Page 44 of I’ll Be Home for Christmas

She started to laugh. ‘That was a long toast.’

‘It needed to be said.’

But her joy didn’t last. ‘There’s more…’

‘Grant did something else?’

‘Not him, no. Me. I did something.’ She felt the warmth from the mug clutched between her hands. Was she really going to do this? Tell someone the story she’d kept to herself since it happened? ‘It’s nothing to do with my work. It’s to do with my family. And you might not want me hanging around when you know what I did.’

‘Why don’t you let me be the judge of that.’

It took her a while to get started, it took the snow falling lightly once again around the chalet and their surroundings, taking on a beauty she didn’t feel could ever be a part of her soul after what happened, for her to tell him about Chrissie’s wedding day.

When she finished, he puffed out his cheeks. ‘You stood up and said those things?’

‘Yep.’

‘You must’ve felt very strongly to do that.’

She turned to face him. She hadn’t been able to look him in the eye while she confessed what she’d done. ‘You know, nobody has ever said that to me. Nobody ever asked why I felt compelled to humiliate myself, my sister and her fiancé and ruin their day.’

‘So why don’t you tell me.’

‘As kids, Chrissie and I moved a lot with Dad’s career in the army. Eventually, Chrissie got used to it in a way. I never did. But my sister struggled in other ways. I never forgot the times she cried against me, the times I held her while she wept because she missed our dad, because she was terrified that he would be killed and she’d never get to see him again. She would shake in my arms, cry out in the night sometimes, and neither of us ever told our mum.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we didn’t want to make things harder for her. Every time something was on the news about the armed forces, we would see Mum’s face change. If it had gone too many days between his last contact and the next, she’d get this change in her voice, like she was all excited about something. But really it was fear. And she hid it from us. She’d pretend not to be affected, but she was.’ She looked at Jonathan. ‘I’m ashamed to admit this, but we read her diary.’

He pulled a face. ‘The ultimate sin. I read my sister’s once – I was only a teenager – and I thought she was going to kill me. I never did it again.’

She laughed. ‘I’ll bet you didn’t.’

‘I felt bad that I’d done it.’

‘We felt terrible too,’ she admitted. ‘And I don’t think we did ourselves any favours. After reading it, we were in no doubt as to how scared Mum was of losing Dad. Chrissie and I worried even more after that – which kind of served us right – but it’s those days with Chrissie that I thought about the second she told me about Anthony. I knew she wanted to get married and have children and I didn’t think she’d ever want to put them through the sort of life we’d had growing up, worrying about their dad, not having a place to call home, upping and changing areas, countries, schools, all of that.

‘I’d been smoking pot on the day of the wedding, and I’d had a couple of drinks. I’d been trying to talk sense into her for ages. I never intended to stand up at the wedding. I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been off my face. But…’

‘The benefit of hindsight.’ He pulled the collar of his coat up a bit around his face.

It was getting too cold to be out here, but now she’d started talking she didn’t want to stop. He was good at listening and his face didn’t show judgement. This was the most she’d talked about it ever since any of it happened. She’d never talked to Grant about it. At first, that had been because she didn’t want to admit what she’d done, but then she wasn’t sure why she hadn’t told him. Now she was talking to Jonathan she realised it had been because Grant probably would’ve laughed, thought it was hilarious, and congratulated her rather than make her face up to the utter devastation she’d caused her family.

‘I stayed out of the way after the church service,’ she went on, ‘but then I turned up at the reception and managed to ruin that as well. Chrissie was ignoring me. I tried to blend in, but I somehow danced my way into the table with the cake on top.’ His expression suggested he knew what was coming even before she said, ‘Yep, the cake fell to the floor. It was a real proud day for me. After that, I lay low. I knew Mum and Dad were upset and Chrissie was obviously furious. I went back to London the next day and didn’t want to talk to anyone. After a couple of months, I got back in touch with my parents, and I think they were so relieved I was alive and kicking that they backed off a bit about me and Chrissie and everything that had happened. I kind of wish they hadn’t. Perhaps Chrissie and me wouldn’t be where we are now if they’d intervened.’

‘It sounds like neither of you would have thanked them at the time.’

‘No, I don’t suppose we would have. Maybe they did the right thing. I thought as the years passed that Chrissie might let me explain, but she didn’t. I sent cards and letters; she never responded. I tried to call a few times, but she never picked up. The Meg she knew was the one she’d seen living in a grotty flat in London wasting her life. The Meg she knew was the one who ruined her wedding. And she didn’t want that Meg in her life any more.’

‘Did you tell Chrissie when you turned your life around?’

‘By then she had Sarah, she was busy, and she had no reason to believe I was any different. I knew Mum and Dad had told her what I was doing, that I was studying, then everything that happened since. Chrissie would’ve known from what they said that I had changed, but perhaps knowing and accepting weren’t the same thing. She never reached out to me, and I got tired of trying to do it with her because of the rejection. It was heartbreaking.

‘I never blamed Chrissie for not wanting to know me. A wedding day is one of the biggest days of your life, so I’m told, and it was a beautiful wedding – apart from me, obviously.’

‘You’re not married?’

She shook her head. ‘No, never. You?’