Johnny got them into the nursing home and Ginger went into the loos to try to collect herself before they started this horrible job. She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t ruin someone’s life. This wasn’t why she had come into journalism. Girlfriend was. That was her calling: helping people.
A very thin blonde woman came out of one of the cubicles, crying.
Their eyes met in the mirror.
It was her, Callie Reynolds. The blonde hair was still blonde, but the face, the amazing face that had graced so many newspapers, looked tireder.
She looked like a hunted animal, huge grey eyes dark with fear.
This woman had been let down, hurt. She had a daughter to protect, and people wanted to hound her? At that moment, Ginger knew what she had to do.
She was Girlfriend helping women, a woman who would not let another woman down.
Taking a deep breath, she said: ‘You don’t know me, but I am here to help you. There is a photographer looking for you. I’m the reporter.’
Callie recoiled.
Ginger shook her head. ‘No. Actually, you know what: I quit. Right now. I am not making a living hounding people.’ She reached forward and grabbed a startled Callie’s hands. ‘Please believe me.’
Callie, her heart pounding, nodded.
‘We need to keep you out of sight because he will know what you look like,’ said Ginger, desperate to make this woman believe her. ‘I need to find someone to say you never worked here, right? Where can we go?’
Callie, although she had no reason to do so, somehow trusted this young woman. It was her face: wide, open and honest. Callie was, she realised, trusting her gut, something she should have done a long time ago with her husband.
But people let you down . . . That doubt was written across her face.
Ginger thought frantically about what she could say that would make this woman understand: confession, she realised. That would do it. ‘My name is Ginger Reilly, I write an online column called Girlfriend—’
‘My daughter reads that,’ said Callie suddenly, surprised.
‘How lovely. Well, that’s what I want to do, but I do it under a pseudonym and I am too scared to come out from behind that because I thought I wasn’t “aspirational”.’ She made air quotes with her hands. ‘But then, it turned out my editor didn’t think that at all. Only I haven’t done it yet because I’m trying to get over this guy—’
She stopped. ‘I’m sorry – I’m telling you my life story. I don’t do that. People tell stuff to me.’
‘Well, they do if you’re a reporter,’ Callie said.
‘No, really, people open up to me and I just did it to you. Weird.’
‘It’s Ballyglen and this place,’ Callie said. ‘It’s peaceful, makes you think of what’s important. I never knew that before. I guess you need to lose everything to see what’s important.’
Ginger stared at her silently.
Lose everything.
That was strangely what she felt she’d lost. She’d got her family, her new friends, work success, and yet losing Will had somehow wiped out all these triumphs.
Will had helped her to love herself in a way she’d never experienced before. She’d been a butterfly locked in a rock-solid cocoon and his friendship – and love? – had cracked it open. And all the pain of the past had been able to tumble out.
Ginger burst into tears.
‘I tried so hard not to mind,’ she said brokenly. ‘I tried to pretend I didn’t care about having a mother, but I did. Like I care about losing Will. How can you have your heart broken so easily?’
‘Hearts are fragile things,’ said Callie truthfully. ‘But they’re strong, too.’
Ginger nodded and Callie put her arms around the younger woman.
‘Your mother died?’ she asked.
Ginger nodded again. ‘She’s buried in Ballyglen and I haven’t been to her grave since I was a child and my father brought me. “It doesn’t matter”, I said, but it does.’
‘You poor pet,’ said Callie. ‘Pain has to be gone through. You can’t ignore it or put it on the backburner. You have to make your way through. I have a lot of experience of that lately, but it’s possible to do it.’
‘Thank you,’ sobbed Ginger.
And somehow that was how Sam found them, hugging in the nursing home bathroom, with Ginger sobbing and Callie saying that it was all right, that even though Ginger’s heart was breaking now, she would recover.
‘There’s a newspaper photographer outside,’ said Sam urgently.
‘And a reporter here,’ said Callie with great calmness as she held the sobbing Ginger in her arms.
Sam stepped back. ‘What?’
‘It’s OK. Gut instinct. She doesn’t want to do this.’
‘It could be a ploy,’ said Sam, and then she looked at the lurid red of Ginger’s face as she sobbed and decided that even though her mother had never brought her up on the concept of gut instinct, it still made sense.
‘Ginger’s mother is buried here and you . . . you never knew her?’ Callie asked gently.
‘No,’ wailed Ginger. ‘I’ve missed her every day of my life. Now I miss Will too and he’s gone. I wonder, did I push him away, because I might have . . .’
Over Ginger’s fabulous hair, Sam and Callie’s eyes met.
‘First things first: we need a plan to get rid of the photographer,’ said Sam.
They hustled Ginger out of the bathroom and into the music room where, for once, Miss Betty was not playing the piano to a crowd of enthusiastic listeners.
‘Can you lie?’ she asked Ginger.
Ginger thought of all the years she’d pretended to be two people – sassy Ginger at work and normal Ginger at home. She nodded.
‘But I’ve been crying—’
‘Somebody’s bound to have a make-up bag,’ said Sam in a businesslike manner. ‘We’ll fix you up. But here’s the plan.’
Plan explained, Sam raced back to the room where Rona sat and quickly filled her in.
‘We need to lie,’ she said.
‘But lying—’
‘Is sometimes necessary for the greater good,’ Sam pointed out. ‘Get me a white coat.’
Johnny had gotten bored and had taken some outside shots and when Sam emerged ten minutes later, he was back in the hallway, waiting.
Sam had put on a white coat and stuck a pen in the top pocket. She’d borrowed somebody’s spectacles so she’d look a little different. She didn’t want to be implicated as a charity boss lying to a newspaper but, and it was a very important but, neither would she sit by and let the woman she’d seen caring for the very ill be hounded. Nobody who had read the story of Jason Reynolds and his abandoning of his wife and child could imagine that they were tied up in it. Callie Reynolds had certainly suffered enough.
Ginger, poor thing, was being filled up with sweet tea to help her recover. Anything less like a cut-throat reporter was hard to imagine.
Rona accompanied her to the lobby.
‘Your reporter found me,’ Sam said to Johnny in a pleasant, nothing-to-see-here voice, ‘and we did have a relative of that woman’s here but he was transferred into hospital. Very sad.’
Rona nodded.
‘All our visitors are logged in and the only person who visited the relative was his wife and, naturally, we cannot give you her details. Now, we do have a problem: your reporter tripped and hurt herself in the music room – snooping, I might add – and she’s very upset. She’s lying down, but I think we’ll need to wait until the doctor comes to look at her leg. Painful bruise, I think she might need a crutch.’
Johnny looked aghast – and relieved that Ginger had not travelled down here with him, as she had guessed.
‘Do you want to see her?’
‘Er, sure.’
Ginger was laid out on a couch in the music room with one of the home’s carers with her. Callie was nowhere to be seen.
‘I’m sorry, Johnny,’ she sobbed. ‘Piano stool. My leg – but they never saw Mrs Reynolds here. Damn it. A wasted trip and I have to hang on till a doctor comes.’
‘I think it’s only a sprain,’ Sam said, sounding as medically minded as she could.
‘Do you want me to stay?’ asked Johnny without eagerness.
Ginger shook her head.
‘No, you go.’
Gratefully, Johnny patted her shoulder, said he’d tell the boss, and was out the door.
‘Some men do hate illness,’ said Sam cheerfully.
Ginger’s phone pinged.
That was a waste of a day, and get well soon, texted Johnny.
This was too good not to share, so she showed it to Sam, who grinned.
‘I think we need strong coffee and nice chocolate biscuits to get us over this. Let’s get Callie too.’
Callie and Rona arrived, and Callie didn’t look remotely like someone who’d just dodged a photographer’s bullet.
‘I’m sure I’ll have to talk to someone from a newspaper one day,’ she said ruefully.
‘I promise he’s gone,’ said Sam.
‘And I promise you I am not writing about this, any of this. On . . .’ Ginger cast about for something suitable. ‘On my mother’s grave,’ she said slowly.
Sam and Callie exchanged glances.
‘I believe you,’ said Callie cheerfully. ‘As the older woman here and the one who has gone through hell these last few months, ladies, I’d say you need to see that grave.’
Sam nodded. ‘Not today, maybe, but one day?’
Ginger nodded back. ‘I think you’re right.’
‘If I’ve learned anything this year, because I’ve a baby daughter, India’ – Sam’s face glowed with pride – ‘it’s that you have to confront the past to move on.’
‘Snap,’ said Callie wryly. ‘Or if the past bites you, you have to learn how to let go and live with yourself.’
‘Or forget about all the people who hurt you because there’s nothing to be gained from thinking about them,’ interrupted Ginger. ‘You have to move on.’
‘Moving on,’ they all agreed.
‘But first,’ Callie went to the door. ‘Biscuits.’