I laughed once then clapped my hand over my mouth, afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop if I started. It was tomorrow, yesterday’s today, and I’d never been so grateful for anything in my life.
‘Everything that happened yesterday, it really happened? You remember it?’ I said, winding my hair up into a bun on top of my head. It needed washing! Because today was a new day!
‘I don’t know what’s got into you this morning but yes.’ Mum picked up my fallen blankets and began to fold them, one by one. ‘Despite the amount of punch I put away at Dorothy’s, I remember everything that happened yesterday. It was a fairly eventful day.’
It was. It was eventful. I tore the curtains open and saw the garden still covered in snow.
‘Can you please attempt to help me by tidying up your mess in here?’ Mum asked as reality slowly began to settle on my shoulders. ‘I’ve got a hangover from hell, your father’s buggered off on his walk and he’s barely talking to me, Manny hasn’t come home yet, your Nan’s refusing to let the kids put the telly on so they’re screaming blue murder, and I’ve got four extra mouths to feed at lunch since Cerys and her lot stayed over.’
‘I will tidy up and I will help with lunch but there’s one thing I have to do first,’ I promised, kissing her on the cheek.
‘Hopefully it’s not in the bathroom,’ she said with frown lines forming brackets around her mouth. ‘Oliver blocked the toilet and I don’t know where your dad’s hidden the plunger. Where are you going?’
I smiled.
‘To finish a conversation I started yesterday.’
‘What’s the rush? Today isn’t going anywhere.’
‘I really hope it is!’ I called as I dashed out the room and bounded up the stairs.
Dad was easy to find.
The trail of footprints down the garden led me right to him, striding down the bridle path along the edge of the stream. I spotted him, wax jacket, flat cap, not five minutes away from the house, and broke into a sprint to catch up.
‘Dad!’ I cried. ‘Dad, wait!’
He turned around, walking stick in hand.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked with a look of alarm. ‘Is it your mum? Cerys?’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I panted as I came to a stop, pressing my hand into my side.
‘But you’re running?’
‘Sometimes I run,’ I replied, wondering how normal it was for a thirty-two-year-old woman to start seeing stars after running for roughly two and a half minutes without stopping. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Because you’ve changed your mind?’ Dad asked, his hopes briefly up.
I shook my head and his face fell. Without another word, he turned around and carried on walking.
‘I haven’t changed my mind and I need you to understand why,’ I said, jogging in front of him and blockingthe path. ‘When I was little, you always told us we could do anything when we grew up. Well, that’s what this is. This is me, doing anything.’
He stabbed at the ground with his walking stick. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘This is you giving up. I raised you to believe in hard work and just rewards, not turning your back on a perfectly good career.’
‘And I will work hard,’ I countered quickly. ‘But it’ll be at a place that’s right for me.’
He poked at something in a patch of bracken, refusing to look at me.
‘I never had you pegged as a quitter.’
The hurt in his voice was sharpened to a point.
‘Quitting isn’t the same as failing,’ I replied, trying to ignore the sting. ‘I’m going to do something else with my life, Dad, maybe something amazing, and it’ll be because you taught me not to settle for anything other than the best. Or would you rather I went back and spent the rest of my life unhappy?’
‘I never said I wanted you to be unhappy,’ he chuntered under his breath. ‘But I don’t want you to have regrets either. If you leave Abbott & Howe now, none of the other big firms will take you. Not after all this … nonsense. Word gets around, you know.’
‘I do know and that’s why I don’t want to work in a place like that.’ I thought of the dark corridors and the wood-panelled walls and the awful men in suits slogging their guts out to make money for other awful men in suits and then I thought a about never going having to go back there, and I smiled. ‘You would hate it there, Dad. Everyone’s miserable, no one’s got any kind of lifeandthey banned sugar from the office because the partnerspaid a nutritionist to do a peak performance diet plan that said we could only have low-glycaemic-index snacks and half a banana in the afternoon.’