‘What?’ he says.
I touch my heart. ‘When people you love die, they still live on inside of you.’
The boy’s dark eyes widen.
‘My little brother is in here.’ I point to my chest. ‘He’s a part of me.’
‘But I won’t be able to talk to Grandpa anymore.’
I smile at him. ‘Yes, you will. You just talk to him inside your head.’
The boy stares at me. ‘Did you get sad about your brother?’
‘I did get sad and the biggest mistake I made was not talking about my sadness.’
We look at each and I spot the faint outline of a smile on his face. ‘Grandpa will always be with me,’ he murmurs.
‘Always. I promise.’
CHAPTER42
EMILY
The train has been delayed for over an hour and a half due to the snow. We’ve been diverted a few times and are finally now going in the right direction and coming into London. It’s been six hours since we boarded the train in Leeds. The threat of Baxter doing a wee on the table again is worrying Felix and me but there’s nothing we can do.
I’ve just returned from a trip to the buffet carriage. Felix is busy drinking a can of lemonade, unwrapping a sandwich, and feeding Baxter. I have a coffee and a ham and cheese toastie. The family opposite must have burst into song while I was gone as the carriage is filled with their loud version of ‘Away in a Manger’. As I take a bite out of my toastie the woman stops singing and reaches over to tap me on the arm. ‘They’ve found the missing boy, he’s safe and well.’
Both Felix and I let out a cheer of delight at her news. ‘Where was he found?’
The woman casts us an ear-to-ear smile. ‘A couple found him on a train.’
‘That’s so good to hear,’ I find myself gushing and pulling Felix into an unexpected hug.
The woman goes back to her singing and Felix brings up a photo of Vivi on my iPad. She’s stood in her kitchen modelling one of my restored dresses; it was a second-hand embroidered powder-blue dress adorned with tiny pink flowers and bows. ‘You can’t give up your dressmaking,’ he says, pointing at Vivi. ‘Mum would not be pleased. She always talked about you starting your own dress company.’ A ball of warmth and tingles travels up my spine. I can’t believe Felix is now trying to persuade me to change my mind.
‘But it makes such a mess, and it covers up your Mum’s living room.’
Felix carries on talking about the day the photo was taken as Vivi had been to the school’s summer fete in that dress and all the other school mums kept telling her how fancy she looked. Felix said he was very embarrassed but thought his mum looked pretty.
In my head my words, ‘it covers up your Mum’s living room,’are being replayed back to me. My dressmaking did cover up Vivi’s living room. It exploded the day I decided to start my own fashion business, six days after she’d died, and I had become Felix’s guardian. In a matter of days there were dresses hanging on the walls, fabric laid out on the dinner table, patterns and books scattered over Vivi’s rug, and sewing boxes on the sofas. I remember looking around the living room a few weeks later and experiencing a moment of relief as when I surveyed the room, I no longer thought of Vivi. Restoring old dresses and making my own dresses was all I wanted to think about. The more mess I created with my business the less I thought of Vivi.
Had I intentionally turned the house into a scene from a dressmaking disaster movie to help block out painful memories?
A WhatsApp video call is coming through on my iPad. It’s Lizzie. In a few seconds we can see her silky black bobbed hair. She’s without make-up which is unusual, and purple circles are looping around her eyes. ‘Where the hell have you two been?’ she barks, making Felix turn down the volume so no one else on the train has to listen to our call. ‘Bill and I have been frantic all morning. Every time I called your mobile I either got some strange woman asking me who the hell I was or an emotional guy who shouted at me for making his ex-girlfriend think I was his bit on the side.’
‘That’s Tom,’ I say, ‘Rory’s flatmate. I left my phone on his coffee table.’
‘Oh, God, that’s one of my worst nightmares, leaving my phone in another part of the country and even worse the home of an ex-boyfriend,’ says Lizzie, making a frightened face.
‘Thanks,’ I say, with an air of sarcasm which makes her giggle.
‘What’s Tom’s problem?’
Felix grins. ‘Tom only had four crosses on his kissing chart.’
Bill wanders behind Lizzie and waves at us. His curly brown hair looks like he’s been plugged into the electricity mains overnight. The trouble with Bill is that sometimes his mouth works faster than his brain. ‘Kissing chart – I thought it was a sleeping…’
One of the many things I love about Lizzie is that she’s quick to react to Bill. Before I can raise my hands to remind Bill to watch what he’s about to say in front of a nine-year-old, Lizzie has grabbed a cushion and put it in Bill’s face which muffles what he is about to say. She turns to a chuckling Felix. ‘A sleep-over challenge. Bill was trying to tell you that before I rudely shoved a cushion in his face.’
