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“Rachel…” she began cautiously.
“My boss asked me to go back to London,” Rachel said through her fingers. “If I want to keep my job.”
“Oh—”
“I told her I wasn’t going to go. That I want to stay here. And I went over to Ben to talk to him about it, and he basically told me he knew I’d always leave and to go.” Or something like that. She couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, only how much it had hurt. “I wanted him to talk to me, have a reasonable discussion, maybe even offer a little comfort, but instead he just shut down.” She shook her head, a sob escaping her like a hiccup. “Bloody Yorkshire farmers. Ihatethem.”
“Oy.” To both her and Harriet’s shock, their father’s voice was heard through the door. Rachel looked up in surprise, wiping her face, as their dad opened her bedroom door, giving them a cautious smile. “Is this about Ben Mackey, then?”
“Dad…” Rachel shook her head slowly. She had no idea what to say.
“Listen, my girl,” he said, resting one shoulder against the doorway of her bedroom. “He’s a good man, Ben Mackey is. The best. And he may not say all you want him to, or the way you want him to, but I know when a man loves a woman.” He tapped his temple. “I’m not that far gone, nor too much of a bloody Yorkshire farmer, to know that full well. That man loves you. And if you want him to fight for you, well, then maybe you’d better bloody well fight for him. It’s a two-way street, you know.”
Rachel could only gape. Relationship advice from her dad? She never, ever would have expected it.
“Dad…” she began, still having no idea what to say.
“It’s advice your mother and I should have heeded,” he continued gruffly, shocking her all the more. He never talked about their mother. Ever. “God knows I made my fair share of mistakes, and then some. I know it; I’ve always known it. I should have told her as much, I expect, but it was a two-way street. It always is.”
“Except for Coppergate in York,” Harriet chimed in. “That one actually is one-way.”
Their father looked startled, and then he let out a wheezy laugh, like the sound of an old lawnmower suddenly gasping to life. “You’re right there, lass,” he said, with a look of affection for Harriet, the likes of which Rachel hadn’t seen before. “You’re right there.”
A sudden thundering at the front door had them all blinking wide-eyed at each other.
“Well,” their dad said, pushing off from the doorway. “I wonder who that’ll be.” He turned to the top of the stairs. “Calm tha’self down, Ben Mackey!” he shouted. “She’s coming.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rachel opened thefront door with trepidation, but also with hope. She felt as if her world had been rocked several times in the space of a few minutes, and she didn’t know if she could handle any more recalibrating. But she did want to see Ben…at least, she hoped she did. The fact that he was here at all seemed like a very good sign, and yet even now she felt afraid, uncertain. They’d come so far, and yet back in the barn it had felt as if they were right back at the beginning.
“Rachel.” He stood on her doorstep, looking breathless, aggrieved, and determined all at once, his hands braced on his thighs as he tried to catch his breath.
“Did you run all the way here?” she asked in surprise.
“Yes, I damned well did. The way you hurtled out of the barn—I thought you’d be halfway to the motorway by now.”
“I told you, I wasn’t going back to London,” she told him flatly, and he nodded.
“I thought maybe you would, after all, since I was such an idiot.”
For a second, she thought she hadn’t heard him right. “Wha…what?”
“I’m an idiot.” He shook his head, regret etched on his features. “You came into the barn, and you had such a sad look on your face—sad but stubborn, and I thought I knew what was coming, and it made me feel—well it made me feel like I was seventeen again, and just like you, that was not a great feeling.” He sighed, reaching for her hands, drawing them against his chest, next to his heart. “I reacted. Badly. I’m sorry. And if you need to go back for a few days, a few weeks, to keep your job—”
“I told you, I’m not going back,” Rachel replied quietly. “I want to spend these last weeks and months with my dad, with my family. And I can find another job—maybe not in Mathering, but near here. It’s not…it’s not the end of my career. At least, it doesn’t have to be.” She shook her head slowly. “It wasn’t even about whether I stayed or left, Ben. It’s aboutus. Can we work these things out, can we talk about them, without it being the end of us, before we’ve had a beginning? I was scared to come into the barn and talk to you, even to tell you I wasn’t going. Because we’d agreed not to talk about the future, and I know that was my idea, but…I didn’t know if I could trust us.”
“You mean trust me,” Ben stated quietly.
“I don’t know.” She sighed. “I’ve got emotional baggage. I know that. I’m working through it, and I have changed, but there’s more to do.”
“Rach, maybe we haven’t been fair to you,” Ben said quietly. “You’re not the only one with baggage, you know? But because you left, it was easier to blame you. But we all had our…stuff. We still do.”
She nodded slowly. “I know.”
“People don’t have to be perfect to stay together,” he told her, and there was a little wobble in his voice that made her ache.
“No,” she agreed, “but they need to be able to talk about things. They need to work things out, without worrying that every discussion might be the last one. If…if they want to think about the future. If they want to face it together.”
