Chapter 23
The dazed look on her face must have registered with Cora as her daughter gave her a broad grin when Thea poked her head around the living room door.
‘Nice walk?’
Thea nodded. ‘Great, thanks.’ The expectant looks on her children’s faces needed a better response, though, and she turned her full attention to the Christmas tree.
‘You’ve done a brilliant job!’ she exclaimed, taking in the coloured riot of lights, baubles, decorations the children had made at primary school and even further back in nursery, and the tinsel that they’d wrapped around the Christmas tree stand.
She turned back to them. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had such a lovely looking tree. ’
Cora grinned at her. ‘Thanks to your good friend, Nick, of course.’
‘Yeah,’ Thea admitted, ‘but you’ve both done such a great job making it look so festive.’ She slid an arm around them both. ‘I feel really Christmassy, now.’
Cora handed her the angel, which was waiting patiently on the table. ‘You can do the honours, Mum.’
Thea, touched, nodded. ‘Let’s do it together, like we always do.
’ They all put their hands on the angel and guided it to the top of the tree.
Dylan had recently had a growth spurt, and Thea felt a pang when she realised she didn’t have to lift him up for this particular family ritual any more.
As she hooked the angel’s cord over the top spur of the tree, she wondered how much longer they’d keep doing this.
Someday, when they’d grown up and left home, Christmases might not be spent this way.
Shaking off that maudlin thought, she smiled down at them both. ‘How about a massive mug of hot chocolate each, and I might even have a stash of marshmallows I’ve been saving for Christmas to float on top?’
The children whooped, and Thea went to the kitchen to make the drinks while they bickered over which film to watch.
Upon her return to the living room, Cora and Dylan had flumped on the sofa and were arguing the toss between the latest Marvel offering and a young-adult romcom. Thea took a sip of her own drink. ‘Do I get a say?’
‘Nope!’ Cora and Dylan chorused. Shaking her head, she was about to toss a coin between them to settle it once and for all when Cora, who’d wrestled control of the remote from her brother again, grinned at Thea.
‘What about this one? I remember watching it all the time when I was younger.’
Dylan groaned and buried his head under a cushion. ‘Do we have to?’
Thea looked at the screen as the beautiful, slightly gangling form of Jennifer Garner peered out of the place card for the movie 13 Going on 30.
Along with Wild Child, it had been one of Thea’s go-to films of her teenage years, and Cora had loved watching and rewatching it when she’d been younger, too.
Thea felt a frisson of nostalgia when she pressed play, and the opening scenes unfolded.
‘We’ll watch your film straight afterwards, I promise, munchkin.’
Still grumbling, but mollified slightly, Dylan relented and snuggled onto the sofa with them.
The familiar plot line unfolded, and Thea found herself wondering what she’d do if she got the chance to go back to being her younger self, as the leading character does at the end of the film.
Would she have done anything differently?
As ever, she knew she wouldn’t be without her children, who were the centre of her life, but there were some things she wished she could change.
A long-forgotten memory drifted into her mind when she began to drowse on the sofa.
A house party at Saints’ Farm, a few too many shots of flavoured vodka and a clumsy, cherry-infused kiss with Nick at the top of the stairs.
It had been the only kiss they’d ever shared, and she wasn’t even sure if, twenty-odd years on, it had actually happened, but buried deep within her memory, she seemed to think it had.
Certainly, neither of them had mentioned it afterwards, which had always made her wonder if she’d imagined it.
Maybe, if they’d both been less drunk, maybe if they’d both been braver, things might have worked out differently…
Thea jerked up as her head started to nod. She’d been dimly aware that Cora had shifted away from her and was surreptitiously scrolling on her phone.
‘Film not holding your attention?’ she said softly, giving her daughter a playful nudge. She didn’t miss the guilty look that passed over Cora’s face before she hurriedly locked her phone again.
‘Says you,’ Cora shot back. ‘You were dribbling on the cushion just now!’
‘Was not!’
‘Was too!’
‘Shut uuuuuuup!’ Dylan grumbled as the two of them continued in this vein for a few more seconds. Surprisingly, he’d become invested in the outcome of the film, and he hated to be disturbed once he’d got into something.
Thea duly did, as did Cora, and as Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner completed their cosy romantic journey, Thea felt a combination of warmth and envy. You couldn’t turn back time, but maybe there was still a way to make the future better.
Later on, when the kids had got themselves organised for school the next day, and she’d made sure both of their phones were charging in the kitchen, she noticed that Cora had put a new passcode on her phone.
She’d never changed it before, and Thea had made it clear that a condition of having a phone was that Cora had to allow Thea access to check the phone’s contents from time to time.
She hadn’t mentioned changing it, but perhaps one of her friends had found out the original code.
Making a note to mention it to her daughter in the morning, she was just about to switch the lights off and go to bed herself when a notification buzzed from the Snapchat app on Cora’s phone.
She knew she should just go to bed, but curiosity got the better of her. Walking back to where both children’s phones were lying on the kitchen counter, she looked down at the screen before it went black.
What she saw there made her blood run cold and her hands start to shake.
It couldn’t be.
Could it?
Not after all this time?
She didn’t dare touch the phone in case she accidentally opened the message, so Thea just stared at the screen until it went dark of its own accord.