‘Hey, Ellie?’
Ellie looked up from her laptop, pausing in her data entry for the week’s takings at the shop, to find Toto standing in the office doorway.
After four days of intensive wedding planning, she was exhausted and behind on every task. She didn’t need the interruption. But Toto looked unhappy, and she knew why. Her father had been using her as a go-between ever since Dan’s arrival.
‘What’s up, Toto?’
‘Dad says he’s towed the caravan to the wild meadow behind Jacob and Maddy’s place, so it’s ready for you and Tess and Annie when you want to decorate it.’
The mention of the caravan made the gaping hole in Ellie’s stomach, which had resolutely refused to close up since Sunday, feel even bigger, but she ignored it. Art and she had been avoiding each other since that night, they’d spoken exactly twice. But she didn’t have time to feel sad or stressed about that, she had a wedding to stress over instead.
‘Thanks, Toto. Tell him that’s terrific and we all really appreciate it,’ she said, forcing magnanimity into her voice.
It had been Annie’s idea to use the caravan for Jacob and Maddy’s wedding night, because Maddy’s parents would be staying in their cabin.
It would have been a great idea, if Art wasn’t using the thing to sleep in at the moment. Art hadn’t returned to the farmhouse, even though Dan had moved into a hotel after that first night, at Ellie’s insistence. She wasn’t sure if Art’s absence from the farmhouse had anything to do with their bust-up, or simply because he was running scared from all the wedding prep. But, either way, she hadn’t wanted to have a conversation with Art about lending the caravan to Jacob and Maddy, just the thought of that conversation making her feel raw. So she’d made up some excuse as to why Annie should ask him.
That he had agreed to loan it out meant he was without an extra bedroom until after the wedding now, but she wasn’t going to worry about where he planned to sleep tonight. Or for the next three nights. It was none of her business. If he decided to sleep back in the house, great. She’d take a sleeping pill and pretend he wasn’t there. How hard could it be?
‘How did the first day of school go?’ she asked Toto, because the child was still hovering.
The poor kid looked harassed. Had Art been as surly with his daughter in the last four days as he’d been with her? She hoped not. But there wasn’t a lot she could do about it. Trying to decipher Art and his moods had always given her a headache.
He couldn’t be angry about Dan’s turning up, because he didn’t care enough about her to be jealous. And anyway there was nothing to be jealous of. She’d finally contacted a lawyer, who would be serving Dan with papers as soon as he returned to Orchard Harbor. Which she hoped would be sooner rather than later. She didn’t want her whole final three weeks here soured by Dan’s presence. She’d have enough time to deal with him when she and Josh got back to the US.
‘All right, we did algebra though, which was pants,’ Toto said. ‘Miss Morely asked after Josh and so did Frankie Bradford. I think they missed him.’
The quietly spoken observation had guilt pressing in on Ellie.
Miss Morely and Frankie Bradford weren’t the only ones who had been missing Josh in the last four days. The plan for Josh to go to school with Toto had been nixed by Dan who had wanted to spend some time with the son he’d been ‘missing like crazy’ for the last three months. Josh had seemed eager to spend time with his dad and Ellie had been pleased that at least Dan seemed focused on his son and not the impossibility of resurrecting their marriage, so she’d been happy to sanction the daily trips Dan had arranged, to go to the movies in Salisbury, or go to a soccer match in Swindon, or today’s excursion to Stonehenge. But she knew Toto had missed her best friend terribly.
Ellie had tried not to worry about that too much. Toto and Josh would be separated soon anyway, so they would both have to get used to it. And Ellie couldn’t do any more about Toto’s unhappiness than she could do about her own. But if Toto had ended up on the sharp end of her father’s temper as well as losing Josh’s companionship through no fault of her own, that seemed grossly unfair.
Toto ducked her head. ‘Do you know when Josh is coming back from Stonehenge?’
‘I think he’s staying at his dad’s hotel tonight in Gratesbury,’ she said. ‘But he’ll have to be back all day on Saturday for the wedding.’
Maddy had asked Josh and Toto to be wedding attendants. Josh had been overjoyed at the prospect, before Dan had arrived. She hoped he hadn’t gone off the idea. But, even if he had, he needed to follow through on that commitment.
‘But Saturday’s two days away.’ Toto looked even more dejected as she turned to go. ‘I wish his dad hadn’t come to visit now.’
You and me both.
‘Don’t worry, he won’t be staying much longer.’ Surely Dan would leave after the wedding? She’d told him they were coming back to Orchard Harbor at the end of September, she refused to change her plans just for him. Or for Art, who probably wanted her to leave sooner rather than later now too.
Well, they could both bog off. She’d done enough to keep them both happy. She was making the choice to go back on her terms, which meant staying till the end of September as she’d originally planned.
And she was not going to let either one of them ruin the three weeks she had left. With her mum and her friends, and the shop.
‘Toto, wait.’ Ellie halted her progress, an idea forming. ‘I’m going over to Maddy and Jacob’s after we close the shop in about an hour to do some more wedding prep.’ The wedding prep that would never end. ‘Annie and Tess are meeting me there, we were going to have some supper over there, too. Why don’t you come with me?’
It wouldn’t hurt the child to spend more time in female company. And they had about a million things to do, most of it grunt work, so an extra pair of hands would not go amiss. Also it would take Toto out of Art’s orbit. Maybe take her mind off Josh’s absence. And save Ellie from any probing questions from Annie and Tess and Maddy about Dan. Annie had already asked some pointed questions about what Dan was doing here if they were getting a divorce? Having Art’s impressionable teenage daughter in their midst ought to halt any more awkward questions, at least until Ellie had the energy to answer them.
‘What’s wedding prep?’ Toto asked, but she looked a little less dejected. Wow, she must be seriously bored.
‘We’ve got to finish tinting the jam jars for the tea lights. And we’re decorating the bases of the flower centrepieces Mum’s doing for the tables. It should be fun.’ Once the wine started flowing. ‘Melody will be there.’ Although she doubted Melody would be much help to anyone.
Toto’s face screwed up, as she considered the invitation. ‘Josh is definitely going to his dad’s?’
Toto’s request for confirmation tore at Ellie’s heart. ‘Yes, I’m sure he is.’
‘I guess I’ll come then,’ Toto said, not sounding overexcited at the prospect of spending an evening doing arts and crafts with a bunch of grown women. Ellie understood. She’d much rather be doing anything other than wedding prep right about now, too.
Stop being a killjoy.
Ellie forced a smile. ‘It’s a deal then. I’ll see you in an hour by the shop and we can walk over together.’
Toto nodded and left.
The false brightness died on Ellie’s face as she turned back to the data entry.
Bloody men, how did they always manage to screw up the best laid plans of women everywhere without even trying.
*
‘OK, spill it…’ Annie leant across the jam jar she was tinting red and fixed Ellie with her do-not-mess-with-me stare.
So much for Toto being an effective deterrent. Ellie’s shield had spent less than twenty minutes painting jam jars, then got bored and headed off into the woods with Melody and Jacob to forage for more ivy for the centrepieces.
‘What the hell is going on with you and Art now?’ Annie finished.
Now?
Ellie’s hands cramped on the reed grass she was weaving through the bases her mother had designed for the flower arrangements.
‘Is it the arrival of the smarmy ex that has put a crimp in things?’ Annie continued, confirming Ellie’s worst fears when Tess and Maddy sent her equally knowing looks – part concern and part curiosity. ‘Because, if it is, I’m going to run him off myself.’
The base dropped out of Ellie’s numbed fingers. ‘Bloody hell, was Art and I’s secret liaison actually a secret from anybody at all?’
‘Did you really think it would be?’ Tess said, still threading dried ivy through the wicker structures Dee had made to hold the rest of the flower centrepieces. ‘Once you started looking as if you’d discovered the secret of life. And Art began to smile on a regular basis?’
‘Not the secret of life. More like the secret of the female orgasm.’ Maddy grinned like someone who had discovered it too, and wasn’t ashamed to let everyone know it as often as was humanly possible.
Ellie swore softly under her breath. Not sure whether to be relieved or depressed that her friends had known about the worst kept secret in Wiltshire all along. A week ago, she would have been amused, delighted even, and probably jumped at the chance to tell them everything. Well, almost everything. Now, not so much.
‘Wait a minute,’ Annie said. ‘Were doing? I thought so, you’ve stopped having spectacular nooky with Art just because Dan the Skank has turned up.’ Apparently Annie hadn’t fallen for Dan’s charm either. ‘I thought we already discussed this. You don’t owe him fidelity. And anyway, you’re divorcing him. Unless…’ Annie’s eyes went wide with horror. ‘Please don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind about that.’
‘No, I spoke to a lawyer two days ago and I’ve told Dan. I’m not sure he believes me.’ In fact, she was fairly positive he didn’t believe her, because he had simply told her they could talk it through when they got back to Orchard Harbor, as if there was actually anything left to discuss that didn’t involve their lawyers. ‘But he’ll find out soon enough when he gets home and the papers are waiting for him.’
‘Well, thank goodness for that,’ Annie said. ‘So what’s going on with Art then? Why have you stopped looking born again and why has he stopped smiling?’
‘We’re guessing there’s no more secret orgasms going on, but why?’ Maddy poured Ellie a glass of wine from the bottle Tess had brought with her.
‘Honestly, it’s complicated,’ Ellie said, feeling like a fraud. Why couldn’t she just tell them what she’d told her mum, that she and Art had never been more than a fling?
‘We can handle complicated,’ Annie said. ‘That’s what friends are for.’
Ellie’s eyes began to sting. The simple statement making her realise that she hadn’t cried herself dry during Dee’s pep talk the way she thought.
Her mother had been wonderful, so supportive and so insightful. And it had made her even more aware of how much she had gained from this summer – with or without Art’s help. And seeing how worried and willing to help Tess and Annie and Maddy were too only confirmed that.
So why did she still feel so shit about the fact that she and Art were over now?
She knew for all his moodiness, and his general unwillingness to talk about his feelings, Art was not an insensitive man. Not by a long shot. If he were, he wouldn’t have been so freaked out about Toto’s periods, or got so worked up and overprotective of Dee when Ellie had first suggested the shop project, or been so deeply scarred by his father’s brutality and his mother’s neglect that he’d ended up with a phobia of hospitals. But it seemed somehow that even though she had thought they were friends, had come to care for him, he’d never cared that deeply for her. Not even as a friend. And that hurt. It made her feel less than the way she now realised she had always felt every time Dan had cheated on her. And that was something she never wanted to feel like again.
‘If you put an end to it because of your divorce not being final,’ Annie continued, ‘we’re here to make you see the error of your ways.’
Tess and Maddy nodded enthusiastically, having abandoned their art and crafts too.
Ellie sipped her wine, to give herself strength, deeply touched by their support. ‘It wasn’t Dan’s arrival so much as…’ She paused. ‘As the fact that it was going nowhere. We both knew it would have to end eventually.’ Hadn’t they? ‘It just seemed less awkward to end it before things got messy.’
‘So you didn’t end it because the ex arrived, you ended it because you didn’t want things to get messy?’ Annie asked.
‘Exactly,’ Ellie said, glad that someone could make sense of it all.
‘But why would things get messy, if it was just a fling?’ she countered.
‘I…’ Ellie hesitated. Why didn’t she have an answer to that?
‘And who ended things exactly?’ Annie added. ‘You or him?’
‘I did, I suppose,’ Ellie said, although she wasn’t even sure about that any more. ‘Although he didn’t exactly put up much of an objection.’ And why did that still hurt?
Ellie felt the tears begin to mist her eyes again.
Oh, for goodness’ sake, pull yourself together.
Annie touched her hand. ‘What is it, Ellie? Whatever it is we are totally here for you.’
She looked at the ceiling, struggling to keep her eyes dry. God, why was it so hard to say now, even to her friends? ‘I’ve got a really bad feeling I might have been falling in love with him. How idiotic is that?’
‘Not idiotic at all,’ Tess said, as if she hadn’t just said something completely ridiculous. ‘Because it’s obvious he was falling for you too.’
Ellie wiped away a tear with her fist. Well, at least now she knew she hadn’t completely lost her mind. Unfortunately, though, it didn’t make her predicament any less tragic. ‘No, he wasn’t.’
‘How can you be sure?’ Maddy said. ‘Did you ask him?’
‘No, thank God. The only saving grace in all this is that I didn’t do that.’ And that was still the major bright spot on the horizon. ‘Believe me, I’ve been there, done that and I already have the hideous memory of what happened to prove it.’
‘You fell in love with Art before? When?’ asked Tess, aka Miss Super Intuitive.
‘Nineteen years ago, the day before I left, I threw myself at Art. I’d had a crush on him for weeks and I thought he had a crush on me.’ Her mum had thought so too, so she hadn’t been completely nuts. ‘For a moment, I thought…’ She pushed her hair back, starting to feel ridiculous all over again. ‘I actually thought he was going to kiss me. But, instead of kissing me, he went all stiff and looked horrified. Then he told me to get lost. He told me he didn’t kiss little girls. Especially not stuck-up little girls like me.’ Good to know she could still cringe about that. ‘I was devastated, of course, as only a fourteen-year-old drama queen can be. I didn’t think I could survive at the commune after that. So the next day, when my dad arrived to visit me – I told him I wanted to go back to London with him. That I hated the commune and couldn’t live there. So we left together. I know now that devastated my mum. And the reason she signed over all her custody rights to him was because after that grand departure, she thought that’s what I wanted. She convinced herself I’d been desperately unhappy at the commune, and it was all her fault, when of course I hadn’t been and it wasn’t. And I suppose I convinced myself of the same thing, because I didn’t want to admit the truth, that I’d made a complete tit of myself and thrown myself at Art when he was not remotely interested in me.’
To think she might have done that again was even more humiliating now she thought about it. Her mother had tried to make her feel good about that stupid knee-jerk decision nineteen years ago, wanted her to believe that she’d learned from it, that what she’d done had been brave instead of just monumentally melodramatic, but how could she have learned from that mistake if she hadn’t actually owned it until this summer?
‘So let me get this straight, you didn’t tell him you think you might be falling in love with him this time?’ Maddy asked.
‘No I did not, thank God.’ She could still be relieved about that if nothing else.
‘Ellie, is it at all possible that you let that incident…’ Annie paused. ‘Which I think all of us who have ever been teenage girls in love will admit sounds pretty horrific,’ she added. ‘But is it possible that it was so awful you let it colour how you read his reaction this time around?’
Ellie thought about it, for a few seconds. Then shuddered. No, she wasn’t going to get delusional again, not even for Annie. ‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. He looked right through me, Annie. He made me feel like crap. Even if I could persuade myself I misunderstood, I can’t get past that look. He’s never looked at me like that before and I–’
‘Which is exactly my point,’ Annie interrupted. ‘Art is not a demonstrative guy. But he looks at you like you matter. I’ve also never seen him smile as much as he has in the two weeks before you split up. And he’s certainly not smiling now, in fact he’s been supremely cranky, even for him. Just ask Toto.’
‘Well, he’s not getting spectacular nooky any more, is he,’ Ellie said, not wanting to think about Toto either. ‘Men are simple creatures, sex keeps them happy. I found that out the hard way with Dan.’
‘Forget about Dan, he’s a skank,’ Annie said. ‘Art’s not. And I wouldn’t normally disagree with you re: the path to enlightenment for men being paved with spectacular nooky. Rob only whistles when he’s up at dawn to do the milking if he got up before dawn too,’ Annie said. ‘If you get my drift.’
Ellie laughed, the first genuine laugh she’d had in four days, Annie’s broad Yorkshire humour hard to resist.
‘And Rob can get tetchy if he’s not getting any, because so can I. But Art’s surprisingly self-contained in that department. I think he may have trained himself to do without sex for Toto’s sake.’ She lifted up her hand and began counting off the points with her fingers. ‘Let’s look at the evidence. One. He never brings anyone back to the farm. Ever.’
‘I was here already, he didn’t have much of a choice there,’ Ellie said.
‘Two,’ Annie carried on regardless. ‘He dates women then discards them quickly.’
‘We broke up after two weeks, so he certainly didn’t break pattern there,’ Ellie said.
‘Yes, he did, you guys were circling each other for months. Ever since you arrived really.’
So everyone had picked up on that too. Fabulous.
‘And three,’ Annie added, not waiting for a reply. ‘He never ever lets a woman get too close. As soon as there is even a whiff of commitment in the air, he’s gone. Ask my mate, Daisy. So the fact he didn’t notice you were getting too close – I think that’s hugely significant.’
Who knew Annie was such a hopeless romantic? Or capable of clutching so hard at straws? Ellie would have been charmed, if only the conversation wasn’t making her start to feel angry with Art now as well as hurt.
How could he have let her think she was special, knowing the whole time she wasn’t? Because if what Annie was saying was true, his behaviour was beginning to look deliberate. He’d protected all the other women he slept with but not her. Had she actually meant even less to him than she thought?
Thank goodness she’d always had an exit strategy – her return to New York suddenly looked like a lifeline.
Josh and she would be able to make a clean break in three weeks’ time from this misery.
She’d get over any lingering feelings for Art again like she had the last time. And when that happened she’d be able to come back and visit. But until then, it would be healthier for her to put the distance between them she needed. Three thousand miles distance to be exact.
‘Annie, can we stop talking about Art now?’ she said, letting the weariness show in her voice. ‘We’ve still got ten more of these centrepieces to prepare. And I don’t want to be still here at midnight.’
Before Annie could say anything, Jacob and Melody crashed into the room holding armfuls of ivy.
‘Hey, you wouldn’t believe how much we managed to find,’ Jacob said.
‘Where’s Toto?’ Ellie asked, pleased to be able to change the subject.
‘We bumped into Art in the woods. Toto went back with him.’
Ellie’s heart throbbed painfully at the mention of the man, the gaping hole still there and still making itself felt. Yup, she needed distance. Thank goodness she was going back to New York, because as long as she was still here, the hole would never heal.
Brushing his hands on his jeans, Jacob knelt beside his bride-to-be, his smile sweetly reassuring as he rested his palm on the small mound of her belly. ‘Hey, good-looking, what you got cooking?’
‘Maddy’s got a baby cooking,’ Melody said, having climbed onto her mother’s lap, then promptly stuck a grubby thumb in her mouth as everyone chuckled.
Jacob ruffled Melody’s hair. ‘Clever girl.’
‘Can I go to bed now, Mummy?’ Melody yawned, round her thumb.
Tess lifted her daughter to take her home. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to desert the field, ladies,’ she said. ‘Are you OK, Ellie?’
‘Yes, of course, I’m happy to put in another couple of hours, if Maddy and Jacob will have me,’ she said, deliberately misinterpreting the question.
Tess left, and Annie stayed and the three of them worked together, doing the last of the work to make sure Maddy’s wedding would be glorious, while Jacob cooked them all dinner and kept the wine flowing. As always, Ellie found herself enjoying the camaraderie. She was really going to miss moments like these when she returned to the US. But it was better not to linger.
Nobody mentioned Art again. And Ellie was glad.
Because really, what else was there left to say?