Chapter 9 #3
‘I can’t ask someone to do what I wouldn’t be prepared to do myself.
Least of all Briony.’ The thought had sat uncomfortably with her from the start, and she hated herself for it.
It shouldn’t matter which of them donated a part of their liver to save their mum, but she hated the idea of it being Briony, acting like some kind of hero when she’d been the one to decimate the family and cause their mother so much stress.
And who knows, all of that might have been one of the root causes of her mother’s illness in the first place.
Stress was supposed to be a contributor to cancer and God knows Briony had caused them all enough of that over the years.
‘I just couldn’t carry on without you.’ Matt cupped the side of her face with his hand. ‘You and the boys are everything to me. I can’t believe how bloody lucky I am and I don’t want anything to jeopardise that.’
‘Me neither.’ She turned her face slightly and kissed his hand. ‘We really are lucky, aren’t we?’
‘Incredibly lucky and that’s why I know all this stuff with your mum is going work out okay one way or the other, but you need to try and get some sleep. I could always tell you one of my stories?’
She could hear the grin in his voice, even though she couldn’t see his face in the darkness.
It was one of the long-running jokes in their marriage that Matt would come up with the most boring and convoluted stories possible to try and combat the insomnia that had plagued Bex on and off for their entire relationship.
The stories often involved the intricacies of farm equipment or the benefits of crop rotation, anything he thought might help her finally drift off to sleep.
What he didn’t know was that it was the sound of his voice that could help regulate her, calm and steady in the dead of night.
Matt was a good man, and she really was incredibly lucky to have found him.
By the time Bex arrived at her parents’ house the next day she felt as if she knew how to approach the conversation.
She wasn’t going to go in all guns blazing and demand that her mum reconsider, but she was still prepared to use emotional blackmail if she had to.
It went against the grain for Bex, because there was nothing she hated more than manipulative behaviour, but this was a matter of life and death, and all bets were off.
She was going to follow Matt’s advice and remind her mum how much she, Ken and the boys needed her, but she was also going to ask Donna what she thought it would do to them all, knowing she could have accepted treatment that would almost certainly save her, but she’d chosen to turn it down.
If that didn’t work, she was going to play her trump card and ask her mum if she really wanted to throw away the best chance she was ever going to get of seeing her daughters reconciled.
Her mother might have doubted Bex’s intentions when she’d first mentioned the prospect of patching things up with Briony, but Donna would have to be absolutely certain it was a lie in order to walk away from the possibility.
There had never been a better reason for the two of them to put their differences aside than there was now, but if their mother died, there’d be no common ground left and no reason for them ever to be a part of one another’s lives again.
It really was horribly manipulative, but Bex didn’t care – there was too much at stake.
‘Hey, Mum.’ She planted a kiss on her mother’s cheek, after letting herself into the house, trying not to gasp at the change in her mother’s appearance. She was losing weight, and the yellow tinge to her skin tone and the whites of her eyes was undeniable now too.
‘Hello, my love, it’s good to see you.’ Donna had always had such joie de vivre and incredible amounts of energy, despite the rheumatoid arthritis, but even her voice sounded old and worn out now, so different to just a few weeks before.
It was as if her mum was disappearing before Bex’s eyes and she couldn’t bear it.
‘Where’s Ken?’
‘Outside in the garden talking to someone about a bike he wants to buy for Tom. At least I think that’s what he said.
You know what the mobile phone signal is like up here and how useless Ken is with the phone at the best of times.
He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t accidentally cut the other person off all together!
’ Donna started laughing, but looking at the sunken hollows of her mother’s cheeks, Bex just wanted to cry.
Couldn’t her mum see that Ken would never cope without her, mostly because he wouldn’t want to?
They were devoted to one another and they’d both experienced bad marriages before they met.
How could her mum want to give up a single day of the time they could have together?
‘Hello, sweetheart.’ Ken’s voice made her jump and, when she turned to look at him, she couldn’t read the expression on his face.
He certainly didn’t look the way she’d expected him to, or the way she felt; terrified and broken.
‘Can you come and have a look at the coffee machine for me. It won’t seem to work when I put the pods in. ’
‘It probably just needs a cleaning pod. I can do it.’ Donna moved to stand up, but there was a flash of something in Ken’s eyes as he shot a look at Bex, an urgency that made her realise there was more to his request than just help with the coffee machine. He wanted a chance to talk to her alone.
‘No. You sit there, Mum. I’ll do it, and I’ll show Ken, so he knows for next time.’ Bex was already moving towards the kitchen with her stepfather, and seconds later he closed the door quietly behind them, dropping his voice to barely more than a whisper.
‘I emailed Briony when she didn’t reply to your message and asked her to call me.
I don’t care if your mum is angry about it any more, I couldn’t just keep waiting.
’ Ken’s voice might have been quiet, but his tone was resolute and she could have kissed him.
There was no room for messing around any more – they had to get this sorted.
‘That’s great. Have you spoken to her?’
‘She called me just now. That’s why I went outside. She’s going to be there on Monday when your mum sees the consultant again, and she’s going to tell him she wants to donate part of her liver.’
Bex was desperately trying to untangle her feelings about the prospect of seeing Briony again.
Part of her had longed for this moment for more than sixteen years.
The pain of being separated from her younger sister for so long had been devastating.
Briony had been her best friend, her sidekick and closest confidante for so long.
There was no way anyone could just break a bond like that without feeling the loss of it.
She had sought comfort by reminding herself that the person she was missing had never really existed; the loving sister she’d considered Briony to be was an illusion.
It was what had stopped her reaching out on the many occasions when she’d been tempted to try to forgive and forget.
After all, it was because of what Briony had done that she’d found true happiness with Matt and their boys.
It should have been easy to forgive, but Briony’s betrayal had broken something deep inside Bex that nothing had been able to fix, not even the beautiful life it had opened up to her.
The person she’d trusted most in the world, the only one who truly understood what it had felt like to be let down and lied to by their father time and time again, had chosen a fling with her former fiancé over Bex.
A man Briony had claimed not even to like.
Bex hadn’t wanted to listen to Briony’s explanation of why she’d done what she done, and she’d dug her heels in when her mother had tried to persuade her to at least hear Briony out.
Over the years that followed, every time she’d been tempted to reach out to Briony and let her guard down again, Bex had talked herself out of it and dug her heels in even further instead.
Somewhere along the line it had reached the point where too much time had passed to back down, even if she’d wanted to.
How was she supposed to explain to her boys what had happened?
And how could she trust Briony to become a part of their lives when she was capable of inflicting such pain on someone she’d claimed to love?
It hadn’t been an option to risk her sons’ happiness and stability, no matter how much she’d ached to go back in time – to before she’d met Liam – when she and Briony had told each other everything.
She knew how much the estrangement had hurt her mum and she hated herself for causing Donna such great pain, but maybe that was the price she had to pay for her own role in what had happened.
Briony had tried to tell her what kind of man Liam was and Bex had been arrogant enough to believe that she was the only one who really knew him, and that she would never fall for a man who was as much like their father as Briony had tried to convince her he was.
Except that’s exactly what Bex had done.
Pride before a fall and all that, but she’d certainly been punished for it.
None of that made the prospect of seeing Briony again any easier.
Things would have been far more straightforward if the only feeling she had for Briony was hatred, but regret and the desperate longing for what they used to be to one another, was all still there in the mix.
It would have been much easier to keep trying to pretend that Briony didn’t exist, as she had done for most of the past sixteen years, but she could hardly continue to do that when they came face to face again.
‘Do you really think Mum is going to react any differently than when I offered?’ Bex’s scalp prickled and she tried to push down another unwanted feeling, hating herself all over again for experiencing even a shred of envy that her sister might be the one who could help their mum when she couldn’t.
‘Maybe not at first, but if the three of us band together and stay really united, surely she has to see sense?’
‘God, I hope so.’
‘Me too.’ Ken paused for a moment and then looked directly at Bex. ‘So will you come to see the consultant with us, too and be there when Briony makes the offer?’
‘Of course I will.’ The words made it sound so easy, and nothing in the world would have stopped her being there for her mum and trying to make her see the sense that everyone around her could see except her.
But the thought of facing Briony again was already making nausea swirl in her stomach, and she had to swallow hard against it.
This wasn’t going to be easy in any sense, but it had to work because it really was their only chance.