AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Rhys rubbed his broad palms over his face. ‘It’s my turn to cook.’
‘Oh, rubbish,’ their uncle said, rising from his chair. ‘I’ll make dinner and Hope will lend me a hand, won’t you, sweetheart?’
‘Of course I will.’ Not waiting for a reply, she stood and gathered Rhys’s empty plate and mug. ‘On your bike.’ She gestured towards the hallway with a thrust of the plate.
‘Okay, okay, I can take a hint.’ Rhys pulled himself to his feet with the effort of a man trying to drag himself from quicksand.
Having set the washing up in the sink, Hope followed her cousin into the hall but only as far as the sitting room. Opening the door, she whistled once. The patter of claws on tile soon followed as the dogs appeared, recognising the summons. ‘In you go,’ she urged Sooty when he stopped in front of her with an expectant look upon his sweet still puppyish face. ‘You know the rules.’ With the help of the gentlest of nudges from her knee, the Labrador padded into the sitting room where a pile of cushions even larger than the one in the kitchen was spread out in front of the empty fireplace. She’d let them back in later, but it would take twice as long to prepare dinner with one or other of them chancing their luck and pestering for more treats. She closed the door and returned to the kitchen, rinsing her hands beneath the tap before she filled the sink with soapy water and tackled the few bits of washing up.
‘Chicken or beef?’ Ziggy asked as he surveyed the contents of the fridge.
Hope considered the options for a moment. It was a warm day, so nothing too heavy, but Rhys at least would need something substantial to keep him going. Catching sight of the makeshift herb garden on the windowsill in front of her, she had a flash of inspiration. ‘Chicken. We could grill it and let it cool and make a nice pesto pasta salad to go with it.’
‘Great idea. There’s loads of salad stuff in the fridge boxes so I can throw a big bowl together and Mrs Davis has put a couple of fresh sourdough loaves from the bakery in the bread bin.’ He began setting things out on the countertop.
With the dishes dried and put away, Hope plucked a handful of fresh basil leaves, rinsed them and set them on a clean tea towel to dry. They liked to cook from scratch, so the walk-in larder was a cornucopia of ingredients. And cooking with her uncle was one of her favourite things in the world. They’d always had a special relationship; with her father dying before she was born, Ziggy was the only father she’d ever known. Zap was amazing too and she loved working with him, but Ziggy was always the one she’d turned to. As she’d grown older, she’d often wondered why her uncle had never married when he had so much love to give, but she’d never quite found the words to ask. She’d learned as a child that there were just some questions you kept to yourself, because asking caused tears.
She remembered being four or five and coming home from school with a homemade Father’s Day card and asking her mother if they could send it to her daddy in heaven. Stevie had rushed from the room in tears and Aunt Ro had done her best to comfort a confused Hope. When they’d made cards the next year, Hope had given hers to Ziggy. She still gave him a card every year, and did her best to ignore the blank space in her memories where her father should’ve been. As she’d grown older, the space hadn’t shrunk at all, she’d just become better at ignoring it.
‘Where have you drifted off to?’
Startled from her daydreaming, Hope realised she was standing in the doorway of the larder, staring at nothing. For a moment, she considered asking her uncle if he knew anything about her father, but how to explain her thought process without spoiling the moment? ‘I was just thinking how lucky I am to have you in my life,’ she said, ignoring the little stab of disappointment that once again she’d chickened out.
‘Oh, get on with you.’ Ziggy flapped at her with a tea towel, but there was no hiding the pleasure in his smile. And just like that, the blank space didn’t matter so very much. Whoever her father had been, he could never have loved her more than this man in front of her did. Count your blessings, not your hurts. It was something her Aunt Ro had told her when she was little, and it was a motto Hope tried hard to live by.
Grateful that she had far more blessings than hurts, Hope ducked into the larder to fetch a jar of pureed garlic. It was a lazy choice but so much better than the stink of it clinging to her fingers even after multiple washes. After a brief perusal of the shelves, she grabbed some pine nuts and a bottle of lemon juice and carried them all back to the stove. It only took a matter of moments to toast the pine nuts and whizz all the ingredients in the blender, together with some fresh parmesan. Setting it to one side, she took the tray of chicken breasts her uncle had trimmed and rubbed with a little oil and placed it in the top oven to cook.
The pasta she would leave until the last minute and give people the choice of having it warm or cold before she stirred in the pesto. ‘What else?’ she asked Ziggy, who was surveying the array of salad items he’d pulled out of the fridge.
‘You can chop these, if you like.’ He pushed a tray of tomatoes, half a cucumber and some spring onions towards her. They worked side by side for a few minutes. Ziggy was humming something under his breath and it made her smile and chop a little louder to drown it out. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be trying to work out what it was and then she’d be stuck with the song in her head. Her uncle was notorious for picking up ear worms from whatever he’d been listening to on the radio in his office and passing them on to the rest of the family. She’d finished the tomatoes and cucumber and was just starting to top and tail the spring onions when the humming stopped. ‘Hope…’
There was a surprising note of hesitation in her uncle’s voice, enough to make her set down the knife and turn to face him. ‘What is it?’
He glanced down at the knife in his own hands before setting it down on his chopping board with a sigh. ‘I’m going to say something, and I want you to please think about it.’
Not sure she liked the sound of that, Hope gave him something of a non-committal nod. ‘Okay.’
Ziggy fidgeted around for a few more moments, the behaviour so out of character for him that Hope began to worry that there was something seriously wrong. When he did speak, however, it was all she could do to suppress a sigh. ‘I’m not sure you moving into one of the lodges is a good idea.’
‘Why not?’ It was hard not snap because honestly, she expected this from her mother, and even from Aunt Ro, but Ziggy was usually more chill about her spreading her wings than this. ‘It’s probably going to take months to sort out whatever is going on up near the chapel. Even if the investigation works come to nothing and I end up being able to build there, it won’t be any time soon.’
‘It was going to take months to build the place, anyway,’ her uncle pointed out, his tone and point so reasonable, Hope wanted to gnash her teeth at him.
‘But now I need to keep an eye on what’s going on with Cam and the rest of his team and Rhys said I’d be helping him out by checking out the lodges first hand.’ Feeling like she had the upper hand with that, she quickly doubled down. ‘You saw how knackered he was just now. Running the farm is a full-time gig and he’s spreading himself too thin. If I’m at the lodge, I’ll be on hand to keep an eye on things at the campsite and run some interference for him. I can do a morning and evening check on everything, make sure things are running smoothly.’
‘That’s very altruistic of you, darling, but you could do the same job just as well and still live here for now. After all, you practically have to drive past the campsite on your way to and from the distillery, so it would just be a case of dropping in before and after work.’
Hope sighed. The problem with accepting Ziggy as a surrogate father was it gave him the right to have an opinion when he thought she was doing something wrong. ‘Has Mum put you up to this?’ Turning so his back was to the counter, her uncle folded his arms across his chest and gave her the kind of look that would’ve had Hope squirming a few years ago. She wasn’t the little girl who’d skipped doing her homework to go climbing trees any more though, no matter how much she loved him. ‘Well, did she?’
Ziggy shook his head. ‘Your mother loves you.’
‘I know that, and I love her too, with all my heart and soul but she’s…’ Hope groped around for the right word. ‘She’s stifling me.’
Ziggy scrubbed a hand through his still mostly dark hair. ‘She’s just worried about you.’
‘I understand that, but I can’t allow the fact she lost my father to allow her to keep clipping my wings like this. She can’t mourn him forever!’
‘Is that what you think? Bloody hell, Hope, it’s nothing like that at all!’
