Chapter 45
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
MAISIE
“I know you’re sitting here, Moo Moo, but I don’t believe you’re actually here.”
Maisie stopped picking at the bobbling cotton of the blanket she’d brought for Vera on her hospital bed; it was better than the starchy thing she’d been given to keep warm for the last three nights. “Sorry,” she uttered, sitting up straighter in her chair. The weird cover on the padding, somewhere between leather and plastic, stuck to her skin in the narrow gap between her top and her skirt, making her even more uncomfortable than she already was to be sitting on something that was definitely not wide enough for her hips.
“It’s okay.” Vera patted her hand which rested on the bed, and Maisie’s gaze fell to the cannula poking into her grandma’s thin skin. “Where has your head gone?”
“It’s not my head we need to worry about, Nain .”
With how dark the bump on Vera’s temple had become, the doctors were increasingly worried about an internal bleed being missed on the brain, though none so far had shown up on any scans, which meant they’d decided to keep her in hospital for another day. Vera wasn’t too happy about the situation – apparently the woman in bed four on the ward was an ex-rival from school and kept on trying to make small talk across the room – but she seemed to have at least acknowledged that she’d been felled this time.
“Well I worry for it,” Vera rebuked.
The sun set an eerie mix of grey cloud and yellow light through the windows. It’d been the same view from this same chair each night for the last two after Maisie clocked out of work early to come straight here.
The hospital was one place she’d hoped to never see the inside of when she’d volunteered herself to be the Moss who moved all the way from London to the coast of Wales, all because her nain had broken her wrist and acted strange ever since. Her only aim had been to find out why Vera’s demeanour on every video chat and phone call became coy and avoidant any time her family tried to ask how she was. The woman single-handedly gave every Moss son and daughter extra-high cortisol with worry that something was majorly wrong, and worst of all, she was keeping whatever it was to herself.
But with that aim, Maisie had failed. She let herself be too preoccupied with falling all over again for this town she’d spent her childhood adoring, and for a man who had walked away from her three days ago.
It was time to come clean.
Taking a steadying breath as she stared at the shifting grey and yellow clouds, she began to say, “ Nain , I moved here because—” The gut-punch of realisation that she would have to reveal that for almost three months she’d lied about her reasons stopped Maisie in her tracks.
Vera squeezed her hand. “I know why you moved here, sweetheart,” she said in her soft, mischievous tone, “and it wasn’t for a change in scenery.”
Maisie’s head swivelled, her heart putting in an extra beat. “You do?”
“Yes. All of you were being worry warts. I told you there was no need to come all of the way here.”
She … she’d known the entire time? “Because the way you were acting after you fell and broke your wrist made us all anxious,” Maisie argued, to which Vera pressed together her lips that for once weren’t painted pink.
“Well I suppose that I was being a little secretive,” she admitted, twiddling the blanket in her lap. “The truth is … Ronald is moving in with me.”
Maisie’s brain stuttered. “That’s it?”
Moving in? She couldn’t believe this. After weeks of trying to find the right quiet moment to ask Vera if she was sick, the truth of all their worries was that her boyfriend was moving in with her. If she’d known that before, then she would never have needed to move her entire life to Wales at all.
Vera’s brows puckered. “What else should there be?”
“Oh my god. Nain , we thought you were sick!”
“Sick?” Vera looked aghast. “Why would you think that?”
“First you fell?—”
Vera tutted. “Oh, you can blame Ronnie for that. It was an accident. The man had slippery fingers.” Something that Maisie still didn’t want to know the ins and outs of.
“Every time that any one of us has called since you fell, you’ve been cryptic,” she said, twisting her position so her legs tucked under the bed. “We were all worried that you were ill or something else was seriously wrong.”
“Oh, Maisie, I’m sorry that I’ve made you all worry.”
The apology tugged on Maisie’s heart strings, and when her nain reached out and cradled her cheek, she crumbled. The last few days had been entirely too overwhelming, and now to find out that being here hadn’t been necessary at all …
“You came all of the way out here for me?” Vera asked, stroking her thumb across Maisie’s round cheek.
“Yes! I left my home and my friends because I love you, Nain , and I thought that you needed me.” The words ripped right out of her without a care for how this had turned into a scene from a soap opera for all the other silently listening women in their beds.
Tilting her head with sadness in her eyes, Vera opened her arms. “Sweetheart, come here.”
Pushing the chair back, Maisie folded down onto the bed and curled within her tiny grandma’s arms. Careful of Vera’s fragile state, she laid her head on her chest and folded her arm across her waist. Ronnie must have sneaked in her bottle of white lily perfume, because that familiar scent softly permeated from the hospital-issued gown.
“I will always need you,” Vera murmured where her lips pressed a kiss to Maisie’s hair, “but not like you might think. I suppose I was a little elusive. Ronnie offered to move in after I fell so that we could be there for one another if something happened again. I think that I was worried what you would all think of it.”
“Us?” Why would they be worried about that? Ronnie had been in Vera’s life for over a decade – it was about time that they lived together permanently.
“You know I loved your taid very much for a very long time.” Vera ran her delicate hand over Maisie’s curls again. “Ronald thought you all might feel as though he was trying to take Taid’s place.”
Maisie’s eyes stung. “We don’t think that at all. You could have told us he was moving in, and we wouldn’t have worried.”
“I’m sorry, Moo Moo.”
It was okay. Maisie supposed that the reason why she was here didn’t really matter anymore – she wasn’t the same person as she was when she’d arrived. That woman was so afraid to be rejected for her needs that she wouldn’t give herself a chance to find the person who embraced her wholly. She didn’t know how to speak up for her own boundaries. And she wanted desperately just to go back home.
That all changed when she came here. She changed because a brilliant man who didn’t know how to love himself knew how to love her. He showed her that what she wanted in love wasn’t too much to ask for – she wasn’t work or a chore. She was just her and he was just him, and who they were together was beautiful. A powerful, uncomplicated force that she would never ever find again.
Vera tilted up Maisie’s chin with the edge of her finger, eyes searching hers. “Why do you still have tears?” she asked as she wiped them away.
Maisie sniffled. “Iain …”
“What’s happened, honey?”
Tension built up and up within her chest. “We … we were never dating, Nain . We lied.”
When her grandmother’s features fell, so did the solid lump of shame lodged in Maisie’s throat.
“But w-why?”
She felt a little pathetic when she sniffled back her silent tears and said, “Because you all wouldn’t leave us alone. We felt like you were pushing us to get together and neither of us wanted that.”
“We were only trying to help you both. Iain has been so miserable for all the months that we’ve known him. And you are an incredible, bubbly person. We thought that you could be a good influence on each other. You could open him up, and he could help you trust that there are good and decent men in the world. We wanted you to be friends. But when you said that he had asked you on a date, we got perhaps a little excited.”
Maisie exhaled a broken sound. “Well your meddling worked a little too much.” Because she couldn’t stop thinking about him: where he was or what he was doing, if he’d taken Ted for a walk along the shore today. Every tiny little detail of their time together was stored in her memory like records she could take out, set on a turntable, and replay. She couldn’t move around her flat and not see the way that he had tidied for her whilst she was sick, moved her sweaty hair away from her skin, and stayed to help with her work when he had no reason to. She couldn’t stand outside of Vera’s door when she went to feed Mister Roberts without feeling the ghost of his hand upon her spine.
She couldn’t look out at the rain and forget the heartbreaking worry on Iain’s face when he’d run through the downpour to find her.
His kiss and his touch meant the world, but every other way in which Iain took care of her in ways she had never let herself be taken care of, meant more.
And now it was all gone.
At least she thought it was. No matter how much hope Maisie clung to, she wouldn’t settle for something casual, and he didn’t want to give her more.
“ None of it was real?” Vera asked, sounding as confused as all the knots tangled up in Maisie’s heartstrings.
“I … I’m not too sure anymore.”
“Oh, Moo Moo.” Vera softened beside her. “You’ve fallen for him.”
Maisie sniffed and buried her face in her hands, one syllable shaking from her lips. “Yes.” Her tears fell without much luck of stopping them. “I don’t know what’s happening. He said that he wasn’t ready to commit to a relationship again, but everything that he does – it’s all I want.”
“A man like that,” Vera said, “they don’t always know how to speak their feelings. Their love is in what they do.”
Maisie shook her head and wiped her nose on yet another sleeve that would need to be washed. “Iain doesn’t love me.”
“I think you are wrong.” A gentle smile graced Vera’s lips. “It was there the moment he took your hand in the café. I saw it. He looked over at you like you’re his entire universe.”
“He’s held me like that, too.” Maisie sat herself upright, so she didn’t squish her grandma any more than she already had, letting one leg dangle from the bed. “I was supposed to go with him to see his dad for the first time in years on Sunday, but I found you when I was on my way, and I forgot to call him. He needed my support, and I let him down.”
Vera gave her a subtle smirk. “I don’t believe it will take his rational brain too long to forgive you.”
He already had, but that’s not why Maisie was so upset. “His ‘rational brain’ tells him he can’t commit to someone again.”
“And what does yours say?”
She thought about it, but it was her heart that overruled her. “That I’m not so homesick now because of him. I don’t miss London anymore, and I’m comfortable here. I broke out of my mould. I want to make this place, here, my home.” Her chin trembled. “I just don’t want to make it without him.”
Her grandma took her hand. “Well then,” Vera said, “you know exactly what you need to do.”