Chapter 1
Now
Though it follows all of the same seasons as home, the countryside never changes.
It hides beneath a blanket of snow in the winter, scorches under the sun in the summer, and blooms in a rainbow in the spring.
But still, there’s something constant about it, as though it stays still as the world around it bends, twists, and breaks.
At least, that’s what I used to think. Every summer for almost ten years, we’d visit Granny and Grandad on their farm to spend our time out in the fields, filling our lungs with enough fresh air to flush out all of the smog of London.
As Mum drives, I see the apple tree that grew the fruit that Callum lost his tooth into when we were eight, and the gaps in the wheat fields that were tracks for races I always lost. We pass by the streams where we caught fish with our little makeshift nets.
But the childish wonder of staring out the window and dreaming of what adventures lay ahead hasn’t quite hit me the same this time around.
Callum sits beside me, his headphones stuffed into his ears so he doesn’t have to listen to mum’s podcast on the aux.
I tuned it out two hours ago, but now the dull vocal fry of the host discussing ‘how to beat corporate burnout’ is starting to grate on me.
Plucking a headphone from Callum, I pop it in my ear and his audiobook on the Tudor dynasty is quickly paused and swapped out for our shared playlist with an eye roll.
‘Ugh, skip this one,’ I mumble about the next four songs.
On the fifth, my brother snaps back. ‘You’re really annoying, you know that.’ He shakes his head. ‘Every one of those songs was one you added.’
They were all songs played at Granny’s funeral, but Callum doesn’t make the connection, and I don’t tell him either. Instead, I stick out my tongue and tell him to skip the next one. He doesn’t protest, nor does he shake me off when I lay my head on his shoulder.
It’s been two years since I’ve been back in this part of the country. Two years since Granny died, two years since Jacob Thorogood broke my heart, and two years since my life felt truly whole.
The landscape hasn’t changed, no. But everything is different.
Callum tried to convince me to come back with him last summer. He’s better at dealing with things than me. He’s a ‘grab the bull by the horns’ kind of guy, but despite being his twin in every other sense of the word, this is where I am his opposite. I didn’t return last year.
This year, I have no choice.
When the car stops, Callum hops out of the car with the same excitement as always. Arriving at the farm always felt like Christmas when Granny was alive, but now I can’t bring myself to follow him.
‘Ava?’ Mum turns to me from the front seat. ‘We’re here …’ She says it as though I was too away with the fairies to notice.
She has a nervous smile on her face, the same one she’s had for the last few weeks as we’ve slowly packed our home into boxes and left a life behind.
It’s her ‘brave face’. She wore the same one at Granny’s funeral, as though she believes that letting her smile drop for even a second would make everyone else spontaneously burst into tears.
I don’t reply, only sit stubbornly in the back, my arms folded like a toddler on the verge of a tantrum. Mum sighs. She does that a lot these days.
‘Come on, Ava. You can’t just sit here. We need to start unloading.’ Mum’s patience is wearing thin. She was the same back at home, packing boxes as though it was nothing, growing more annoyed as I stared at my empty cardboard, trying not to cry.
If I get out now, that will make all of this real. As soon as I put my shoes onto the gravel of Grandad’s driveway, it will all hit me: that we left Dad behind in London, that our lives have to start over again, that this place of summer holidays is now our new home.
‘I know this isn’t what you wanted, Ava, but I’ve told you why it is the way it is. Your dad’s job is too demanding to look after you and your brother, and now that I’ve quit mine, I can’t afford for us to stay in London. I know it’s not ideal … but that’s how it’s going to be.’
She used to be some high-up exec in some fancy company with an office in a building with too many floors.
I imagine she had to be ruthless there too, smashing all the glass ceilings and whatnot, but Mum and Dad’s divorce doesn’t feel like business to me – it’s not like a dissolution of a contract with no emotions.
Everything I have ever known is being tossed in the blades of a combine, and I’m just supposed to collect the scraps as if nothing has happened.
Mum is good at switching off her feelings. She’s always been the tough one, as though she’s afraid to show any weakness. Maybe that’s why we have never been close; I have too much heart, while she is all brain.
‘I can’t do it,’ I say weakly. ‘I can’t just start again.’
‘Well, you have no other choice, Ava. None of us have a choice.’ She huffs. ‘This is our fresh start.’
You had a choice, I want to scream at her. Could you not have just got on for one more year? Let me finish school? Let me go to university? Not disrupt my life at its most important point? No, you were only thinking about yourself, weren’t you.
The words I long to say out loud get stuck before they can reach Mum, but they do enough damage in my mind to send angry tears running down my face.
Sighing again, she turns away from the car for a moment before she spins back around to look at me with sad eyes.
‘This was the right choice for our family, Ava. I hope one day you’ll be able to see that.
’ And she strides away before I can fight back any more.
The only thing that pulls me out of my own head is my phone as it buzzes aggressively on my lap.
Freya’s name illuminates the screen, her little round profile picture glowing with her wide smile and bouncing coils of hair.
It’s from our photoshoot at college, where she agreed to model some of my designs as long as I promised to set her up with Ash in the year above.
They’ve been together ever since, and I still like to take all of the credit for that.
Did you see him yet? x
Him. We both know who she’s talking about: Jacob Thorogood.
The boy who lives on the next farm over.
The boy who has filled my summers my whole childhood.
The boy that once felt like my whole world.
But this time, I closed my eyes as we drove through the village, just so I’d have no chance of spotting him.
I reply:
Who?
Sweat pools in my palms at the thought of him and I slide my phone back into my pocket before she can reply. I don’t want to think about him any more. I will myself to get out of the car and take my suitcase out of the boot.
Callum and Grandad are standing in the doorway when I reach them, discussing the weather from the last few weeks. Callum enquires about how ‘his’ chickens have been in the months without him.
‘Hello Ava, love.’ Grandad interrupts the conversation to address me. He isn’t the hugging type, so he taps my arm with his swollen hands that are permanently stained with tractor engine oil. ‘I was starting to worry that they’d left you behind.’
I smile, and this time it’s genuine. No matter how I feel – about the divorce, about the move, about how much pain I feel standing here without Granny – Grandad always gets a smile from me. He’s the only one I actually got in the car for.
‘They couldn’t keep me away,’ I reply. We both know it’s a lie. I kept myself away for two years, but it’s enough to make Grandad tap me again on the arm and try his best to hide a grin.
Seeing this house – its red gables, its wisteria-covered brick work, and its assembly of roses lining the driveway – was always the treasure at the end of what felt like an epic voyage when I was younger.
Granny and Grandad would always be waiting at the door with smiles.
As a kid, I always thought they had been standing out there all day just waiting for us to arrive.
Granny would be wearing her apron and a silk scarf around her neck.
Grandad would always have a tool or a knick-knack of some kind in hand that he was in the middle of tinkering with.
The roses have wilted early this year, and the flower beds are knotted with weeds.
This was always Granny’s patch. Whatever the weather, she’d be out here, kneeling on her little floral cushion, tending to her flowers as though they too were her grandchildren.
Grandad had other, more important parts of the farm he needed to look after.
Granny did too, but she always made time for her garden.
We’d sit along here for hours, pruning, watering, admiring.
Sometimes we’d talk, about school, about boys, the future, but other times, we were happy with the silence.
Just knowing she was beside me, with the rhythmic slicing of the secateurs and her quiet humming, was more than enough.
‘Now, I’ve made up your rooms,’ Grandad says. ‘But I couldn’t remember which of you had which duvet cover, so for now, Ava you’ve got that Pepe Le Pig one.’ He means Peppa Pig. ‘Cal, you’ve got the one with them big bears on it.’
It’s clear he’s been struggling without Granny too, so I don’t mention that she bought us new ones five years ago, and neither does Callum.
‘Thank you, Grandad.’ I kiss the top of his head as I slide past him through the front door, dragging my suitcase behind me. I’ve grown a little in the last couple of years, and Grandad seems to have shrunk. Either that, or his shoulders are a little more slumped than the last time I saw him.