Page 8 of A Winter Wish

“Would you like to sit up here for a bit, hmm? I’ll make you a cup of tea—award-winning, is my tea.”

Lexie looked around at the flat. The walls were pale blue, a little bare. No attempt at Christmas decorations up here. “Is this part of the office, then?”

“No, it’s my flat,” Theo said bluntly.

Ange leveled a look at him. “You’ll want to be controlling that temper, young man, or you and I will be having words again. You know perfectly well none of this is Lexie’s fault. Besides, it’s not your flat.” She smiled at Lexie. “It belongs to the company—Theo rents it out at the moment. We also use it for certain meetings, the odd staff drink and whatnot.”

“Well, if we’re done dividing up Richard’s assets like the man himself meant nothing, then I’ll just head downstairs and check on the company I helped him run for the last five years.”

Theo got up off the sofa and didn’t even look at Lexie as he stalked away.

Ange frowned at his back. “You’ll have to forgive Theo.” She sighed. “Well, you don’t have to forgive him, not sure I would, the way he’s acting right now, but try to believe me when I say he’s not always this bad. Let’s just say I think he’s a little lost, without Richard.”

Lexie had no idea what to say to that. At the idea that he wasn’t always this bad, or at the idea that this Theo had some kind of relationship with her dad that went beyond the nine-to-five. She found it hard to believe. She imagined Theo’s antics had more to do with losing a potentially large sum of money, and while she could appreciate that might be annoying, it gave him absolutely no right to be a total dick, whatever Ange said.

“I think I’ll go,” Lexie said, standing up. Absurd. This whole thing was completely absurd. “I’m meeting a friend for coffee, anyway.” Fran! Fran, who was a solicitor. Well, she’d see what Fran had to say about all this, wouldn’t she? Surely there was some way around it all.

“OK, love, you do that. Chat it through, hmm? And we’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Lexie repeated dumbly.

“I thought it would be good to show you round, help you understand what it is you’ve taken on.” The way she put it made it sound like it had been an active decision on Lexie’s part. “We close for a couple of days over Christmas,” Ange continued, “so you’ll want to come in before that. So tomorrow, have a little lie-in, maybe just come in for the afternoon?” And again, as Ange showed her back down the stairs, Lexie had the feeling of being steamrolled, with absolutely no choice in the matter.

Chapter Four

Lexie sat on her mum’s sofa, blanket pulled up around her knees, sipping the mulled wine that her mum had made them. “Made” being a fancy way of saying “heated up”—it was out of one of those premade mulled wine bottles from Tesco. But it was still good, and they’d stuck some orange slices and a cinnamon stick in there for good measure. The Christmas tree was up in the corner, decorated in red and gold, and a fire crackled in the center of the room.

Everything felt comfortingly familiar. This was the house where Lexie had grown up. She’d thought, once, that they might have to leave after her dad left. She’d thought her mum might have wanted a fresh start, when she’d heard her sobbing in her bedroom, or seen her break down over a stray men’s sock that she’d found. But Lexie had hated that idea and had made that clear—crying all night one time at the suggestion. Because this was her home, and she hadn’t wanted to leave it. And secretly, she’d been worried that her dad would never come back if they moved. She wasn’t sure of the ins and outs of it, but at some point it had been decided that they’d stay. But even though her mum had moved on, had redecorated her bedroom and gotten Lexie to help with the painting, and even though Lexie had been the one who’d wanted to stay, over time she’d come to resent the house a little. Because it became the house her dad had left, the one he hadn’t come back to.

She had so many good memories here. Sleepovers with friends, film nights spent in with her mum. But isn’t it funny sometimes how the bad memories can consume the good?

Her mum was in the adjoining kitchen, stirring a homemade pasta sauce. She did pasta very well—any type of pasta you could imagine. But anything else in the kitchen had the tendency to go a bit wrong.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Lexie huffed as she sipped her mulled wine. “Did you know? Did he tell you?”

She didn’t know how much her mum and dad had talked. When Lexie was little, they’d undoubtedly liaised on timings for when Lexie was supposed to see him, and as she’d gotten older, she knew her dad had sometimes tried to go through her mum to get to her, when she wouldn’t answer, but presumably the conversations were limited.

There was the briefest hesitation. “No.”

“Mum!”

“He didn’t, Lex. He just…We spoke a few times in the past year. I didn’t know it, but he was ill and he wanted to connect with you and I didn’t know for sure but I thought there might have been something he wanted to…”

“Forget it. I don’t want to know.”

Hearing this made her feel all bitter and twisted inside. Partly because her mum seemed to be insinuating that she should have answered her dad’s calls, should have magically forgiven him after he’d let her down again and again. And her mum had been there the day she’d turned twenty-one—she knew exactly why Lexie had decided that enough was enough. So, what, was she supposed to feel guilty now? Because in the last year of his life he’d finally decided he wanted to be a dad to her again? Well, it didn’t work like that.

“I didn’t know, Lexie,” her mum said again. “We didn’t speak all that much. And he didn’t tell me about the cancer, I think because he didn’t want you to hear about it from me, but…”

“But what?” She snapped the words, then took a breath. She sounded like a teenager—something about being in this house, perhaps. She shouldn’t have been taking this out on her mum. “Sorry. I just…I don’t know how to process this. I don’t want to run his stupid business. I don’t even live in the UK right now. Am I supposed to just change my entire life for this?” Though it looked like she didn’t have much of a choice. Fran, much to Lexie’s dismay, hadn’t immediately seen a “get-out clause” in that fancy solicitor brain of hers.

“You could move back, if you wanted to.”

“I have a job in Austria, Mum. They let me fly home for the funeral, but they want me back on Boxing Day.”

Her mum didn’t respond to that—Lexie knew her mother didn’t take any of Lexie’s jobs seriously, probably because they never lasted all that long. But Lexie would be letting the family down if she quit, and even if it was only a seasonal job, that didn’t mean she didn’t care about it.

“Think of the money at the end of this. If you sell the company for a profit you might have enough to put down a deposit on a house.”