‘Done and done,’ I replied. A good lawyer always knew when to take the deal. ‘We will have the perfect Christmas. Should be doable as long as we start on the Baileys before Cerys arrives.’
‘Gwen Baker, the woman with the plan.’ Manny held up his hand for a high five, only swerving into the next lane for a second. ‘You always were the clever one.’
I turned up the volume on the CD player as the first bars of ‘Last Christmas’ echoed through the speakers, the festive spirit almost,almostupon me.
‘If I’m the clever one, what does that make you?’
‘The pretty one,’ Manny replied, cranking the volume even higher, the swell of tinkling keyboards drowning out the sounds of the motorway. ‘Obviously.’
‘So obvious,’ I agreed, clapping as the beat dropped. ‘Thank you for the pep talk.’
‘Any time,’ he said with a flash of a smile. ‘I just want my Gwen back.’
‘All you want for Christmas is me.’ I grinned and my cousin laughed.
‘There’s my girl,’ he said as he pulled off the motorway. ‘And here’s our exit, almost there now.’
Out of nowhere, I felt a tiny flicker of excitement somewhere so deep inside it would have taken a crack surgical team to find its exact location, but still, it wasthere. Maybe this was what I needed. A couple of days away from London, my caring family waiting on me hand and foot and a never-ending supply of food, drinks and tiny wrapped chocolate we never ate any other time of the year even though they were perennially available and always delicious.
Maybe I would have myself a merry little Christmas after all.
CHAPTER TWO
‘Anyone home?’ I called through the open door of my parents’ house. ’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house the sound of the news at ten blared so loudly, I had to assume my dad had lost his hearing aids again.
‘Here she is, here she is,’ he bellowed, bursting out of the living room like an oversized toddler, cracked out on mince pies and late nights. ‘Well? What’s the news? Have they come to their senses and put you in charge of the whole bloody place yet?’
Since retiring earlier in the year, my father had transferred all his legal eagle ambition on to me. He’d always had grand plans, ever since I told him I was going to LCL to study law, just like he had, but lately things had got a bit out of hand. Casual monthly check-ins slowly became well-meaning weekly probes and, more recently, frighteningly frequent demands, more than once a day, wanting to know what was going on with my job. If I didn’t answer his text, I got a phone call, if I didn’tanswer the phone call, we went to FaceTime. I was getting better at responding early for fear of him showing up outside my flat with a megaphone.
‘Not yet, but there’s still a couple of hours left in the day,’ I quipped, my cheeks flaming as red as his festive pyjamas. ‘Is Mum still up?’
‘In there, still fannying around with the tree. You know your mum, she never stops.’ Dad held out his hands for my suitcase. ‘Go and say hello, I’ll help Manny get the rest of the stuff out the car.’
‘Thank goodness,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘He could use a hand with all those heavy gift cards.’
No matter how busy things were, I did my best to get home as often as I could, but it felt as though I’d hardly been up at all over the past year. Once for an ill-fated Easter weekend that ended in family-wide food poisoning and an up-and-down pop-in for Dad’s big birthday and retirement party back in July, but when I entered the living room to a roaring fire in the hearth, Christmas cards on the mantlepiece and a real, towering tree taking up half the living room, my heart grew three sizes. This was exactly where I wanted to be.
‘There’s my little girl!’
Mum jumped up to her feet, hurling her entire five-foot-nothing frame at mine for a bear hug and then thrusting me into the armchair by the fire. My mother was like something straight out of an advert for vitamins marketed to the over fifty-fives. Petite and lean and always in motion, she simply never stopped. Up with the lark for a run around the village, healthy breakfast, packed lunch, off to school where she’d been head of science since I went there, yoga after work, cooked dinner onthe table, smart silver and black bob, tidy cupboards, go go go. In my mind she was a blur.
‘We were worried you wouldn’t make it up,’ Mum said, tidying away a box of chocolates she’d been hanging on the tree. They never went up until Christmas Eve because my dad quite rightly claimed being made to stare at chocolates you can’t eat for an entire month is a human rights violation. ‘They said the traffic was terrible on the news. Was the traffic terrible?’
‘No worse than usual, it was fine, gave me more time to eat more sweets.’
‘Do you want anything?’ she asked. ‘Something proper to eat? Something to drink? You look completely haggard. Oh, you’re not well, I can tell. Are you ill? Is it flu? Or are you just not wearing any make-up?’
‘Didn’t sleep well last night,’ I choked out as she yanked at my coat, wrapping the arms around my back and turning it into a straitjacket for one very brief, panic-stricken moment. ‘I’ll be right as rain in the morning.’
But I wasn’t getting off that easily. She stood in front of me, her blue eyes boring into my brown ones, like a human lie-detector test. There was no upside to having a schoolteacher for a mother. She had seen it all.
‘Are you really all right?’
I nodded. Somewhat true.
‘Work’s going well?’
I nodded. Entirely false.