And part of her happiness was Jay. In the car now, she reached a hand up to his face and ran her fingers across his cheek and along his strong jaw. ‘I’m sorry, I know how much you were looking forward to our week off.’
With a sigh he shook his head. ‘You’ll keep, I guess.’ And he beamed a smile her way to tell her that it wasn’t great, but he understood. ‘Hey, I could always come with you.’
‘No need, honestly. I’ll be at the hospital half the time anyway, at least until Barney gets out, and then I’ll be at his place helping as much as I can.’ She said it with as much conviction as she could muster, because part of her panicked that Barney wouldn’t get home, that this was it. She would’ve left it too late to say how sorry she was for her absence. How had she left it so long? And how had she not seen how selfish she was being?
Melissa would email her boss the moment she got home and clear an extra week of unpaid leave so she didn’t have to rush back to work, because if Barney was really bad, there was no way she’d leave him to fend for himself. He was loved in the community of Heritage Cove, but he had no wife, no children, no siblings, and it was Melissa and Harvey who, despite not being blood-related, were the closest thing he had to family.
Jay put a hand over hers, mistaking her frown of concern for guilt at cancelling their pre-arranged time off together. ‘We’ll have a staycation together another time, no big deal.’ His gaze came her way, his sharp blue eyes that missed nothing at thousands of feet up in the sky. ‘If you don’t need me with you, at least let me drive you up there.’
‘No need. I’ll want my car to get to and from the hospital. But thank you.’ She put her hand on his knee and gave it a squeeze, maintaining physical contact between them while he handled the gear stick, the wheel, focusing his attention on the road.
‘Well don’t stay away too long,’ he said. ‘For selfish reasons, the bed’s much better when you’re in it.’
‘You should be used to it, we’re rarely on the same schedule.’
‘True, but this is different. I’ll know you’re not all that far away.’
‘I won’t be far away, and I’ll be back in a few weeks.’ Then she’d get back to normal, back to Jay, back to her job and jetting off somewhere far, far away from everything else.
He covered her hand with his, looking at her whenever he could. His attentiveness had been one of the things that attracted Melissa to Jay right from the start. She’d spent some time on her own, determined to prove that she could do it, because if she didn’t let anyone get close, she was protecting herself. It was a barrier she put up so she’d never feel so devastated and heartbroken again. But then, one night on a stopover in Singapore, she’d found herself alone in a bar after all the other cabin crew had gone to bed and Jay had asked her to have a drink with him. For the first time in a long while she’d felt like the centre of someone’s universe, she felt needed. They’d dated whenever they could, spending any spare minutes they had together. And Melissa had felt that she was finally getting the true fresh start she’d yearned for.
Now, in the lay-by approaching Heritage Cove, the soothing clippety-clop of the horses’ hooves faded as they trooped one after the other across the road to presumably head towards the riding school. The cottage Melissa’s parents had once owned and that Melissa had lived in until she left the village was down that way, past the paddocks, and had been rented out for the last five years. Jay wanted her to sell it and instead put the money into a bolthole in France, Spain or Portugal but, so far, Melissa hadn’t bothered to get in touch with an estate agent. Maybe now she was here it was time to do so, to get rid of the cottage once and for all, another tie she could discard and move away from.
She looked again at the sign saying Heritage Cove, there ahead of her. It was now or never. She put the cap back on her bottle of water and prepared to drive on, check in at the Heritage Inn and then take herself off to the hospital.
But instead of driving on, she made the most of the quiet country road and the lay-by that made it possible to turn around and she headed back the way she’d come. She’d go to the hospital first, see Barney, anything to put off check-in – or, more to the point, anything to avoid Heritage Cove for a little bit longer.
Who knew? Maybe she’d be at the hospital so long that it would at least be dark by the time she came back to the village and she could face it in full sunlight after a good night’s sleep.
Maybe by then she wouldn’t have such a feeling of dread pooling inside of her.
Chapter Two
‘Would you stop fussing?’ Barney demanded for the third time in as many minutes. Harvey was at his bedside in the hospital; he’d been here since the early hours, waiting to be allowed inside. If he’d had his way he would’ve slept in the chair all night to keep an eye on the man who’d always been there for him when his own father had not.
‘Don’t you have a job to do, lofts to convert and work on?’ Barney moaned. He’d just had breakfast but it seemed that hadn’t gone any way to improving his mood. ‘You’ve been here every day for the last week.’
‘My job doesn’t come first, some things are more important.’ Harvey stopped smiling when Barney shrugged his hand away from his arm. ‘Stop being so grumpy, it doesn’t suit you.’
‘Of course it does, and if it’s the only way I’ll be left alone to get some peace and quiet, then I’ll be as miserable as I like.’ Fair-skinned Barney usually had a bit of colour in his cheeks but not since he’d had the fall. He looked gaunt and his frustration left a scowl that deepened the wrinkles on his forehead.
When the nurse came in to do her checks, Harvey was grateful to take his mind away from Barney’s mood and the fact he was somehow viewing this fall, this temporary setback, as the start of his demise. It wasn’t like Barney, who only days before had been happily showing off his short back and sides at the local bakery after going to the barber and having his silver, almost white, hair cropped back into the tidy way it should be. Over the last day or so Barney had continually – when he was talking rather than griping – claimed an inability to look after himself properly anymore. He’d talked about the lonely house awaiting his return and although he didn’t say he was scared to be alone, Harvey could tell that was what he meant. It was as though the fall and fracture of his hip had snatched the seventy-three-year-old’s confidence and therefore independence away from him.
‘He’s been here since first thing, you know, hanging around well before he was allowed in,’ the nurse told Barney, referring to Harvey as she pulled the stethoscope from her ears and loosened the cuff she’d put on Barney’s arm to check his blood pressure. ‘Same as every day you’ve been in here, he’s been by your side. You’re lucky to have him.’
‘Stupid boy, he should know I’ll tell him if I need anything. I’m hardly likely to get myself into trouble lying in this bed, am I?’
‘Family tend to see it a different way and they want to be here for you anyway,’ the nurse, Sharon, chirruped on in her overly happy way. She probably saw miserable old buggers like Barney every day of the week. But the chances of him cheering up while he was in here were very slim. Harvey wondered whether she saw beneath the façade like he did, whether she guessed that, deep down, Barney was scared and that usually, instead of being this rude, he’d have nothing but kind words and smiles for people unless they crossed him.
‘He’s not family,’ Barney murmured, looking out the window across grey rooftops, which, mingled with an equally slate-grey sky, didn’t help much either.
Sharon held her clipboard against an ample chest. ‘Then you must be a very close friend,’ she told Harvey before putting a hand on Barney’s shoulder. ‘Sometimes our friends become our family.’
While the nurse carried on with her checks Harvey went to grab a coffee, not that it tasted much good out of the vending machine, but at least it would give Barney a bit of space.
The nurse was spot on when she said that friends often became family. Barney had been in his life since Harvey was eight years old. Harvey had been hanging around the village one summer, bored as anything, and he’d gone to the old barn via the road that cut behind Barney’s house so he wouldn’t be seen. As he’d done many a time without being caught, he’d climbed up into one of the trees to pluck a ripe apple but while he was pulling the firm fruit from where it hung, a voice had yelled out to him and scared him half to death; he lost his footing and tumbled out of the tree to the ground. The man who had shouted at him came tearing over but Harvey was lying in a pile of leaves that had cushioned his fall and was already laughing away when another apple, disturbed by the pandemonium, dropped down and clonked him on the head. The man had laughed too, most likely in relief, helped him up, and it had been the start of a very happy friendship that, decades on, was still going strong. The day Harvey tried to steal an apple, Barney had made him help collect more of the fruit and they’d taken it into the barn, where Barney had shown him how to make fresh juice. From that day on he’d been allowed to come over whenever he liked, drink as much of the juice as he wanted, and it became his escape every day after, that first day ending up with him racing home as fast as his skinny little legs would let him so as not to break curfew. Out of the barn he’d gone, across the courtyard, through the gap between the trees, down the path to the pavement and then up and around the bend and into the village itself before heading to his own house. It was a route he’d be wholly familiar with very quickly and still was.
Harvey pressed the button on the vending machine and the coffee groaned its way out as though it couldn’t really be bothered to add flavour for anyone, least of all him. Over the years, Harvey had told Barney very little about his home life but he hadn’t really needed to. Everyone in the village knew about the Luddington family – the dad who was a bully, the mum who tried to do her best by her two sons, Harvey, whose home was still in Heritage Cove, and his younger brother Daniel, who was no longer interested in being a proper part of their family. Daniel had eventually left the Cove at eighteen after endless run-ins with their dad, Donnie. The pair probably would’ve killed one another if Daniel hadn’t left when he did, their tempers were a match. Harvey was left behind to pick up the pieces for his mum, who was devastated Daniel had left them behind, but at least they had their own lives now, in a beautiful village, minus the aggravation.
