Joe

I watched the flaps of burst tyre flutter down the hill. The horsebox was a heap of shit—ancient and tired, like everything else in my life—but I’d been counting on the brake pads to give up on me first. A cheap fix, rather than a triple-figure repair bill I’d have to sell a kidney to pay.

Fuck’s sake. I rounded the back of the horsebox and kicked what was left of the tyre. The impact rattled up my shin, but the pain wasn’t enough to ward off the fast-approaching black cloud. Guilt, frustration, and plain old rage fought for dominance in my gut and guilt won out—for now. The tyre bursting was my fault, because the anger simmering in my veins had been there before I’d come to a skidding stop in a bramble bush.

I turned my back on the horsebox and crossed the sand-dusted road. The only pro I could find at breaking down so close to the beach was that there were plenty of pubs to keep me occupied while I waited for my friendly neighbour to tow me home. At least, I hoped Dex would be friendly after I’d called him out to rescue me for the third time this month. And he wasn’t exactly my neighbour—his place was fifty miles away.

Still, he readily agreed to come and get me after I’d called him and begged for assistance. Dex was a man of few words, but he had a heart of gold and a rare smile I often thought about when I pretended his gentle giant of a fella didn’t exist. Shame Seb was even nicer than Dex. It would’ve been easy to hate him. Distracting, too; something I was in dire need of as I set myself up at the nearest tourist-rammed pub with a pint of crappy shandy.

But as hot as Dex was, he couldn’t keep me from my financial woes for long. Buying my piss-weak pint had emptied my pockets of change, and the maxed-out cards I’d left at home made my wallet so useless that I hadn’t bothered bringing it out. If the abandoned mare I’d come out to collect had been alive, I’d have lacked the resources to rescue her.

“We’ll find a way, son. We always do.”

But that shit wasn’t real. The man who’d uttered those words was as good as dead, and the mare? Fuck. At least I hadn’t seen her emaciated body. My soul was running out of room for horses I couldn’t save.

A heavy hand clapped me on the shoulder. “Well, look who it is. Jonah Carter’s boy propping up the bar. Who’d have thought it?”

Great. New tension rippled through me, merging with the disquiet already there. I was a little ways out of town and holed up in a pub that most locals wouldn’t bother to frequent at this time of year, but lately it didn’t seem to matter where I went, there was always a wanker around the corner.

I set my glass down and shrugged the man’s hand off me. A cursory glance revealed him as Dicky McGee, a one-time friend of my father’s before his life had gone to shit. “What do you want?”

Dicky took the stool next to me, his brawny fists curled menacingly on the bar. “I want my money.”

“So? What’s that got to do with me?”

“I ain’t seen your old man for weeks, so you’ll have to do.”

I laughed. Couldn’t help it. Coming after me for money was almost as pointless as chasing Jonah. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, mate. Even if I gave a shit—which I don’t—I haven’t got a pot to piss in.”

“Likely story. Saw your ma driving around in that Transporter last week. Bet you’ve got a few of those tucked away on that big farm.”

“Couldn’t give them away if we had. That old thing is a heap of junk.”

Dicky knew it was true, I could tell, and the taunting humour faded from his eyes, only to be replaced with resentment that mirrored mine whenever I thought of Jonah. Staring into a pint glass with a financial cloud of doom was his job, not mine, but his inability to think beyond his next bottle of whisky had ruined more lives than he’d ever know.

“Now listen here,” Dicky rumbled, gripping my arm. “You tell your old man that I’m done waiting for my cash. If he don’t show up at the Legion on Friday with full payment, I’m gonna—”

“You’re gonna what?” I shoved his hand off me and slid from my stool, squaring up like I had been my whole life, one way or another. “What do you think you can do that I care about? ’Cause if you’re going to knock him off, you’d be doing me a favour.”

“Wouldn’t get me my money, though, would it?”

Dicky had a point, but so did I. I didn’t care what he did to my father for whatever failed scheme they’d cooked up between them; I just wanted him out of my face. “Whatever. Just piss off, yeah? I’m trying to have a quiet pint.”

Someone behind me sniggered. I reckoned probably at my expense, until the scowl on Dicky’s face said otherwise. His already ruddy skin reddened and he grabbed me again, shoving me against the bar. “Now listen here, you little poof. Your old man might be AWOL, but your ma is still right where he left her. If he don’t—”

My patience snapped. I’d never been good with folk up in my personal space, and my mum was my flashpoint. I’d decked people for even looking at her wrong. Threatening her? Damn. My fists blurred. My knuckles crashed against the bristly skin of Dicky’s face, and blood seeped through my fingers as his eyebrow split like an overripe peach.

He roared in response, lunging at me the way I wanted him to so I could punch him again—his gut this time, adrenaline surging through me as he went down.

My grandfather had taught me the world as he knew it, raising me from the hole Jonah had left me in. Never kick a man on the ground. I never had, and I didn’t now, something I regretted in the seconds it took Dicky to get up—just margin enough for someone to come to his rescue.

I fought the arms that restrained me from behind, landing blows with my elbows before the burly man holding me back was joined by another, and then another. “Get the fuck off me.”

No one paid me any attention, save Dicky, who got to his feet with a smirk. “You’re as nutty as your old man,” he scoffed.

But he was wrong about that too. Jonah was a worthless drunk who’d frittered our lives away, but it hadn’t always been like that. And as far as I knew, he’d never laid a hand on anyone. Me? I had a record as long as my arm, and as the pub landlord appeared, phone in hand, it looked like it was about to gain an extra page.

* * *

Harry

I helped my last client of the day to his feet—a client who had, over the eighteen months we’d been working together, become my student and eventually my friend. “You did great today. Those legs loosened up in the end, eh?”

Angelo shrugged. “Didn’t feel like it. Thought my calves were going to snap.”

“That’s because you’re still looking at yourself and expecting to see your body from three years ago.”

He didn’t deny it. Just sloped off to get his clothes. I watched him move, analysing the slight limp he’d developed in recent months. Angelo had been a world-class ballet dancer before chronic fatigue syndrome had ravaged his muscles and joints, and the longer we worked together, the more it hurt to see him on his bad days. “Come back.”

“What?” Angelo glanced over his shoulder.

“Come back,” I repeated. “I want to try something.”

Angelo groaned. “Don’t make me do more lunges. I’ll puke on you this time, I swear.”

It wouldn’t be the first time a client had puked on me, but I was pretty sure Angelo could handle what I had in mind. Despite all his condition threw at him, his pain threshold was far higher than mine. And when he left the clinic a little while later, his hip moving better than it had in months, his smile wide and warm, I knew I’d miss him if I took my newly signed agent up on her offer of a summer writing retreat.

And it was a big if. For me, at least. Rhys—my brother—who met me at the juice bar across the road after work, couldn’t see the problem.

“It’s a few weeks, li’l bro. And it’s not like it’s a holiday. Your publisher gave you a deadline.”

The mention of deadlines made my stomach clench before I forced myself to think positive. Eighty-thousand words exploring the value of mind over matter. Of what benefits positive thinking and mindfulness brought to recovery. By September. I could do that, right? Twenty-thousand words a month. Five-thousand words a week. How hard could it be?

Well, pretty damn hard, actually, I’d discovered when I hadn’t factored in time for self-editing and rewrites. At my current pace, I’d be done by Christmas. Maybe. Which meant I needed a plan B.

“You should take a sabbatical,” Rhys said. “You’ve barely had a week off from that clinic in five years.”

“It’s not the clinic I’m worried about. It’s my patients. I can’t just abandon them.”

“You wouldn’t be gone forever. Besides, you’re not what makes their recovery viable—it’s what’s going on inside them, and that’s what your book’s all about, right? That we have more power over our minds and bodies than we realise?”

Damn my big brother and the stubborn paramedic logic he applied to the whole world except himself. He was the only person I could never reason with. “I don’t even know where they want to send me. If it’s the backside of nowhere, I’m definitely not going. I’ve got my private clients to consider too, and there’s no one to pick up slack there.”

“Of course there is. Farm them out to another clinic.”

“I can’t do that—”

“Yes, you can. It’s not slacking off to take some time out to do other things. If you weren’t planning on giving yourself a chance to actually write this book, then you shouldn’t have signed the deal.”

I shot him a half-hearted glare and toyed with the straw in my glass. The book deal had come out of the blue, and I’d let my immediate excitement get the better of me, assuming the fact that an agent had scouted me online meant that I could cobble the book together from stuff I’d already written and posted. But no such luck. The eighty-thousand words due by winter had to be original, and since I’d learned that tough reality, my muse had jumped ship, taking any and all of my inspiration with it.

“Show me the email they sent you,” Rhys demanded. “They must’ve said something about where they’re sending you.”

I couldn’t actually remember. I got thousands of emails a week and reserved my concentration for my patients. Wednesday was my busiest day, and I’d had a full list. Still, resistance was futile. I dug my iPad out of my bag and handed it over.

Rhys swiped at it until he found the right email. “They haven’t got a particular place in mind. They’re saying you can find your own and send them the bill.”

“Really? Where on earth would I find a writing retreat?”

“That’s not a positive mental attitude,” Rhys chided. “And it’s pretty short-sighted. Where do we find everything these days?”

I looked at him blankly.

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “You’re impossible. I don’t know how you run three successful enterprises when you’re so bloody dense.”

“I don’t run three enterprises,” I retorted mildly. “I work for the NHS. My blog and a handful of private clients are side projects.”

“Side projects that got you a book deal you won’t fulfil if you don’t give yourself the time to write it. Shut your face a moment while I find you some place to hole up for the summer.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to point out he was the one who hadn’t shut up since we’d sat down together for the first time in months, but I couldn’t be bothered. What was the point? Rhys was a force of nature when it came to other people’s problems, and for this brief moment, I loved him for it.

“Why do you have the Airbnb app on your iPad when you only ever go to the clinic and the gym?”

“Hmm?” I blinked at Rhys as his words sank in. “That’s not fair. I do have a life. If I didn’t, I’d have time to write the book.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Rhys said. “But I don’t remember you leaving London recently.”

“How would you know when you spend all of your time working or hanging around that sex club?”

Rhys flipped me off, but he was more right than I cared to admit. I settled for gathering our empty glasses with a scowl and retreating to the counter for more of the kale-pineapple-protein smoothies that would probably be my dinner.

When I returned to the table, Rhys slid the iPad to me. “Found you somewhere. It’s on the coast and quiet.”

“Which coast?”

“South-west. Down near Newquay.”

“Newquay isn’t quiet.” I took the iPad and studied the room for rent he’d found on a Cornish horse farm. “It’s full of surfers and teenagers.”

“Not all of it,” Rhys protested. “And I said it was near Newquay. Not in the town itself. The farm is further inland.”

I studied the gallery of photos on the farm’s profile. The scenery was stunning, and the room itself was gorgeous—wooden floors and beams, a large bed, and even a desk by the window where I could set up my computer to write.

“See,” Rhys pressed when I didn’t speak. “It’s perfect.”

It was perfect, but all the four-poster beds in the world didn’t solve the issue of my packed patient list. But still . . . something drew me to the images scrolling across my iPad screen. I’d never been on a farm in my life, but there was no denying London was too brutally suffocating for me to get done what I needed to do. I had a choice to make: bite the bullet and take some time out of the real world, or stay home and let go of an opportunity I’d been damn lucky to get in the first place.

Common sense told me there were easier ways of making this happen. That I could simply cut down my hours at the clinic. Scale back my private clients. But a whisper of something I didn’t quite understand argued that I had no business writing a book on the power of the mind if I couldn’t reason with my own.

Rhys put his hand on my arm in a rare show of fraternal affection. “So? What’s it to be?”

I shrugged and reached for my smoothie. “I’ll think about it.”