She thought some more. ‘So, if not an architect…plumber?’
‘Now I know you’re not being serious.’ His attempts to fix anything around the house usually ended up making it ten times worse and then having to call in the professionals to fix his bodge job. ‘I wanted to be a surgeon.’
‘Seriously? Dad, that is way cool.’
‘Way cool,’ he agreed. ‘But it wasn’t meant to be.’
‘Why didn’t you do it? Mum got to be a nurse, why not become a doctor if that’s what you wanted?’
‘Because it would’ve involved many, many years of studying, placements, shift work, and I felt with a family to focus on I needed a well-paying job that I could get into a lot sooner.’ He’d been sensible and pragmatic when they first found out they were having a baby, but that had only lasted so long before he’d felt the pressures and fought the walls closing in around them, the stress of having to live together under his parents’ roof. ‘Part of me wonders where I’d be now if I’d kept on the career path I really wanted, even though I have a career I do enjoy.’
They crossed over the next intersection and he came back to the whole point of this trip down memory lane. ‘I don’t want you to make the same mistakes we did, Scarlett. I want you to have choices while you’re young, enjoy your freedom. As I’ve already said, you’re on holiday, so is Kyle. I expect he’s looking for a bit of fun.’
‘And maybe so am I.’
They’d reached the street where the Inglenook Inn stood proudly in the brownstone on the other side and he did his best not to think too hard about her last comment. ‘Holiday romances are usually about one thing, in my opinion.’ He didn’t even want to think about his daughter wanting the kind of fun he remembered wanting as a seventeen-year-old boy. She wasn’t ready. Hell, he wasn’t ready!
‘I know what you’re getting at and, for goodness’ sake, we’ve only kissed and we’ve barely spent much time together – you’re being paranoid.’ Her face changed, frustration replaced with a scowl. ‘I can’t believe I never saw it before.’
They’d crossed over and were in front of the inn now. ‘Saw what?’
‘You wish you’d never had me.’
‘Of course not, but I regret we did it so young.’
‘Is that why you never spent much time with me?’
‘Scarlett…I’m always there for you.’
‘You’re always around now, but that wasn’t always the case, was it? Some of it I remember, the rest I’ve heard about. I listened to you and Gran once, her telling you that you need to be there for me. Did you think that with this one holiday you could erase all those times I remember as a kid when you weren’t there? I’d lie in bed and refuse to go to sleep until you came home. I never lasted of course because half the time you never bothered. Do you know how much I longed for you to be the type of dad to tuck me in and read me a story?’
‘God, I’m sorry, Scarlett.’ He hadn’t realised quite how much she remembered.
‘You can’t buy my forgiveness with a holiday.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘It wasn’t just the stories.’ With her boot she scraped at the white dusting of snow on the bottom step of the Inglenook Inn entrance. ‘You went away a lot, you worked weekends and shut yourself away in the study. The time it snowed on Christmas Eve you were down the pub and it was up to mum and I to make a snowman, I don’t think you even saw it before it all melted. I cried myself to sleep that night. You rarely made it to my swim lessons, even when I represented the school in a gala once. I was so proud to be there, I searched the crowd for your face but you never came. I know it didn’t feel like much, but it was a lot for me.’
‘I don’t know what to say apart from how sorry I am.’
‘After Mum died you were better, you’ve always been there for me, you had to be, but it doesn’t wipe away all that hurt.’
‘I know it doesn’t. I just freaked out, I felt trapped. I was so young, we both were. The way I reacted, how I distanced myself and stayed away from you and your mum, threw myself into work, it wasn’t right. I know that now. But my life as I knew it had been taken away.’
‘Because of me,’ she concluded with a shake of her head. ‘You wish Mum had never got pregnant.’
Exasperated, he said the one thing he probably shouldn’t. ‘If I’m being honest, yes!’ His voice echoed down the tree-lined street. ‘I wish I’d been a decade older before I was tied down, I wish I’d followed the career path I planned. There, I’ve said it.’
‘Nice to know, Dad. Nice to know.’
Wishing he hadn’t opened his big mouth he added, ‘You know I can’t imagine life without you now, don’t you?’
But she’d already turned and stomped her way up the steps and into the inn, leaving him out in the cold.
Chapter Nine
Amelia
