If Only Forever

by Sophie Love

  Emily kissed him deeply. “Thank you, it’s perfect,” she said.

  As Emily undressed and sunk into the hot, bubbly water, she felt all her worries over the last few days melt away. All that existed for her in that moment was Daniel. And she couldn’t have been happier.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Several days passed in a blur of telephone calls with Richard Goldsmith, tending to Trevor, wedding discussions, and business with guests at the inn. Though Emily was thankful that business was picking up, she also found herself becoming increasingly swamped and overwhelmed.

  It came as a surprise (and great relief) when Emily found herself in the living room one evening, with Chantelle drawing by the window and Daniel lighting a fire, the dogs stretched out on the rug. It felt comforting and familiar.

  It was only in this state of calm that Emily even remembered the architect’s plans that Trevor had given her the day after Thanksgiving. She’d been so shocked by the sight of them that she had put them to one side, not quite ready to deal with any emotional fall-out they might cause. But now she decided to take a look, to feel that connection with her father, to allow more forgotten memories to emerge.

  She spread the plans out onto the coffee table, the paper feeling like waxy baking parchment beneath her fingers. She looked down at the plans, drawn in faint pencil lines with angular precision, each different floor of the house separated out so they appeared side by side, connected by a jagged line that represented a staircase. There was the widow’s walk and the secret flight of stairs running from the third floor to the roof. And there was the ballroom, closed off and hidden down its strange corridor. Emily could see now, looking at the plans, that the ballroom had once been an entirely different structure and that it was that small, strange corridor that connected it to the main house. She wondered whether her dad had decided to conjoin them via the narrow, low-ceilinged corridor as some kind of personal joke, or if it was symptomatic of his secretive mind.

  Just then, something on the plans caught Emily’s eye. She’d just located the living room (the very space in which they now sat) on the plans when she noticed there was another corridor, not a small spindly one like the one that led to the ballroom, but an enormous one as wide as the room, connecting an outbuilding to the living room.

  Almost as if she’d been burned by flame, Emily leapt up, surprised, and looked about her with confusion.

  “What’s wrong?” Daniel asked, turning his head from the now blazing fire in the hearth.

  Chantelle looked up from her drawing and studied Emily’s face. But Emily was too bemused to speak. She ran up to the far wall and placed her fingers against the wallpaper. Most of the inn had been renovated when she moved in, but not the wallpaper in this room. It had been in too good condition for Emily to justify replacing it, since it was the original and it felt criminal to strip it out for no reason. Now she realized that that decision had kept another one of her father’s secrets from her for many more months.

  “Emily, what are you doing?” Daniel asked, frowning, coming up to her side.

  “Look at the plans!” Emily gasped. “On the table. There’s another room back here.”

  Daniel’s eyes widened with surprise. He did as she commanded, running to the coffee table, searching the diagram until he’d located the source of Emily’s surprise.

  By now, Chantelle had jumped from her seat to join in. She seemed thrilled. A secret room was the stuff of fairytales for a child of her age.

  Emily ran her fingers all the way along the wall, searching for a seam or a fissure that might indicate where the door was hidden.

  “It’s behind the shelves!” Daniel said, looking up from the plans at the table. “I’d always wondered about that extra extension at the side of the house. I’d just assumed it was an outer foundation wall or something, there are so many oddities with this house after all. I did wonder about it, though. Now it all makes sense.”

  The shelves he’d indicated were currently stuffed with books and ornamental display plates. Emily hastily began taking them down, bundling the books into Chantelle’s arms so she could place them in piles on the table and floor. Daniel helped, removing the more fragile items that Emily couldn’t trust her trembling fingers not to drop.

  Once they were clear of items, it was time to remove the large wooden shelves. They were made from repossessed railways sleepers, each weighing what felt like a ton. After some groaning and straining, they stood staring at a now empty alcove.

  Emily knocked against the wall and heard the dull echo that indicated its hollowness. Chantelle gasped with surprise. She knocked too, almost leaping back in shock at the repeated hollow sound. Emily felt her excitement grow. Chantelle was practically buzzing with anticipation. Beside her, Daniel’s eyes sparkled.

  “How do we get in?” Chantelle cried, bouncing up and down.

  “Sledgehammer?” Daniel suggested.

  “Absolutely not!” Emily replied. “Think of the wallpaper.”

  She ran her fingers over the textured print.

  “I wonder if this does anything,” she heard Chantelle’s small voice say.

  Emily looked down. The child was crouched in the corner, peering at something. To Emily’s astonishment she realized it was a small lever, tucked out of sight in the lowermost corner.

  She shook her head with shock, a million feelings vying inside of her. Her father’s strange habit of hiding things from view had come to its extreme conclusion. This was no longer a dusty vault in the corner of a wine cellar; it was an entire room that had been boarded up behind a false, plasterboard wall. According to the architect’s drawings there was a whole room on the other side, double the one they were standing in again. Emily just had to pull the secret lever to open it up. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what she would find behind it! Her father’s secret spy’s lair? Concealed stairs to his underground bunker where he’d been living in hiding for the last twenty years? Her mind swam with thoughts, each one more fantastical than the last.

  “Go on,” Daniel prompted her.

  Taking a deep breath to steel herself, Emily took hold of the lever and pulled. There was a low, growling noise, the sound of a long disused mechanism coming back to life. Then, with a click, the wall sprang back an inch. Emily pushed the small opening and felt the wall resist her pressure. She pressed again, harder this time, and the wall began arcing open, creaking like a trapdoor to a basement, revealing pitch blackness on the other side.

  Flabbergasted, overwhelmed, Emily stood staring at the gaping void, at the blackness that might contain everything or nothing. Daniel and Chantelle rushed off to grab some flashlights. On their return, everyone stepped together into Roy Mitchell’s most recently unearthed secret.

  Emily directed the beam of her flashlight all around, gasping in surprise at the sight that greeted her. In the ten-foot extension to the living room was a huge mahogany bar, complete with tables and chairs, bar stools, and optics on the wall.

  “What on earth?” Emily exclaimed, walking inside.

  The room was gorgeous, and the bar was clearly very valuable, with an antique marble top and mahogany wood paneling below and behind it. Emily gasped with surprise as she realized it was also fully stocked with liquor. It was like a movie set.

  Daniel and Chantelle were both looking around her with shocked expressions. Emily felt exactly the same. How had this stayed hidden for all those years?

  “I think this was a speakeasy,” Emily cried. “Look, some of these posters are from Prohibition!”

  She squealed with excitement. She’d stepped into a museum, with the same musty smell of dust, hidden in a real room inside her real house.

  “We need to restore it,” Daniel exclaimed. “It would be an amazing addition to the inn.”

  Emily looked back out at the warm, firelit living room just through the other side of the alcove. The whole wall must have been a fake all along, put up in order to hide the liquor.

  “We could have a New Y
ear’s Eve party here!” Daniel added. He was clearly getting excited about the prospect.

  Emily explored the space. There were hints that the room hadn’t been forgotten about, signs that someone (and she presumed it to be her father) had been in here not too long ago. On the labels of some of the bottles of liquor, Emily saw they had dates from just a few years prior, and that they’d been nestled behind the older antique bottles to be kept hidden.

  Just like the date on the letters from just two years ago, seeing the liquor bottles from only a few years hence was further confirmation to Emily that her father had been here. She added it to her list of revelations—which also included Trevor’s sighting of Roy in a beat-up car—that confirmed her father was not only alive but that he had very recently returned to the house.

  She wondered if her dad had used this secret room as a drinking den, as a place he could escape to in order to indulge in the shameful habit that had contributed to the breakup of his marriage and the death of his youngest daughter.

  While Emily’s mind was wrapped up in thoughts, Daniel was still on a roll, considering all the possibilities of the new room.

  “I could restore it like I did with the carriage house,” he exclaimed. “Work behind the bar.”

  “You’re supposed to be finding a proper job, remember,” Emily said.

  Just then, Serena walked in through the living room door, her arms laden with freshly laundered towels.

  “Sorry to interrupt, it’s just that one of the guests…” she began. Then she paused and her mouth gaped open as she took in the sight of the new room, the expanse that had opened up in the living room. “What the…”

  “Isn’t it great?” Daniel exclaimed, gesturing his arms wide. He already seemed to be feeling some kind of ownership over the bar.

  Serena rushed forward, grinning from ear to ear. “This is amazing! Are you going to restore it?” she asked. “You have to!” She grabbed Emily’s hand. “Can you imagine how awesome the parties would be if we had a bar in here?”

  Emily nodded but it was all a bit too much to take in.

  “My friend Alec is looking for bar work,” Serena continued. “I bet you he’d work for tips. You know what us students are like.”

  “And I’ll fill in if need be,” Daniel added. “May as well while I’m applying and waiting for interviews. I could call George in the morning to look into restoring the room. Take the rest of this fake wall away.”

  He knocked on the plasterboard and the sound of its hollowness resonated.

  “Okay,” Emily agreed, smiling finally. “It’s a good idea. Let’s do it.”

  Everyone cheered.

  Emily grabbed one of the dusty, vintage bottles of whiskey and poured a drink for herself, Daniel, and Serena.

  “Sorry, kiddo,” she said to Chantelle. “I don’t think there’s anything here for you.”

  “How about this?” Chantelle asked, producing a dusty glass bottle of root beer from the back of a cupboard.

  “Perfect,” Emily said, though she wasn’t sure whether such an old soda would taste good. It would certainly be flat by now!

  Now that everyone had a glass, they clinked them together and, somewhat hesitantly, took sips of their decades old beverages.

  Serena raised her eyebrows. “Wow. That’s actually really good.”

  Daniel nodded. “Amazing quality,” he said, peering at the bottle. “And eighty years old! That’s pretty vintage!” He seemed more enthused than he had for days.

  Emily sipped her own drink, enjoying the sharpness that slid down her throat. It felt like another gift from her father, another thing he’d kept hidden and stored for her when the time was right to unveil it.

  Just then, Chantelle made a disgusted noise. “This is horrible!”

  Everyone laughed.

  “I’d better get back to work,” Serena said, looking a little ruddy-cheeked after the unexpected whiskey shot.

  Excited by the restoration work, Daniel hopped onto his laptop and began looking into what would need to be done, firing off text message exchanges with his friend George, who had so artfully restored the Tiffany glass for them. Chantelle, ever the organizer, made a list of things she thought should be in the new room, including arcade games and a popcorn machine.

  While everyone’s creative juices flowed, Emily spent some time in the strange new room. In here, she could feel her father more than in any other room in the house. His study was where she’d first felt connected to him, then she’d felt him in the basement where clues of his secret life had been distributed throughout the labyrinth of wine cellars and the peppering of vaults. What if there was something more in here?

  She rushed around, looking for one of her father’s hidden vaults. There were none behind the bar, none hidden in trap doors in the floor. Then Emily remembered the Prohibition poster on the wall. Could he have hidden a vault behind it?

  Carefully, Emily removed the picture frame from the wall and placed it gently on the floor. And there it was. The door of a vault.

  She stared at it, breathing raggedly. Like all the other safes in the house, she knew this one would contain more secrets, more pieces of the puzzle of her father’s life.

  Then Emily was even more surprised to discover that this safe was not locked. The door was partially open, just a crack. She reached forward, hooking her fingertips into the crack, and pulled the metal door toward her.

  Straightaway she saw that there was a stack of papers inside. Her father had a habit of locking all his important documentation away, dispersed throughout the house as though he were paranoid someone would get their hands on them. She felt a sudden deflation at the thought that they would just be random papers, documents and deeds, files from his job, shopping lists.

  She began rummaging through them, her emotions a mixture of apprehension and excitement. With each random piece of paper she looked through her hopes faded more and more. But then she noticed something that made her heart flutter. It was a printout of an email exchange regarding the purchase of a car from an auto dealer. The sale had fallen through by the looks of things.

  But that wasn’t why Emily was interested. What had caught her attention was the email address of the recipient: e-jcm@rm.net. Could it be a code? E-J for Emily Jane, her full name. C for Charlotte and M for Mitchell. Then RM for Roy Mitchell. Could it be a coincidence or was this email address her father’s?

  Her heart began hammering a mile a minute. Clutching the piece of paper in her hands, Emily ran out of the speakeasy.

  “Are you okay?” Daniel asked as she rushed by.

  But Emily found she couldn’t speak. She just paused and looked at him mutely, the paper in her hands. Finally she managed to stammer, “I have an email to send.”

  Then she hurried upstairs to the computer. Fingers shaking with excitement, she opened up her emails and composed a new message.

  Dad?

  Are you there?

  It’s me, Emily.

  What can I possibly say after all these years? First of all, I need you to know that I’m not angry with you. I was for a long time, but I’m a woman now, not a child, and I harbor no ill will toward you. Looking at the world through an adult’s perspective means I understand that life can be messy and complicated, that sometimes we make decisions we regret, and then feel unable to admit our mistakes. I don’t know why you left but I need you to know that you can come home now. Please don’t stay in hiding just because you’re scared to face me, scared to apologize, scared to admit you made the wrong decision all those years ago when you ran away. I forgive you. And moreover, I miss you. It’s time to come home, Dad. It’s time to be a family again.

  So much has changed in the years since you left. I live in your house now, the house in Sunset Harbor. I have met a wonderful man, Daniel. I have no children of my own, but Daniel is a father, and by default I have become a mother to his beautiful daughter, Chantelle. She is so much like Charlotte, Dad. You will love her.

  Daniel and
I are getting married. It would mean the world to me to have you walk me down the aisle. After years spent wondering whether you were dead, then discovering over this past year of unearthing your clues that you are not, the idea of you walking beside me down the aisle has become more pertinent, more compelling. It would be a dream come true if you came back even if it was just for one day. I need you, Dad, now more than ever.

  I’ve found myself here, ironically, in the place where I lost you. And I’ve found your clues, unearthed your secrets. There’s nothing left to fear, to be ashamed of. I know how Charlotte died, I know that you blamed yourself. I’ve pieced together the reasons for your guilt—your affair, your alcoholism—and I need you to know that none of that matters. Too much time has slipped away. Please let us spend what we have left together as a family.

  I forgive you for everything. The question now is can you forgive yourself?

  My love, always and forever,

  Emily Jane.

  She sent the email as quickly as her fingers would allow, then sat back, panting, almost delirious with excitement.

  Time passed, second by second, Emily feeling each one keenly. As more and more time sifted away from her, she felt her hope begin to wane. What if she’d misinterpreted the email address, had chosen to see a pattern in a random collection of letters? No, it couldn’t be. It was too much of a coincidence. Which left two options. Firstly that the email address was defunct or never checked by her father. Secondly (and more likely), that he didn’t want to reply.

  Emily prayed that direct contact from her would be enough for him to finally break his silence, to reveal himself. But twenty minutes passed without her prayers being answered.

  As she stared at her empty inbox, Emily was struck with a familiar sensation, like heavy armor falling onto her shoulders, one that kept her safe but at the expense of her emotions. Her dad was still absent, still missing from her life. She was getting closer but she was still so far. It was all up to him, to Roy, just as it always had been. He was in the driver’s seat and as long as her father chose to stay hidden, he could maintain that distance between them forever.