Page 49 of A Winter Wish

“I was about eleven, I think. Mum was trying to teach me how to cook—she was very insistent that I had a rounded education, and even then she wasn’t super-impressed with my grades, so she was on a bit of a mission to help me find my calling, so to speak. Anyway, she left me alone chopping onions for a bit, and they started to sting my eyes and I, like, reached up to rub them or something and sort of…forgot I was holding a really fucking sharp knife.”

“Oh my god, Theo! You could have taken your eye out.”

“So I’ve been told, many times.”

“Your mum must have been so scared.”

There was the tiniest beat of hesitation before he said, “Yeah. She was. Your turn.”

“When I was six, I wished for a new bike. That one did come true, but only because I not-so-subtly told my parents what the wish was.”

“Is that why you do it? Because you want to believe the wishes will come true?”

She rolled her eyes. “Maybe when I was like five.” She didn’t want to go into how much she’d believed in the magic of it once—they might have been opening up a little, but that was a step too far. “I know you think I’m stupid, but there are limits.”

“I never said you were stupid. And I definitely don’t think that. I guess I’m just trying to work it out—the whole wish jar thing. You seem so…” He gestured around into the park.

“Green?”

“Green?”

“You’re gesturing at the grass. Though if green is your favorite color, maybe I should take that as a compliment?”

“Right. Well, I’m not, I was gesturing into space, for emphasis.”

“I seem so…spacey?”

He made a sound that was a cross between a choke and a laugh. “So…I don’t know. Real.”

“Yes, I’ve often been complimented on my realness. Those poor imaginary people out there, never having any validation.”

“What I mean is, you don’t, like, often reference star charts or horoscopes or anything. I had a girlfriend once who was obsessed with horoscopes—to the extent that she broke up with me because her horoscope told her that she was about to meet the man of her dreams, and she took that to mean she had to get rid of me first so she was ready for him.”

Lexie laughed, feeling lighter, then pressed her lips together. “Sorry. That’s not funny.”

“It’s a bit funny now. Felt a bit harsh at the time. But wishes—don’t they fit into that category? Sort of, you know, wishing something would come true instead of…”

“Working for it?”

“Something like that. Not that you…I just mean, that’s the thing. You seem to go after stuff. You’re always off—”

“Waiting on posh people in the Alps and having a frivolous time skiing?”

A wince. “Another thing I shouldn’t have said. I don’t always think things through before I speak.”

And for now, she decided to let him off the hook. “So what you’re saying is…You’re not the wishing type?”

“My mum was big into wishes. Like wishing I would do better in school, wishing I would get a different job, wishing I would propose to my ‘aspirational’ girlfriend.” He sighed. “Just generally wishing I was different. I guess you could say it put me off a bit.”

So maybe that partly explained why he always came back from Ireland in a bad mood, then. She couldn’t think of what to say in reply—but she knew what it was like, to think you weren’t enough. So she kept it light and said the thing she’d want to hear. “I think you turned out OK. When you’re not being all argumentative and annoying.”

He laughed, which was what she’d been aiming for. And she realized she liked that she was able to make him laugh.

“I mean, you stuck with the company, didn’t you? So maybe you were just waiting for the right thing to come along. Not everyone has to immediately find their feet and get all grown up and sorted.”

“Yeah. I guess. Though I only really stuck with the company because Richard made me.” He pushed up off the grass, took his sunglasses off as he looked at her, and asked her a question before she could push him on that. “What would you wish for now?”

“Honestly?” A beat. “I don’t know. I didn’t make one this past Christmas. After he died…” She took a sharp breath. “I thought of a few wishes, when I found out what he’d left me.”