Chapter Nine
Evie
Evie was up early the next morning. The evening with Nicole had been cut short after finding the photograph because Evie had been unable to get the image out of her head. She’d feigned a headache, feeling guilty with every lie that came out of her mouth, and she’d left for home before nine o’clock. She’d walked back to her apartment paranoid someone was following her, and as soon as she’d arrived, she’d locked the door behind her, drawn the chain across and pulled the curtains. She’d kept the lights off too, even the twinkle lights on the Christmas tree and around the door and cupboards.
Sleep had come eventually, but Evie had tossed and turned and after a fitful few hours she’d got up before sunrise to take a long walk around Central Park. Usually, a walk did the trick and ignited her energy levels, but not this morning. And when someone had tapped her on the shoulder, she’d jumped a mile before realising they were merely passing her the packet of tissues that had fallen from her pocket to the ground. She’d ended up taking off at speed in the direction of her apartment, and hadn’t stopped until she’d safely slammed the door behind her and locked herself in all over again.
Evie stayed below the shower jets until the mediocre water tank ran cold. She dressed, tried her best to eat a bowl of muesli and drink a glass of juice in the hope something, anything would put a spring back in her step, but nothing. She wrapped a long scarf around her neck, covering the bottom of her face to keep away the winter chills, and made her way to work, venturing through the New York City streets which didn’t seem anywhere near as friendly as they had been twenty-four hours ago.
*
‘Is everything okay?’ Bonnie hovered in the doorway to the workroom where Evie had plonked herself at the enormous table in the middle the moment she’d arrived. Since then Evie had kept herself busy scrolling through their social media, replying to any comments. Sharni from Long Island wanted to know how much notice she’d need to give them to make her dress; Rhianne from Brooklyn wondered whether they made clothes for groomsmen; and there was a post to approve from the Henderson’s wedding last week, shots of the bride’s dress alongside a big thank you note.
‘Everything’s fine,’ Evie didn’t look up from the screen. ‘I just didn’t sleep too well last night.’
‘Don’t you dare come down with anything, Evie. I need you!’
It was true. Work was full on crazy right now. There were final fittings to do, last minute touches to make to dresses and accessories, and the rush for summer wedding attire seemed to have begun early with two new clients booked in that afternoon. And that was before they even thought about working towards the upcoming expos in the New Year.
‘I want to run through some ideas for March’s Bridal Expo when you’ve got a moment,’ said Bonnie. ‘I want your opinion on the designs that’ll make the most impact.’ She clapped her hands together in an excitement Evie did her best to share and went to answer the door to the client who was stopping by to collect her dress for her wedding at the weekend.
Evie stared at the screen. She looked at the banner across the top: The Perfect Fit Couture written in lavender on the left and a backdrop photo of herself and Bonnie for all to see. She’d agreed to it when she hadn’t really wanted to. She’d also agreed to a magazine article, and of course with that had come more photographs. She’d sat here at work as the professional snapped pictures of her, all the while thinking surely after all this time her uncle would’ve been well rid of her and moved on to something or someone else. But after seeing that photo when she’d pulled it out of the coat pocket last night, the disgusting image she longed to forget, it seemed he hadn’t moved on at all. In fact, she suspected he was enjoying every minute of the chase, like a cat pinning a mouse down by its tail and watching it wriggle, deriving a kind of perverse pleasure as it squirmed and tried to get away. She wondered where he was going to turn up next, what he was going to do with the other photographs she knew he had.
Evie shook herself. Right now she needed to focus on her job, the part of her life she loved, the part she could control. In half an hour, she’d need to be ready to greet the next new bride-to-be and make this moment about her. She plastered a smile on her face, pinched her cheeks to give them a bit of the colour she suspected had drained as she obsessed about what might happen, and went out to the formal living room to prepare.
Evie had changed her life once before, and as she arranged the magazines into a perfect fan, lit the lamps to emit a warm glow and polished the glasses ready to offer champagne, she knew she couldn’t let anything take away everything she had worked for. She thought about the man with Jack at the hospital, how he’d judged her and looked at her as though she would never be good enough to turn her life around. She’d seen his feelings in those mean, pinny eyes, heard it in the condescending tone of his voice. But she would fight him and everyone like him who got in her way, just as she’d had to fight the first night she’d ever seen him.
Jack
They finished the video call with the Seattle outlet and Jack gathered his papers together.
‘That went well,’ said Braydon. ‘They’ve got the displays set up, as we discussed, the best lines out there for the customers. Jack, are you even listening?’
‘What? Oh, sorry. Yes. Good meeting. Progress.’
Braydon rolled his eyes and Jack walked away before he’d say something he’d regret. Since the day at the hospital, he hadn’t been able to look his colleague in the eye. He’d disliked him before that, but never had he seen him so downright nasty. Jack had let the man see his father but he’d excused himself to go to the restrooms where he’d splashed freezing water on his face before walking away, back to the foyer where he hovered until he saw Braydon leave the building. The man was an ogre and his father’s insistence that he was good for business did little to show Jack that he belonged with the company. In the interests of his father’s health, he’d keep quiet about his concerns for now, but there was only so much he’d put up with.
Jack ran in Central Park after work, pounding the pavements venting his frustration. He finished with a loop of just under two miles in the southern part of the park by the Tavern on the Green where he stopped for a moment, paused for breath. Plumes of white filled the air as he regulated his breathing, paced back and forth, and stood out of the way for a couple heading inside, past the planters surrounding the perimeter, and into the Tavern for dinner. The trees outside sparkled with twinkly lights wrapped around their once-bare trunks, as enchanting as the flowers would be come spring when the bistro-style white iron tables would come out to announce the season of hope and fresh starts.
Back at his apartment, he poured a glass of juice and slouched on the couch of his bachelor pad, feet up on the cushions the way he’d never been allowed to in the house he grew up in: a place for everything and everything in its place. Apart from a few photos of him over the years, the Churchill family residence was more like a show house than a home. His father had packed away all the photographs of Jack’s mother, his own wife, as though by not having them around it could ease the pain of their loss. But it didn’t. The only reminder now was a photograph of the family all together for Cynthia’s last Thanksgiving with them, taken beside the fireplace by a family friend. And that photograph had been relegated to Kent’s office, an identical one here in Jack’s apartment, reminding him of how happy they’d once been and how precious life was. The problem was, you rarely realised that until it leapt up and smacked you in the face by being so cruel.
The next morning Jack did something he never did. He called in sick. He left a message on the company voicemail to tell Penny, his father’s executive assistant, he had a migraine. He may as well have said menstrual cramps given how believable he sounded.
And that was how he found himself driving from Manhattan to Hazelbrook in the early hours of a Thursday morning. A thick frost had set in, but with barely any traffic on the roads, the drive calmed him as he followed the familiar route through Hazelbrook and onto Hollyhock Farm. So early in the morning he snapped off his headlights as he arrived at the farm, anxious not to wake Nate or Julia. It was unusual for him to appear mid-week, but he had plenty to do. Aside from any cutting back and maintaining the maze, he wanted to help Nate construct the new shed, and then there were Christmas trees to haul onto a truck and drive into town as Nate did each day. It was a simple life with a hell of a lot of hard work, but there was a love, a passion behind all that effort. And sometimes, Jack wished to God he could trade places with his friend.
The land at Hollyhock Farm was big enough that Jack could park away from the house so he wasn’t heard as he made his way down to the maze. The sun wasn’t due up for another hour and the frost presented the conifers gloriously, lining the hedges of the maze, twinkling silver and white beneath the moonlight. Kitted up in scarf, gloves and winter jacket, he pulled an old raincoat from the trunk of his car and followed the familiar route of the pathways that, stretched into a straight line, would amount to over a half a mile. He chuckled when even he, who’d spent many hours in this maze, took a couple of wrong turnings.
Eventually he found his way to the centre and there he spread out the old raincoat, lay down and looked up into the darkness that settled over Hazelbrook like a comfortable blanket. A thousand stars congregated above him, more than he could ever see from the townhouse or his condo in Manhattan, and he thought about his mother, how this sight would’ve mesmerised her for hours. He wasn’t a religious person, nobody in his family was, and he knew it was a silly notion, but since his mother had died, he liked to think of her being among the stars looking down at him. When he was little she’d taken him to the organised events in Central Park where Jack could run free with other kids, waving their glow sticks in a familiar colourful dance in the air as their parents listened to the astronomers sharing views through telescopes of planets or star clusters.
As he lay there in the centre of the maze, Jack’s thoughts drifted to Nicole, then to Evie and the pair of them three years ago, the pair of them today. Evie was feisty enough not to take any of his crap when he accused her of sponging off Nicole, but could he really trust her? Nicole had been like a mother to him, and he’d done his best at keeping in contact with her, but her refusal had left him no choice but to move on. Maybe if he’d told her what she meant to him, what she’d become over the years, she would’ve gotten in touch after that night. Perhaps if, for once, he’d disagreed with his father and not allowed it to happen, confronted him rather than falling in line, none of this would’ve happened.
Who was he kidding? He hadn’t ever stood up to his father and actually told him whathewanted to do with his life.
Jack fidgeted at the uneasy thought, at the sense he still hadn’t manned up to his father. He gazed up at the sky willing the stars to give him answers, show him how to escape the life he felt increasingly stuck in.
Was he asking for the impossible?
