AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The memories bombarded her, one after the other, sweet and poignant and yet somehow painful, too. She’d forgotten about it all, or at least buried it too deep to let herself recall it in any detail. Worse than that, Rachel realised, she’d as good as thrown it all away. The friendship, the wonderful certainty of feeling known by another human being. Known and accepted.
“Rachel?” Ben prompted as he settled himself in the armchair by the fire. “What about your dad?”
But suddenly she didn’t want to talk about her dad, not like that, anyway. She didn’t want this to be aboutbusiness. They’d been friends, once. Good friends. The years of ignoring each other in secondary school, the abortive romance that came after didn’t change that; it added complexity to their history but it didn’t alter it completely.
“Never mind that for now,” she said as she sat in the sofa opposite him, letting the fire warm her right through. “Tell me what’s going on with you.”
Ben raised his eyebrows, but beyond that his expression didn’t change. Rachel knew he had to be surprised, even if he didn’t show it. When had she last asked him about his life? When had she last talked to him at all, properly? The years stretched behind her, endless and empty.
It wasn’t as if she had no friends in London, she reminded herself; she had some old uni friends and work acquaintances she did things with—went to wine bars or Pilates classes, the occasional spa day or birthday party, but there was a certain expediency about it, a transactional nature to each and every of those relationships. It certainly wasn’t like this, sitting in front of a fire with a glass of wine, being okay with the silence.
Well,sort ofokay with it. Why hadn’t Ben said anything?
“What’s going on with me,” he repeated neutrally, his tone naturally giving nothing away. “Not much, besides the obvious. The farm keeps me busy, but you know that already.”
“Yes, I suppose.” Although she felt like she didn’t know much about anything anymore, and certainly not about Ben. She took a sip of wine. Did he have hobbies? A girlfriend? “What about other stuff?” she asked. “You must have something going on in your life, other than the farm.”
He quirked one eyebrow at her in challenge. “Do you? Other than work, I mean?”
She lowered her glass, startled by the question.Didshe? “Well, no,” she admitted after a pause. But then she was a financial analyst, she told herself, not a farmer. But maybe that didn’t make much of a difference. “Not really.”
Ben stretched out his legs in front of him. “The farm has taken up pretty much all my time, especially since Dad died. He did a lot more than I realised, until he was gone.” He spoke matter-of-factly, but there was a remnant of sorrow in his voice, an old grief.
Rachel gazed at the bright, flickering flames of the fire as she recalled Douglas Mackey, a typical Yorkshire farmer, stalwart and stoic, but with a sudden, booming laugh, and an easy affection with his children and wife. Rachel could picture him absent-mindedly slinging an arm around Diana in the kitchen as he sipped from a mug of tea, ruffling Ben or Izzy’s hair as he passed by.
“I’m sorry I didn’t go to his funeral,” she said, and when she turned to look at Ben, she saw he looked entirely nonplussed in a way that made her stomach dip unpleasantly.
“I didn’t expect you to,” he replied after a second’s uneasy pause.
Rachel had a sudden desire to squirm in her seat, to look away. Ben had spoken without rancour, without any of the accusations that so often hovered in the air between her and Harriet. Just a simple statement of fact.I didn’t expect you to.
And the truth was, he shouldn’t have, because she hadn’t even considered coming. Harriet had texted her that Douglas had died after a short battle with cancer—only a couple of months—and Rachel had felt a fleeting sense of sorrow and then pushed it away, focused on the future.Herfuture.
She took another sip of wine, trying to organise her thoughts, to figure out her feelings. Was she hurt by Ben’s seeming indifference, or disappointed in herself, that that was the choice she’d made all those years ago? A no-brainer, just like Danielle had said.
“I wish I’d come,” she said suddenly, a confession, and Ben leaned forward.
“Do you?”
He held her gaze, and the moment spun on, intense, a little uncomfortable, seeming to encompass more than his father’s funeral. A lot more. Rachel swallowed dryly. “I feel like I missed a lot of things,” she said after a moment, and for some reason it felt like something of a cop-out, although she wasn’t sure why.
Ben eased back in the chair, his expression ironing out to blandness. “Well, you did.” Another statement of fact, and for the first time that evening Rachel felt herself prickle with annoyance.
“I did have a job, you know,” she said as mildly as she could. “A very demanding job.”
“Trust me, I know.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Ben was silent for a few seconds while Rachel waited, wondering if they were actually arguing. No, she decided, not yet, but it was close.
“I’m not sure this is a valuable discussion to have at this point,” he finally said, his tone resigned, and Rachel prickled all the more.
“Maybe I should be the judge of that.”
He expelled a long, low breath as he raked a hand through his hair, causing it to stand up all the more. “What do you want me to say, Rachel? You made it very clear, over the years, again and again, in fact, that you had no intention of coming back home. That you were completely over Mathering and everybody here, and that you had a very important and busy life in London. So yes, I know all about yourdemanding job.”
Rachel stared at him, her lips slightly parted, colour flooding into her face as she absorbed the terrible sting of his words. The worst part was, he hadn’t even been saying it to hurt her. Again, just another weary statement of fact. He met her gaze with a steady one of his own, his shoulders moving in a little ‘so what’ sort of shrug.
