Chapter 3
Hendricks
Miles sits at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee in his hand. It’s the first indication that today won’t go as planned.
Which is to say as quickly as possible and without drama.
Miles is rarely awake before breakfast. There’s only one reason he’s here, and it’s me. He thinks I’m falling apart.
I stand in the doorway, arms crossed over my chest, while I wait. He looks up at me and shrugs, daring me to prove him wrong.
For fuck’s sake. I’m fine. Fine.
So what if the woman I’ve been in love with before I ever realized has returned after a six-year absence?
So what if I have no idea why she’s back or for how long? Or the reason she left in the first place, beyond wild guesses pulled from the depths of my soul in the middle of the night.
So what if she’s returned looking nothing like the Story I remember?
That my head’s in a spin because of it. Or the weeks I’ve spent poring over the thousands of photos I still have of her—of us—just to check. Because what if she’s exactly the same, and I forgot?
But I am fine, whatever Miles believes to the contrary.
He’s only here for moral support because he thinks I’m taking Max for the first day of term. Which is great and all, but he’s wasted his time. He got out of bed for nothing.
“Birgitta’s taking Max,” I tell Miles after a minute of unspoken dialogue. “But I appreciate it.”
“Hen—”
I walk over to the coffee laid out for breakfast and pour myself a cup. I’ve been up for three hours already. This is my fourth, but I’m going to need it. While the household was still asleep, I stood at the window, watching the darkness and debating what to do.
Then I went about the day as normal, waking my son and making his breakfast.
“I have an early surgery.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“A feline hysterectomy,” I reply with as much confidence as that sentence allows.
I’m not going to tell him that it was originally scheduled for this afternoon or that it wasn’t even my surgery, but while I stood at the window, I stole it and bumped up the time.
He can guess because I don’t normally deal with small animals.
Beyond my weekly surgery hours, I specialize in large and farm animals.
In fact, it’s been months since I performed a cat spaying.
Miles’s eyes roll, and he picks up his coffee. I know exactly what he’s thinking. That I’m a pussy, and he’s correct.
I am.
Max’s school bag is laid out on the kitchen island, and I set about packing it up with his freshly washed and folded sports kit, a change of uniform in the very likely event he gets the one he’s wearing all dirty before home time, his holiday homework, school books, pencil case, and his water bottle.
Though before I do any of that, I rescue a glitter-covered snail I find crawling along the bottom and put it outside. Maybe it’ll crawl back to the disco where it’s clearly been.
“You’ll have to get it over with sometime.”
I shake my head and grab an apple from the fruit bowl to cut up. “No, I don’t. I never have to get it over with. Birgitta can do drop-offs and pickups forever. And if not her, then Mum or Clementine. Alex and Haven said they’d do it too. And you, apparently.”
He shakes his head slowly. “No. I’m going to be by your side or nothing.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not doing your dirty work.” He scratches through his beard, but I’m not expecting him to give up the subject. Miles is like a dog with a bone. “On second thought, do you want me to take Max? Story won’t know the difference, and I can sort things out once and for all.”
I scoff loudly, and a smile is momentarily raised. We both know that’s not true. Story was one of the very few people who could always tell us apart at first sight.
“You never know, maybe Australia has addled her brain. I am better looking now. The years haven’t treated you well, big brother.”
I launch an apple at his head, only for him to catch it and bite down with a smirk.
“Fuck off.”
“Then I guess it’s down to you.”
Zipping up Max’s bag, I leave it by the door and pull out the chair next to Miles, slumping into it with a deep sigh.
“I don’t want to see her, Milo. I can’t see her.”
Miles leans forward in his chair. His elbow falls on the table, and his body twists so he’s as close to me as he can get without us touching.
I glance up at my twin, my mirror image, and the other half of me. When I hurt, he hurts, and vice versa. Story leaving might have broken my heart, but it broke him too. Just differently.
Miles picked me up after she vanished.
Miles helped me wade through my desolation and unravel my feelings for Story, the friend I loved, with Story, the girl I was in love with.
Miles was the one who helped me get through Sienna’s pregnancy and my first year of being a father.
He was there when I cried all night because I couldn’t cope and didn’t understand how Sienna could be such a godawful mother.
It was Miles who saved me and kept me sane.
Miles carries as much anger as I do.
He knows that when I say I don’t want to see Story, I mean it.
But he also knows that I need to see her.
Deep down, I know it too.
“What’s the point? She’s probably going to fuck off again in a month. It was just a shock.”
“She’s here for more than a month, Hen. Her contract runs to the end of the school year.”
My eyes widen to the point they sting. I shouldn’t be surprised he knows this because Miles can usually get whatever information he’s after. But I’m surprised he hasn’t already told me, because the guy cannot keep a secret.
“How do you know?”
“There’s a girl I’ve slept with in the admin office. She told me.” He shrugs. “And that takes us up to July. You can’t avoid Story for six months.”
“Wanna bet?” I grumble even though I know I can’t. Not in Valentine Nook, where everyone’s in everyone else’s business.
Not to mention, as the village vet, I spend my time treating animals, including the cows on Story’s dad’s farm.
Everyone knows Story, and everyone knows how close we were as children, then as teenagers.
I’m amazed no one spotted me at the Christmas tree stand.
Even more so, no one’s asked how I feel about her returning.
They probably would if I hadn’t been avoiding the village.
I’d heard she’d returned and barely lasted a week before I stormed over there. I shouldn’t have done it, but I had to see her.
I wanted to know if the girl who’d left me without another word could return just as silently. I didn’t want to believe it, but she’d been there all the same, in the dimming December daylight.
Same but so different.
Her freckles were still there, scattered across the nose she always complained was too big, no matter how many times I assured her it was the perfect size. Her full mouth, even pursed, was exactly as I remembered it—soft, with its thin silvery scar from the time she split her top lip open.
But it was her eyes—that distinctive shade of pale brown—I can’t get out of my mind, as they found mine.
Weary, defensive, a little sad. Enough that I had to clench my fists to stop myself from wrapping my arms around her.
And her hair . . . it might have been mostly hidden under a beanie, but I could see it was now too short to braid like she used to.
Or fasten in a ponytail that swung with each of her strides.
Instead, dark strands curled against her collar, brushing her hardened jaw.
Did it still smell like the shampoo she always used? The one I used to love burying my nose in. Like summer and autumn all at the same time.
I didn’t dare get close enough to find out.
“Hen, we’ll get it over with together.”
My eyes close in defeat, only for the sound of rapid footsteps to stop me from descending into complete panic, because ten seconds later, my son sprints into the kitchen. He’s mostly dressed and whipping his tie in the air like a lasso, followed by Dolly, Hamish, and Maud.
It’s the reality check I need.
“DADDY! DADDY—”
Dark brown curls bounce on his head with every step, his stocky little legs powering him across the wide Cotswold stone tiles on the kitchen floor. He’s my mini-me in every way, except for his nose. The rounded, button end comes straight from his mother.
And his volume comes more from Miles than me.
Regardless of his energy and noise levels, there’s also an inherent sweetness to him that makes me so proud to be his father. He’s kind to everything and everyone, with an unmatched curiosity that makes me want to learn more just so I have more to teach.
“Daddy, can you tie my tie please?” he asks, chucking it at me. He climbs into my lap before I get a chance to reply and peers over my shoulder. “What’s Uncle Miles doing here?”
Miles raises an eyebrow. “A good question, Maxy. The answer is, I’m taking you to school.”
Max’s eyes slice to mine, constantly inquisitive yet bordering on suspicious. Nothing gets past this child. “Are you not coming to school with me?”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I’m always so firm in my convictions until Max looks at me with his Burlington blue eyes and the pout Miles taught him. Rockets have launched slower than the time it took him to learn that particular expression can get him almost anything.
“Of course he is,” Miles answers before I can. “We’re both going.”
“Even Birgitta?”
As he says her name, Max’s nanny walks into the kitchen.
Tall, lithe, blonde. Always clad in some kind of Lycra.
Typically Swedish, objectively beautiful.
As usual, her eyes fall on Miles before anyone else, only he’s now nose deep scrolling on his phone, probably liking Instagram pictures of Lando and Holiday on the red carpet—his latest achievement is getting the hashtag #hotduke to go viral.
After he slept with Max’s previous nanny and she quit when he didn’t want a repeat, he’s been banned from being within twenty feet of anyone else without supervision, so he finds it easier to ignore her.