door and made a big show of putting on his shoes, before finally stomping off in the direction of the farmhouse with his father following close behind.
‘You must have realised I didn’t know Tom was with you and that I’d be out of my mind with worry.’ Bex didn’t even wait for Briony to respond. ‘Although that’s not in your wheelhouse is it, to think about how your actions are going to impact other people? I didn’t want to have to tell the boys anything about what happened between us, but I guess I don’t have a choice now. They need to know the truth about why you aren’t in our lives.’
‘But they won’t hear the truth, will they? Because you don’t even know the full story, you’ve never let me tell it.’
‘Story is the right word when it comes to you, and I don’t think you’d recognise the truth if it slapped you in the face.’ Bex looked for a moment as if she was capable of doing exactly that, but if this was Briony’s one shot to have her say she needed to take it.
‘I never slept with Liam and I think deep down you know that, but I did set out to make him fall in love with me. It had nothing to do with proving that I could and everything to do with showing you what kind of man you were marrying. But you chose to believe him and make me the bad guy in all of this.’
‘You can try to twist what happened all you want, but I wasn’t buying it then and I’m certainly not now. I can’t trust you, which means I don’t want you in my life and I definitely don’t want you in my children’s lives. Just do the right thing for once, Briony, help Mum and then get back on the road. It’ll be better for all of us that way.’
Bex turned then, shutting the door of the van so firmlybehind her that it shook for a second time, the sound drowning out Briony’s response.
‘Not for me it won’t.’ She should never have come back here and peeked behind the curtain of the life she might have had if things had been different. The cold, hard reality was that she was never going to have that life now and that realisation hurt even more than the pain it had caused to walk away from Port Agnes and everyone she loved the first time around.
15
Easter had come and gone in such a haze that Bex could barely recall it, and everything had felt so far out of her control, but thankfully, somehow, the assessment had gone according to plan. She’d been expecting a phone call at any moment from her mum or Ken to say that Briony had decided not to proceed for one reason or another, or that the barrage of tests they’d had to go through had identified a barrier that couldn’t be surmounted. Maybe a tiny bit of Bex had even hoped for that, so that she could step up instead. At this stage, it wasn’t even about stopping Briony from playing the hero, it was about guarantees. If she – Bex – was the donor, there’d be no last-minute change of plan or pulling out. If she passed all the tests, the donation would happen. She couldn’t guarantee the same thing with Briony, she wouldn’t be 100 percent certain until both operations were complete, and that layered on the stress even further, despite the fact that the tests had gone to plan. Deep down, a part of her could acknowledge that she was the one sowing the seeds of all that doubt. Nothing Briony had said or done since she’d come back to Cornwall had suggested she might back out, and Bex had to admit thelove between her and their mother was obvious. Briony loved Donna just as much as Bex did, and in some ways, there was probably even more at stake for her. Their mum and Ken were the only family Briony had, there’d be no comfort to be sought by burying herself in the centre of a family she’d created for herself. A now-familiar pang of sadness for Briony briefly returned, before she shook it off again. She couldn’t think about all of that when she was so worried for Donna. The operation going well was all that mattered.
According to Ken, her mother and Briony had met with the transplant coordinator to discuss their motivation for going ahead. That had been followed by blood tests, an ECG, urine tests, and physical examinations, as well as ultrasounds to check compatibility, organ function and overall health. Then there had been the psychological analysis and even a legal assessment before they could be given the green light to go ahead. At every stage they’d been told they could proceed and now it was the day before the operation, and Bex had travelled to London to see her mum. It would take over six hours by train and she was only planning on staying two nights in London. It would be long enough to know that Donna had got safely through the op and was being cared for by the medical staff. Then she planned to come back again once her mother went to stay with Iris, so she could care for her there. Donna had tried to insist that Bex wait until she was out of hospital to visit, knowing what a juggling act it was with the boys and the business, but there was no way she’d miss the chance to speak to her mum before the operation and make sure there was nothing left unsaid.
The thought of not being able to tell Donna how much she loved her, and what a wonderful mother she’d always been, was too much. She couldn’t bear the idea of not being there to see that her mum had made it through the op okay too and was on theroad to recovery, but she couldn’t commit to longer than two days until Keira got back from her holiday to Greece and was able to help Tristan out with the campsite, which had become almost completely booked out in the wake of Briony sharing some photos of her location. Tristan had said she never usually shared her location until she’d moved on, but given that Briony was now in London, she effectively had. The flurry of bookings that had come in on the back of her recommendation shouldn’t have been a surprise, but they now had reservations for more than twelve months. They weren’t fully booked every single week, but they had guaranteed income they couldn’t have dreamt of any other way.
However grudging it might be, part of her had to admit that none of that would have been possible without Briony’s help and that maybe Bex ought to be grateful to her sister and Tristan for keeping her in the dark and allowing it to happen. She was trying really hard to revert to being the happy-go-lucky person she’d always been, and finding the good in every situation. She might even have been able to tell Briony that she was grateful, if Tom hadn’t gone to her camper that day and scared the life out of Bex. Maybe once the operation was over, she could thank Briony for her impact on the bookings, and, far more importantly, for saving their mum, before they went their separate ways again. Either way, Briony’s recommendation had been a game-changer for the business and it meant Bex couldn’t leave everything on the campsite to Tristan, not when Matt needed him on the farm too.
‘Are you going to go and see Briony?’ Matt had asked as he’d pulled up outside the train station in Newquay to drop her off, earlier that morning.
‘No.’ She’d tried to sound nonchalant, as if the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind, but her husband knew her far too well and he’d echoed the words that Ken had already said to her.
‘Don’t you think you might regret it if anything unexpected happens and you don’t have a chance to make peace with her?’
‘All that would do is make me a massive hypocrite, because I’ve got no intention of making my peace with Briony if things go well. I’m really grateful to her for stepping up and being the one to help Mum, but I don’t want her in my life again.’ Her words sounded so certain and she said them loudly enough to drown out the nagging voice in her head that kept questioning whether she really did mean them. She knew why the doubt was there. If she could have turned back the clock and had the old version of Briony back in her life, the version who hadn’t slept with Bex’s fiancé, then of course she would have done. But there was no way of getting that version of her sister back, the one who’d been her little sidekick for so long and who she’d mothered whenever Donna couldn’t. Every so often it had been Briony who’d taken on the big sister role instead, but only ever when it came to their father.
