By the time she was twelve and an orphan in the truest sense of the word – both blood parents dead – she’d been bundled off to boarding school, out of sight, out of mind.
By age thirteen she’d been left on her own to rattle around that huge cold house in the long holidays, Tam and Tilda choosing to visit their glamorous mother in Paris rather than stay in the Cotswolds with a brittle, younger stepsister. She could hardly blame them; she hadn’t exactly been the world’s nicest child to be around. They probably hadn’t, she realised now, known what the heck to do with her.
‘Chronic illness is not a good thing, Emily. Do you know how hard it is being here with him? Tilda and I are exhausted. It’s been a terrible year with Daddy, and now Mummy is going into hospital for cataract surgery. We need to be with her and we can’t be in two places at once.’
‘Is she still in Paris? You’re going to Paris to be with her, then? Both of you?’
‘Yes.’ There was a heavy sigh and Em felt it all the way across the Atlantic. ‘We did have a carer booked for him, but she’s fallen and broken her leg and so now we’re stuck. And don’t ask if one of us can stay in Little Duxbury, because we just can’t, okay? Tilda really needs to get away and it looks as if I’m going to have to look after everyone. As usual.’
Emily had clearly missed an awful lot of their lives. She felt a little pang in her chest. ‘I’m sure you’ll do a sterling job. What’s wrong with Tilda?’
‘Nothing that a few days away won’t fix, I’m sure. She just needs some time out from that useless husband of hers. So, as you can see, we have no one else to ask. We need you to come back and do your bit.’ There was another pause. Then a very quiet, and somewhat difficult, ‘Please’.
Emily knew what that single word would have cost Tamara. They’d never wanted her before. They’d definitely never begged her to come home. ‘I don’t know, Tam. It’s been such a long time, I doubt he’d want me there, honestly. Is it high blood pressure? Because, I might even make it worse. You know how it is between us.’
‘Now, now, we need to put all that water under the bridge. We need to pull together.’
She was right, of course; it would be selfish to think otherwise, but a large part of Emily – admittedly, the cowardly part – really didn’t want to go back and confront their past. Not at all. It wasn’t just about how she’d left things with The Judge either… it was pretty much the whole village. She’d probably succeeded in offending all of them at some point, in one way or another. Troubled, her head teacher had labelled her in yet another parent-teacher interview. Disruptive, manipulative…
And yes, she’d been all those things, but mostly she’d just been a sad little girl who missed her parents and their hugs so badly it physically hurt. Moving to New York and reinventing herself had meant she could leave all that hurt behind. But no matter what she did, it was still there in her memories of Little Duxbury and, no doubt, in its memories of her.
But maybe it was being around Brett and his lovely supportive family that made her yearn for something like he had, or maybe it really was just time to try to make things better between them all. She found herself saying, ‘Yes, yes, you’re right, we do need to move on.’
Which would be a whole lot easier said than done.
Tam sighed. ‘Good. Well, I should tell you, he’s changed a lot… not been himself for a while.’
‘So, why didn’t you tell me before now?’
‘It’s been insidious, a bit of memory loss here, an easily explained confusion there. A tendency to repeat himself. Christ, don’t we all? But now we can’t ignore that he’s actually got a real problem. He’s fine physically, you know, he can manage his… self-care – that’s what they call it – if you remind him. But he can’t cook or… anything much.’ Another pause. Then, ‘So you’ll come?’
‘I don’t know…’ But as she said the words, guilt rolled through Emily’s stomach. Even though he’d done as little of his duty towards her as he could, he’d at least not seen her be homeless.
‘When do you leave for Paris?’ She began to mentally pack things for a cooler climate.
‘Sunday.’
‘Sunday? This Sunday? That’s madness. It’s what? Four days away? I can’t just –’
‘You can just, Emily. One week, that’s all we’re asking. One week to help us out. You’ve been doing exactly as you please your whole life.’
Because she’d had no one else.
‘Well, I have a few things I need to sort out. We’re in the middle of some important campaigns…’ It all sounded like feeble excuses, because what kind of person put work before a sick relative? But even so… there were things she needed to put in place before she upped sticks and left the country.
Work, and Brett.
Brett. Her skin prickled at the thought of him kneeling in the restaurant.
His proposal had, for a few minutes, been pushed out of her head by more pressing things. But now, coupled with this call, she felt as if everything she knew was tilting off balance.
The weekend at his parents’ would have to be put on hold. She looked down at the ring, the symbol of their promise, and that little frisson of panic still bubbled away in the bottom of her gut.
Tam interrupted her thoughts. ‘Sunday, then. That’s sorted. Email me your arrival details.’
‘But –’ The line was suddenly as dead as she had believed her family relationships to be.
‘Shit.’
Despite Emily’s bad feeling about this she was already working through the logistics. Even she couldn’t imagine The Judge being ill and left to cope on his own in that rambling mansion.
She threw her phone into her bag and pinched the top of her nose. Took a deep breath and blew it out. Her eyes were on the brink of leaking, but she would not cry about this. It was shock, that was all. A shock about The Judge, and a shock about the proposal.
Emily never cried. Living with The Judge she’d learnt pretty swiftly that crying never achieved anything; it certainly didn’t harness sympathy and was a pretty useless thing to do.
But in a few short hours her life had taken a detour into Crazyville.
She’d said yes. Brett was a good guy, a great guy in fact. Most women would jump at the chance of spending the rest of their lives with him.
Even so, underneath the excitement of what the future held for her, that little panic bubble would not go away. Was it a bad sign that she hadn’t jumped in and told her stepsister about her engagement? That it hadn’t been at the forefront of her mind? That even now there was a small part of her that wanted to keep it to herself until she’d worked things out in her head?
Worked out what exactly?
She didn’t really know. There was just a little niggle that wouldn’t go away.
So maybe, just maybe, some time away from New York would be a good thing. She could fix things with The Judge, and get things back into perspective.
Just maybe going back to Little Duxbury would be a good thing for all concerned.
***
It turned out that fog could do real damage to an airline’s schedule, so Emily was running late… very late indeed.
After landing at Heathrow she tried Tam’s phone but there was just a voice message and a whole lot more static.
Stuart, Tilda’s husband, was no help, either, with his gruff,