Chapter 11
Molly
‘What was all that about earlier?’ I ask Sadie.
She and Clara are hanging around, pretending to shoot footage of me icing the church for my gingerbread village in the hope of gleaning some gossip.
The breakfast rush is over, and my team of two pastry chefs is working on making sourdough and prepping for lunch while I play catch up with this bloody village.
‘What?’ she asks innocently, leaning in with her phone to record as I pipe the palest blue line icing around the edges of the gingerbread pieces that will form the body of the church.
My plan is to flood the rest of the church ‘walls’ with a deeper, duck-egg blue icing after lunch once the lines are set.
Clara’s taking photos too, or pretending to, at least, her SLR camera looming close to the orderly gingerbread pieces.
I pause my piping so I can fix Sadie with a glare. ‘Telling Max about my date with Paul.’
She grins, looking totally unapologetic. ‘I don’t know what your game is with Mr Hottie—’
‘I have no game,’ I assure her.
‘—but there is absolutely no downside to letting one delicious man know you have a date with another delicious man. Trust me.’
‘Who is Max?’ Clara demands, peering at her camera’s digital display.
‘Max is Angus’ very hot, very ripped younger brother who Molly here dated for years, back in the day, and who has turned up and is staying with her, and mannying for her kids—yes, mannying—and may or may not have been in a fight this morning, which makes him even hotter in my book.’
Clara’s eyes widen, and I sigh and set down the piping bag. I’m never going to get this damned thing finished with this pair around.
‘He didn’t get in a fight. At least, not a proper one. He was on the receiving end of Daisy’s foot when he tried to get her tights on this morning. It seems his first day on drop-off duty did not go well.’
They both giggle.
‘Oh, Jesus. That must have hurt his pride as much as his nose,’ Sadie gasps.
‘I knew you went out with Angus’ brother, but I didn’t know he was still in the picture,’ Clara says, twisting a strand of long, glossy dark hair. Clara’s parents are Italian, and the woman is a walking Fellini movie.
‘He’s not in the picture. Him showing up here was totally random. He didn’t even know Angus had got me a job here. Can you believe it? Men are such bad communicators. So it’s been a real shock to see him again.’
‘But he’s looking after Daisy and Tobes for you?’ Clara persists. ‘How the hell did that come about?’
I sigh. ‘He showed up out of the blue, hoping to stay with Angus and Evelyn for a few weeks. He’s been in Africa these past few years—he works for WaterAid.
’ I catch the approving look they give each other.
‘I know. It’s sickening. Anyway, they have no room, obviously, and Evelyn had mentioned to Angus that I needed childcare.
’ I shrug. ‘And so the worst idea ever was born.’
‘It’s brutal,’ Sadie muses. ‘Stuck with a huge, positively edible hunk of manliness under your very own roof when the nights are at their coldest… Bloody nightmare.’
‘Please fuck off.’
‘His smile is extraordinary, though, isn’t it?’ she continues, unbothered. ‘I mean, it basically exemplifies the concept of the come to bed smile. And when I mentioned your date with Paul…’ She shudders in delight and turns to Clara. ‘His face was like thunder. I’m not exaggerating.’
‘No, because you never exaggerate,’ I say with an eye roll.
Clara looks fit to burst. ‘This is so exciting!’
‘I thought you were excited about my date with Paul,’ I say wearily.
She deflates. ‘Yeah, I am. I mean, it’s a high-quality problem, right? If there are gorgeous men fighting over you?’
‘No one is fighting over me.’ My voice is firm.
‘Max and I deliberately called it a day a long time ago, for good reason. If we can salvage some kind of friendship after all this time, then I suppose that’s something to be grateful for, but there’s nothing else to it.
I’m going to focus on my date with Paul, and that’s the end of the matter. ’
I just wish getting excited about my date with Paul came more naturally to me. I’ve been so busy worrying about it that I haven’t had time to look forward to it, and since Max showed up, he’s commanded more of my headspace than I’d care to admit.
Clara cocks her head to one side. ‘How long since you and Max broke up?’
‘Too long ago. Twelve years. And I’ve had a husband since then, remember?’
‘There’s no expiry date on true love,’ she says excitedly. ‘Look at me and Alex—we were apart for twenty-one years before we found each other again. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.’
‘That’s totally different,’ I argue. ‘You and Alex were torn apart in the most horrific circumstances. He went to prison, for God’s sake. You’d never have broken up otherwise. Max and I called it a day. It was mutual.’
I know a lot about Clara and Alex’s fairytale second chance, both from Clara herself and from a tell-all they gave Hello!
Magazine earlier this year. Alex is notoriously private, especially since he got back together with Clara, but he auctioned off a frank press interview, the proceeds going to his charity focused on rehabilitating young inmates.
Their story is the stuff of legends. He went off the rails aged seventeen and was arrested for killing a woman when driving while high and drunk. He went to juvie for a couple of years and refused to let Clara, his high school sweetheart, visit him, believing she was far better off without him.
When he got out, he went off and forged a path for himself in personal training.
He’s now a massive celebrity and a total national treasure.
He was reunited with Clara a few years ago when Evelyn proposed her to photograph a conference he was holding at Sorrel Farm.
She was married to a guy who sounded like a complete jackass, and she ended up leaving him for Alex.
She won custody of her twins, and she and Alex are deliriously, obnoxiously happy together.
‘I don’t know.’ She shakes her head stubbornly. ‘He had major issues back then, and I’m not sure he would have found a way to work through them without everything he’s been through. Sometimes, something that seems like a deal-breaker when you’re young can just… dissolve over time. Poof.’
She gestures with her hands. I like Clara a lot. I’ve got close to her since I’ve been here. She’s a creative, like me. A dreamer. Her photography is magic, and she’s a talented painter. We get each other. But I suspect her own love story has quashed any residual sense of realism she has.
‘I wanted kids,’ I tell her. ‘He didn’t.
That’s why we split. Now I have kids. Unless he’s had a lobotomy, I’m pretty sure he still doesn’t want them.
Especially after this morning. That’s what I call a deal-breaker that’s alive and kicking.
So, for the love of God, let’s not talk about how gorgeous he is, or how sexy, or how dangerous that smile of his is.
‘Because, believe me, you’re preaching to the choir. I know how amazing he is. And it’s spectacularly unhealthy for me to allow myself to think about what might have been, or, even worse, what still could be in a parallel universe.’
I definitely didn’t mean to say that much. To give voice to the till-now unarticulated sense of yearning I’ve had since Max showed up. But I really need my friends not to big him up to me, because my imagination is fertile enough without them egging me on.
And it’s not just my imagination that’s the problem.
It’s my memories.
Multilayered, technicolor memories that still live rent-free in my head when they have no business being in my head at all. Memories of how perfect he was. How perfect we were.
To make matters worse, it wasn’t as though Max was a flake, or that his reasons for not wanting kids were in any way red flags. Because they weren’t. They were sound fucking reasons.
The planet was already overpopulated.
Yep.
He couldn’t in all good conscience bring children into this world to inhabit a planet our generation, and previous generations, had fucked up to the extent that it was probably a ticking time bomb.
It was hard to argue with that logic.
And hardest of all to fault was his argument that having kids was the most terrifying game of Russian roulette. That it was the ultimate high-stakes gamble of our current happiness by embarking on a road down which we had zero control.
And I got it.
His eldest brother Jules and his wife Rachel had a heart-stopping time with their eldest, Harry, before I came on the scene.
Harry was so severely asthmatic that hospitalisations became an almost weekly occurrence when he was little.
Every man and woman on our local paramedic team were on their Christmas card list, for Christ’s sake.
Honestly, Max watched them go to hell and back with Harry for years.
And that was asthma, not leukaemia or a brain tumour.
So I one million percent understood why Max would not sign up to take those risks.
Why he was content with having a lovely life, just the two of us.
Why he believed the highs of parenthood weren’t worth risking the lows.
He told me enough times that if I died, it would finish him off anyway. He couldn’t conceive of multiplying that vulnerability by having tiny kids who were entirely dependent on us. Not when our entire future happiness would be entirely dependent on them.
His logic was so faultless that I knew I was the selfish one for actually wanting children.
But, try as I might, I couldn’t fight the ache.
Couldn’t fight that blind, crazy, primal desire to hold my newborns against my skin.
To throw caution to the wind, despite the vast amount of things that could go wrong.
And that was where we were tragically, irreconcilably different.
It seems my message hits home with the others. Their eyes are wide, their faces concerned.
‘Sorry, babe,’ Sadie says, reaching over and squeezing my hand. ‘I got a bit over-excited. You know best, obviously, when it comes to him. And Paul’s a massive catch, anyway.’
‘Yeah, I’m sorry too.’ Clara’s huge brown eyes radiate worry. ‘If you say there are irreconcilable differences, then we believe you. But are you sure you’re okay with him being under the same roof as you for the next few weeks? None of us wants to see you get hurt.’
‘I’m fine with it.’ I nod with a conviction I don’t quite feel. ‘We have an arrangement, that’s all. We both know the score.’