AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter One
The unknown numbermaking her mobile buzz insistently had the area code from home. Rachel Mowbray squinted in the hard glare of the bright Ibiza sunlight as she glanced down at the unfamiliar number and wondered whether she should answer it. Did she really want to hear from anyone in the 01653 dialling code? The truth was, not particularly.
She switched her phone to silent and slipped it into the oversize straw bag leaning against her sun lounger. This was the first proper holiday she’d had in several years, and it was only her second day of it. The knots between her shoulders had yet to loosen, and last night she’d been too exhausted to hang out by the beach bar as she’d intended and so she’d gone to bed at ten-thirty after a single mojito. Hardly the knees-up, hair-down scenario she’d been hoping for herself, but that would come in time. She had five more days here in the sun, after all.
In her bag her phone buzzed again, quietly, like a trapped wasp. Rachel closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the plastic slats of her lounger. The sunlight shimmered on her closed lids, and she could hear the gentle lapping of the sea, the distant laughter of some children playing on the beach…and the buzz of her phone.
For heaven’ssake.
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes, the dazzle of the sun on the water blinding her for a second. Her phone was still ringing. Whoever was trying to call her was being annoyingly persistent. A flicker of worry licked at her insides, and she immediately squashed it. If it was anything important, she would recognise the number, and really, the only person who would be calling her from Yorkshire was her sister Harriet, and they hadn’t spoken in months, maybe years. It was probably just the library chasing up a book she’d taken out twenty years ago, or maybe the local surgery reminding her she was due for a cervical smear. She might not have lived in Mathering, North Yorkshire, for over a decade, but locals liked to forget that. Just as an outsider could never be fully accepted into their exalted ranks, an insider could never leave. Not truly. Not even if you did your best never to go back.
Her phone thankfully, finally, fell silent. Rachel let out her breath in a gust and leaned once more against her lounger. Time, at last, to relax…
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
“Damn it!” The words exploded out of her, earning her a censorious look from a woman on the lounger a few metres away, who had a toddler by her feet, building a sandcastle with a bucket and spade. The little girl looked up at her, wide blue eyes blinking slowly.
Rachel spared the mother a fleeting, only semi-apologetic glance before she snatched up her phone. “Yes?” she demanded, not able or even willing to hide her surly impatience.
“Hello, Rachel.”
The voice, low and smooth and assured, with a generous hint of Yorkshire accent, had the same effect as a fist slamming into her solar plexus. For a second Rachel was breathless, blinking in the bright sunlight, her mind spinning uselessly as she did her utmost to keep any memories at bay.
“Are you there?” Ben Mackey asked.
Her breath came out in something alarmingly like a gasp before she said shortly, “Yes. Obviously. Why are you ringing me?”How did you get my number, was what she really wanted to ask. She hadn’t talked to Ben Mackey, not properly anyway, in twelve years. And not at all in at least about five. The last time she’d been home she’d seen him on a tractor in the distance, his stony gaze moving right over her as if she were invisible. Well, so what? It wasn’t like they werefriends. Not anymore.
“I’m ringing,” Ben told her in that slow, careful drawl he had, like he was never going to rush about anything, “about your dad.”
“My dad—” Rachel heard the panic in her voice and strove to moderate it. If it was something serious, Harriet would have called, she reminded herself. She would have called about six times.
“He’s all right,” Ben said in that same slow way, “but you need to come home.”
“What? Why?” She couldn’t get her head around what he seemed to be implying. “What do you mean? What’s going on?”
“I can’t go into it on the phone,” Ben said. “At least, I shouldn’t. Harriet can tell you more. But you need to come home.”
There was an implacable note in his voice that Rachel instinctively bristled against, even as she felt a deep, sudden shaft of fear slice right through her. Who was her neighbour, whom she hadn’t talked to in donkey’s years, to tell her what to do about her own father? If he’d ever had that kind of prerogative, he’d lost it alongtime ago. “Well,” she said, unable to keep from sounding just that little bit snarky, “that’s a little difficult because I’m on holiday right now, in Ibiza.”
A short silence greeted this pronouncement before Ben remarked neutrally, far too neutrally, “Ibiza, eh?”
So what?Rachel wanted to snap.I’m allowed to go to Ibiza. I’m allowed a holiday, the first one I’ve taken in years, as well as a life away from the farm and all that it is. I am!Of course, no one back home was likely to agree with that, even as they’d tell her that of course she was. Rachel still felt their judgement, had felt it for twelve years, since she’d taken up her place at the University of Exeter, which was about as far as she’d been able to get away from the North Yorkshire Moors without actually leaving the country.
“Well,” Ben continued when Rachel had not said anything because her jaw was clenched too tight, “can you get an earlier flight home?”
“Is it that serious?” She heard the thin needling of fear prick holes in her snarky tone. “Why can’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“It’s important, Rachel.”
Ben’s voice was gentle, and Rachel’s stomach dipped unpleasantly. “Is my dad ill?” she asked abruptly, and she was greeted with another one of Ben’s meaningful silences. The things the man didn’t say outweighed, by far, the things that he did. He’d always been that way, so had his father, and her own, for that matter. Yorkshire farmers were sparing with their words—and their feelings.
“He needs to go in for some tests,” Ben said at last. “Not that he’d admit it. But he’s been forgetting some things. It’s starting to worry us.”
Us.The word was like a hedge surrounding him, Harriet, everyone Rachel had left behind. Us definitely did not include her. Everyone back home had always made that abundantly clear. “All right.” She breathed out evenly, focused on keeping calm. Controlled. It was a strategy that worked in her high-stress job in finance, and it would work with this—even if the memories were already rising in a dark tide.
You want to go? Fine. Go. Like I care. Don’t bother coming back.
And as for Ben, back then? Ringing silence. He hadn’t said a single word. She’d stood in the Mackeys’ barn while he’d mucked out a stable and waited for him to say something. Anything. He hadn’t even turned around.
