by Shari Low
‘So, Aaron, tell us about LA. What do you do there?’ Isla asked him and as Aaron began to chat, Hope felt comfortable enough to zone out and reflect on the day.
She’d found her dad and he was… Hope glanced over at him now. He was lovely. And caring. And sweet. And flawed. And, if Hope was reading him correctly, absolutely still in love with Agnetha.
Today she’d gained one father. One mother. A couple of almost-kinda-maybe stepsisters.
And she already had her mum and Maisie.
It was dysfunctional. Shocking. Completely bizarre. But if this was her family, then she was oh so happy to take it.
When she zoned back in, Skye was asking Aaron how long he planned to stay. Good question. He’d mentioned this morning that he had an open ticket, and she hadn’t pressed him on when he needed to go back.
‘I’m not sure, it depends on how long Hope would like me to stay for.’
‘As long as you can,’ Hope replied honestly.
‘I can probably swing a couple of weeks,’ he said, ‘if that would be okay with you? I don’t want you getting sick of me already.’
‘Never gonna happen.’ She took his hand again. ‘The only thing is, I need to study and work, and my shifts are pretty long, so you’ll be at a loose end with lots of free time on your hands.’
The implicit suggestion settled above the table and hung there for a few moments, as all eyes shifted to Agnetha. Hope knew what she was doing. It had been a long road to finding her father and she was determined that there would be no more wasted time for any of them.
To her surprise, it was her dad who broke the silence first. He leaned forward, as if he’d made some kind of decision and was about to act on it. ‘You know… since we’re all almost-kinda-maybe family here now,’ he nodded to Skye when he said that and she grinned in return, ‘then I’m just going to put this out there. There have been too many secrets and we’ve lost so much because of them. Hope, I just want to say, meeting you is now up there with the days my boys were born as the happiest of my life.’
Hope felt a rush of love for the vulnerability that was evident in the very slight quiver of his voice.
‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you found me.’
‘I am too, Aaron…. I mean, Dad,’ she whispered, called him that out loud for the first time. Hope was grateful to see that Maisie didn’t even flinch. Calling him Dad felt right and that didn’t minimise for a single second what her adoptive dad meant to her. Tim McTeer had been her father. Aaron Ward was too. They still had a lot of getting to know each other to do, but from now on, he deserved to be ‘dad’.
‘And, Agnetha,’ he said, watching as Agnetha’s head shot up and she looked at him questioningly. ‘I messed up. I really did. And I want to admit that in front of the people we love because this might matter to them too. I’m so sorry. If I could take it back a million times, then I would, but I can’t.’
‘I know,’ Agnetha said sadly, and Hope’s heart broke for them.
‘Pass me a napkin or I’ll need to use your sleeve,’ Maisie whispered, and Hope turned to see huge fat tears slipping down her sister’s face as she listened to Aaron speak.
‘But here’s the thing. I feel like…’ Her dad’s voice broke, and he stopped, cleared his throat, started again. ‘I feel like maybe we’ve been given a second chance. I’ve loved you since the moment I set eyes on you, and seeing you tonight, I know that I love you still. If you think our time has passed, then I’ll accept that, I promise. But if you think there’s any way, any way at all, that you can give us another chance, then I’m all in.’
Maisie blew her nose noisily. ‘Oh my God, this guy is killing me,’ she whispered, as she waited, just as they all did, for Agnetha to respond. A heartbeat. Another. Another.
‘Come on, Mum, he is at a loose end,’ Isla prompted gently, making her feelings on the matter clear.
When Agnetha began to shake her head, Hope’s spirits crashed. Oh bollocks, her dad had put himself out there and he was about to be crushed. ‘I don’t know why I would do that,’ Agnetha said, before falling silent and still again. Hope was pretty sure no one in the room was breathing any longer. ‘But, hey, when I woke up this morning, I decided I was going to take chances, to find adventure, and happiness and love… So I guess if you’re all in, then I’m willing to try.’
As the cheering started, Hope added to her earlier list.
Maybe she’d just found an almost-kinda-maybe future stepmum too.
Epilogue
A Few Months Later
I remember her so clearly.
There’s an image in my mind of her standing on the observation deck at the top of the Empire State Building in New York. She was about twenty-one and it was a cold day, but she didn’t care that the wind made her long red hair fly and her eyes glisten as she threw her arms out wide. The sheer joy she was feeling radiated from every pore, her smile wide and irrepressible. Like it would never fade.
Another memory. Maybe a year later. Sitting on the end of a cold Scottish pier in the early hours of the morning with a man she was madly in love with. She said he was the third love of her life. Or was it the fourth? It was a standing joke with her friends that her romantic history was like a constant repetition of death defying leaps. She’d fall from a great height into the abyss, but as if on a bungee cord, she’d snap right back out again at warp speed a day, a week, a month later, leaving a few cases of whiplash along the way.
Another flashback, to the following summer. On a beach in Malibu, watching the surfers at dawn, making lines in the sand with her toes. I knew the whole holiday had been put on a brand-new credit card and the expense sent it straight to its limit, but she gave that no thought at all. All that mattered was that moment. That experience. Life is for living. Her mantra. A cliché, but, yep, life is for living, she’d say.
Along the way she met him. The one who made her forget everyone else. Dizzy with love and optimism, she said yes to the happy-ever-after dream, and prepared to waltz up the aisle with him. But they didn’t make it. Life took her on another path and into the arms of someone else.
It was just a detour. A blip.
Still, she would dance, she would throw back shots and bounce the glass on the bar, she would start a party in an empty room and watch as people flocked to join the fun.
She would talk about how there were no limits to how great her life could be, and you couldn’t listen to the enthusiasm and certainty in her voice and not believe her.
At twenty-three, she thought nothing could stop her, that she was indestructible, that there was absolutely nothing she couldn’t do or achieve if she wanted to.
Perhaps it was the naivety of youth, but she didn’t even see the perfect storm coming.
Marriage. Children. Ailing parents. A mind-blowing betrayal. A chain of events that would hijack her world, changing her until the person she was no longer existed.
Yep, life is for living, she would say.
Until she became nothing more than a battle-weary survivor, who set aside her own life just to get through the days.
I remember that young, carefree woman so clearly.
Because she was me.
And now, when I look in the mirror, older, wiser and battle scarred, I see a forty-five year old mother who is rewinding the reams of time, reclaiming that young woman’s spirit and doing her dreams justice.
I see a middle-aged woman who is open to possibilities and embracing change.
The need to follow her passions have given her the courage to step back from work a little, to let her daughter take the reins of a family business that she loves and that will continue to flourish under Isla’s care.
She has welcomed new friends into her life and she already adores them like family. Hope and Maisie are two of her favourite people. She even got tested in case her stem cells were a match for Hope. They weren’t. And neither were Celeste’s. But Aaron’s were, and they all sleep better at night knowing that if he’s ever n
eeded, he’d give everything to his daughter.
It’s not just new friends that are bringing her joy. She’s spending more time with Val and Yvie and the others from the Wednesday Club. Will still comes, but now he brings Carol and it’s lovely to see them rebuilding their marriage. It’s not always a straight line, recovering from grief, but they’re all taking the zigzags together.
She’s growing as a person, mending fences and finding ways to forgive. Mitchell has become a regular fixture at Sunday dinners, they’ve found a new, very platonic closeness, and she doesn’t mind at all when he occasionally brings a date. They’ve all been perfectly nice and shown no narcissistic tendencies, so he’s clearly changed his type. He hasn’t shown any signs of settling down again, but it’s only been a few months. She tells him it will take time. And she should know.
Of course, none of this means she’s the finished article, and there are still moments when her response lacks generosity. Yes, she did smile just for a moment when she heard that Derek Evans had gone off with a reality TV starlet and cut all ties with his event manager, Celeste. Last anyone heard of her, she was living in a city centre flat, where she spent a month recovering from her latest facelift. Hope offered to visit her but that idea was rejected after Celeste decided that a monthly lunch with her biological daughter was as much as she was prepared to commit to. Hope was, of course, hurt, but there was a consolation prize. There was another new family out there that embraced her.
You see, that middle-aged woman is taking a chance with her heart, by giving it to a man that she loved and lost.
At the beginning, it took patience on his part as she tried to resist him, knowing that this was the greatest love and scared that losing it for a second time would be a pain too great to bear. But after a couple of months she threw caution to the wind and taking that risk has rewarded her with so much more than just a new romance. Now, as she gazes into Aaron’s gorgeous grey eyes, she feels things she hasn’t felt for a very long time – since she was that young girl dancing on a beach in Malibu, someone who loved, who laughed, and who grabbed the joy from every moment.
With Hope, Maisie, Isla and Skye standing beside them at sunrise on a Santa Monica beach, they finally say the vows they didn’t get to share more than two decades before.
‘I will love you until the end of time,’ he promises.
Her smile is pure bliss. ‘And I you,’ she replies.
Life is for living, that young woman used to say.
And now I am.
Acknowledgement
Thank you as always to my brilliant editor and publisher Caroline Ridding, for being the best damn editor and friend a writer could have. Thanks too, to Amanda, Nia and Megan, and the rest of the brilliant team at Boldwood Books, for the endless support and encouragement. I feel so lucky to have a home with you.
To Jade Craddock and Rose Fox, much gratitude for once again nudging this novel into shape.
And to every reader, blogger and reviewer who takes the time to pick up one of my books, you make it possible for me to carry on doing a job that I adore. I heart you.
Love,
Shari x
More from Shari Low
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My One Month Marriage, another warm and insightful novel from Shari Low, is available to buy now by clicking on the image below. Or read on for an exclusive extract…
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1
I’m in one of those unofficial clubs that no one really wants to be in. You know, like the ‘Association of People Who Got Jilted at The Altar’. Or ‘The Secret Society of Dumplings Who Let Online Scammers Empty Their Bank Account Because They Believed They Had A Long-Lost Uncle Who Left Them Millions In His Will.’
In this case, I’m Zoe Danton, the latest fully paid up member of the ‘Collective Of Fools Who Had Marriages That Lasted For Less Time Than A Four-Part Mini-Series.’
A month. Thirty days to be precise.
It’s not even as if I have the folly of youth as an excuse. Thirty-three years on this planet is long enough to learn some vital life lessons. For healthy oral hygiene, always floss morning and night. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. If you get caught in a riptide, swim parallel to the shore. Pot pourri has no purpose. And if you’re getting married, ensure that it’ll last longer than the flowers you carried up the aisle.
Otherwise, you’ll be me, the idiot who is sitting on her wide plank, oak floor, consumed by fear that the local newspaper will use my story as a human-interest feature, surrounded by gifts that I need to return. Except the cocktail shaker. That one’s already open and in use.
‘Do you feel like an idiot?’ Verity asks, handing me a drink that’s so pink it could very well be radioactive. She was the first member of the Sister Emergency Service to respond to my text and rush over to my city centre Glasgow flat. I hope she kicked the bin bags containing the last of my short-lived husband’s things on the way in to our marital home. Actually ‘marital home’ is a stretch. It’s my flat, a one bedroom waterfront apartment in an eighties block on the city side of the Clyde, and even though he’s lived with me for the last year or so, I realise now that it always felt like he was just visiting. Maybe that should have been a hint. So, to answer Verity’s question, did I feel like an idiot?
‘No,’ I lie, only to be met with her raised eyebrow of cynicism. I capitulate like an eight year old caught spray-painting the school toilet walls. ‘Okay, of course I do. I mean, even Kim Kardashian’s shortest marriage lasted seventy-two days. It’s a sad day when I make worse life choices than a reality show star who built her career on the size of her arse.’
I take a sip of… ‘What is this?’ I ask, when my taste buds throw their hands up, at a loss as to what they are faced with.
Verity shakes her head, her deep red ponytail swinging as she does so. Even on a Sunday morning, in the midst of this traumatic episode in our family’s history, she still looks great. My elder sister has been on this earth for fourteen months longer than me and something happened in those fourteen months that gave her a level of physical superiority that the rest of us could only aspire to. She’s one of those women who has visible cheekbones and naturally fiery, thick long red hair, so you could pretty much put her through a car wash and she’d come out the other end, sweep her hair up in a messy bun and look fabulous. Even more annoying, she has absolutely no awareness of this. Her appearance and personality are the complete opposite of each other. On the outside, fierce, bold, striking. On the inside, restrained and the most conservative of us all. Now she is shrugging. ‘No idea. I just put a bit of everything in the fridge into the cocktail shaker. There’s gin, cream, raspberry juice, pineapple—’
‘I don’t have pineapple juice,’ I interrupt.
Verity doesn’t break stride. ‘Crushed pineapple from a tin… you’ll find it lurking at the bottom of the glass. Vitamin C has so many benefits…’
‘Will it prevent me marrying dickheads in the future?’
She glides right over that. ‘No, but it does help with the absorption of iron, decreasing blood pressure, combatting heart disease and…’ Off she goes into full education mode. This is what happens when one of your three sisters is a primary school teacher. Not only is she relentlessly organised and can calm a class of stroppy eight year olds with some kind of Jedi mind trick, but she has a remarkable memory for facts and an absolutely pitch-perfect technique for delivering them.
Unfortunately, in this case, her pupil has zoned out. What does it matter what is in there? As long as it contains alcohol that will reduce my feelings of general crapness by even one degree, I’m game.
&n
bsp; There’s a crash at the door.
‘What have I missed?’ Yvie wails as she enters the room, balancing several plastic bags and a tray giving off a distinctly ‘lasagne’ aroma on her forearms.
I swallow a slither of pineapple. ‘Just some rampant self-pity, wails of regret and general pathetic wallowing.’
My younger sister nods thoughtfully. ‘All just as expected then. Will lasagne help? Jean, one of the cleaners on the ward, made it. She says it’s her ancient, traditional family recipe, but she’s from Paisley, has no Italian ancestors and has never been further than Great Yarmouth on her holidays, so I have my doubts. In saying that, I’m starting the diet tomorrow, so no point letting this go to waste.’
Dropping the bags on the floor, she wanders out in the direction of the kitchen clutching the lasagne, the stiff blue trousers of her nursing uniform rustling as she goes. The youngest of the four of us, Yvie is a nurse on a geriatric ward at Glasgow Central Hospital. When I’m in my dotage, there’s no one else I want to look after me. Although, I’m hoping that she’ll tend to my every need on the fourteenth deck of a cruise ship floating around the Caribbean, rather than in an aging Victorian building on the edge of the city centre with a bird’s-eye view of the nearby motorway. Still, she loves her job and nursing is what she has always wanted to do. Even when we were kids, she got an undeniable thrill when one of us needed emergency first aid.
I hear the sound of the oven door banging shut, before she re-enters with a glass of radiation pink. ‘I took some of this from the cocktail shaker,’ she informs us. ‘It looks suspiciously like something I’d prescribe for acid reflux. Right, what’s the latest? Married anyone else since I saw you yesterday? Divorced yet? Engaged again?’
