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“What do you want me to say?”
Back at home, they’d tried to get more information from him, but he’d been just as close-lipped, and with a frustration that had bordered on fury, Ellie and Matthew, in agreement, had sent him to his room with no screens allowed until further notice.
“Who are these other boys who did this with him?” Matthew had asked. “Maybe we should talk to their parents.”
“I don’t know.” Ellie had felt that curdling of mother guilt. Why didn’t she know her son’s friends? She knew Owen, of course, but she seriously doubted he was one of the bullying boys. Ben had never been forthcoming about his friendships, tending to meet up on the village green to play football, or, in the last few months, getting the bus into Abergavenny—a privilege that Ellie was now semi-regretting. How had she not realized what her son got up to?
Over the next few weeks, she’d tried to engage more with him, encouraging him when she saw him being kind, reminding him to use an indoor voice or not to roughhouse too much with Josh, who was not always up for his brother’s wrestling matches. She’d tried, gently, to get to the bottom of what had happened with the bullying, but Ben had lost his temper, rounding on her in an exasperated fury.
“It was just ajoke, all right? We didn’t mean anything by it. It didn’t have to be such a big deal.”
“Did you steal their money?” Ellie had asked steadily, her heart thumping.
Ben had rolled his eyes. “Like, apound. We gave it back later.”
He made it sound so innocuous, but Ellie feared it wasn’t. Who were these boys Ben was getting involved with? Who was the ringleader? She hoped it wasn’t her son.
“Ava Davies?”
Ellie looked up to see a nurse standing in the doorway, a wreath of glittery green tinsel hanging above its frame. With a smile for her daughter, doing her best to banish her worries about Ben, she rose from her seat and followed the nurse into the GP’s office.
“How can I help?” the doctor, a young woman with a friendly, freckled face and sandy hair pulled back in a ponytail, asked pleasantly as they sat down in the office.
“We’ve had some issues with bedwetting in the last month or so,” Ellie began with an apologetic smile.
“Oh?” The doctor raised her eyebrows. “And is this unusual?” She turned to Ava. “How old are you, sweetheart?”
“Six,” Ava declared proudly.
“My, my!” The doctor turned back to Ellie. “How many times has she wet the bed?”
“Three or four times a week, but before last month, she’d been dry at night for years.” Ellie gave Ava a small, encouraging smile. Fortunately, her daughter did not seem embarrassed by her bedwetting; she was smiling and kicking her legs against the rungs of her chair, looking around the office with interest.
The GP asked a few more questions which Ellie did her best to answer, although she wasn’t entirely sure. Had Ava lost her appetite? Had she seemed tired or lethargic? Had she lost weight?
“I… I don’t think so,” Ellie replied helplessly. “Not that I’ve noticed.” Which made her sound—and feel—like a bad mother. “She’s tired, yes, but I’d expect her to be, with the broken nights.”
“Has she been unusually thirsty?” the doctor asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Ellie replied, only to remember how Ava had guzzled from her water bottle in the waiting room. And, now that she thought of it, Ava had been asking for a second glass of milk at dinner, which Ellie had been reluctant to give her, and her water bottle that she took to school had been empty in the afternoons, when before it had usually been half-full. Ellie had been trying to limit her daughter’s liquid intake, but Ava had seemed thirstier than usual. “Yes, actually,” Ellie admitted. “I think she has been.”
“Well, it’s worth doing a random blood sugar test, just to rule out diabetes,” the doctor said with a smile. “Probably it’s just a phase—this happens sometimes at Ava’s age—but we want to make sure.”
Diabetes? Such a possibility hadn’t even crossed Ellie’s mind. At the worst, she’d been thinking a virus, maybe a bladder infection. Guilt swamped her, that she might have missed some obvious signs and symptoms.
“All right,” she replied a bit shakily, and the doctor filled out a form for Ellie to take to the nurse’s office.
“Fortunately, there’s time now, so we can get it down right away, and you’ll have your results within seventy-two hours.”
“Thank you,” Ellie murmured, still reeling. Surely Ava couldn’t have diabetes?
The nurse was as friendly as the doctor, and was able to take the blood sample while chatting to Ava the whole time, so her daughter barely noticed the needle going in, and was thrilled with her princess sticker.
Ellie had promised her a sticky bun from the Angel Bakery, and so it was nearly lunchtime before she’d dropped her back at school and headed back to the inn, her mind buzzing with her never-ending to-do list as well as this new anxiety about Ava. It was now just under three weeks till their first guests arrived, and Ellie still felt as if she had so much work to do—spruce up the bedrooms, order the food, organize gifts for the guests as well as her own children…
It didn’t help that looming over all this was the mind-boggling possibility of moving to New York. Matthew still hadn’t heard back about his Zoom interview several weeks ago, and Ellie didn’t know if that was a good or bad sign. She didn’t know which one shewantedit to be. She didn’t have the headspace to think about it all while, at the same time, trying to get the inn ready for Christmas. It was as if she was operating on two separate planes, and she could only manage one. Thinking about New York would have to wait untilafterChristmas.
As Ellie came into the house, she heard a small sound, muffled, but almost like a sob, coming from the kitchen. She hesitated, wondering what was going on. Gwen…? She knew John had left to return home a few days ago, but her mother-in-law had seemed surprisingly philosophical about it, to Matthew’s relief.
