Isle of Ormer, Five Years Later
Oliver no longer raced because it made him feel alive. The heart-pounding thrill he’d craved as a younger man eluded him now, anyway. It didn’t excite him to take risks—he had so very much to lose.
But he still raced to win.
“You’re going down, bike boy.”
Aspen’s cycling helmet was jammed over the enormous ginger bun at the nape of her neck.
She was poised at the starting line Rog had drawn with a stick in the dirt, which had already been disputed several times because tourists kept scuffing it.
Tradition was tradition, however, particularly on the Isle of Ormer.
At the first Harvest Festival Bramblebay Race, the starting line had been drawn with a stick, and so it always would be.
“Save it for the bedroom, Aspen. What will the committee say?” Oliver shot back, biting down on a small smile as her cheeks went pink.
He could still make Aspen blush just by looking at her.
Sometimes he’d do it at council meetings—she was the Deputy for Health and Emergency Services, now that Doc was scaling back his duties, and Oliver had somehow got roped into being Speaker, because (he suspected) he was the only one who could get anyone to shut up.
While everyone argued about the Ormer constitution, Oliver would hold Aspen’s gaze across the table and watch her slowly lose focus on anything but him.
“Ready?” Rog yelled, adjusting his orange bucket hat. A permanent feature ever since his hair had gone from thinning to altogether absent, this hat was now as iconic an element of Ormer life as Toby’s famous harbor mural.
“Ready,” Oliver and Aspen confirmed in unison.
“Set?” Rog shouted.
There was a pause.
“Are you expecting us to—”
“GO!” Rog yelled.
Aspen pulled ahead initially. Her technique was shoddy, but it was that grit of hers—it was as if she could simply will herself into the lead.
Tourists and locals cheered from the sidelines as Aspen, Oliver and the rest of the entrants raced down the Rue, ducked low, wholly focused on the finish line, which was just visible between the ears of Oliver’s trusty steed.
“Come on, Maple, old girl,” Oliver muttered, digging in his heels.
The Bramblebay donkey race was now one of the island’s major tourist attractions.
It was widely regarded to be Aspen’s idea, but really, it was Galoshes who was responsible.
She had told Aspen that the donkeys were untrainable, and so Aspen had decided she would train them all.
In her long-running quest to find out who she was beneath her anxiety, Aspen had been delighted to discover that she was actually an extremely stubborn person, something she had announced to Oliver a few years ago, as though he hadn’t known it all along.
“And Toby and Stardust win the prize!” Rog yelled.
“What!” Aspen shouted, straightening up on her donkey as she and Oliver crossed the finish line at what was, essentially, a slow trot.
The donkeys were trained, but they weren’t fast.
“Sorry,” Toby said, pulling off his helmet and ruffling up his hair.
He wore it in a ponytail these days, or loose around his shoulders, but never hiding his face.
Fatherhood had stripped away many of Toby’s insecurities.
When you’re this happy, and this tired, he’d told Oliver once, it’s really hard to care about forehead acne.
Aspen’s phone rang before she could contest the result, which was probably for the best, since Toby had won by at least two donkey lengths.
“Brianna,” she said to Oliver’s unasked question, answering on speaker as they offered their donkeys carrots from the barrels waiting at the finish line.
“Hey, so, are you still riding a donkey like the island nutter you have become?” Brianna said.
She sounded out of breath, or a little strained, perhaps, as though she’d just climbed a hill.
“No, why?” Aspen said, glancing at Oliver.
Tourists milled around them, clutching cinnamon-spiced coffees and pumpkin-shaped buns, squinting at the sky as the inevitable autumn drizzle began.
“Just that I’m having some…contraction-like sensations,” said Brianna, “and I wonder if you could drop by the B when Rosie had innocently asked if she’d had acetaminophen yet, Bri had roared at her so loudly that Charlie had called from up at the farm shop to ask whether one of the cows was trapped in the fence again.
Now Brianna lay with her third child in her arms, sweaty and queenly and convinced that this situation was everybody else’s fault.
“We did tell you it was risky to visit at thirty-eight weeks,” Aspen called from the utility room, where she was tugging warm towels out of the dryer.
“Do you want her to kill you?” Oliver muttered under his breath.
“She would never kill me,” Aspen said. “I brought the pain relief.”
Aspen had been magnificent, in fact. It had been a long time since Oliver had seen her at work—he’d attended one inadvertent home birth before, when she’d called him to bring her bag from the medical center at short notice, and had fallen more in love with her with every second she’d spent coaxing a stranger to do the hardest thing she’d ever done.
Today he’d been banished by Brianna—“I still have some dignity left,” she’d yelled at him—but had heard everything from where he and Marly sat in the kitchen, Stuart on speakerphone between them.
Aspen had a gift. Within ten minutes of her arrival, Brianna’s blood pressure dropped to safe levels again, as though her sister’s voice had magical properties.
“Darling!” came a loud voice from the hallway. One with different properties.
“Oh, now you turn up, Mum!” Brianna yelled over her new son’s head.
“You know I don’t do the blood and guts part,” Bridget Denby said, as she swanned in with two large paper bags.
“But I brought pastries, made by that handsome doctor. What a silver fox! And Berty wants to know if there’s anything you need?
He said witnessing one birth with Aspen was enough—he’s hovering outside in that fancy new tractor of his. ”
Bridget and Brianna were visiting together for Aspen’s birthday—they’d come a month early, because of Brianna’s due date, and were insisting on throwing Aspen a large party, which she had largely ended up organizing herself.
“Coward,” Brianna said, taking an enormous bite from a cherry Danish. “You can tell him Aspen’s finished sewing up my—”
“Brianna!” Bridget squealed, covering her mouth.
“Oh, just tell him to come in, half the bloody island’s here anyway—and his wife’s in the kitchen making me some sort of broth that’ll heal my womb, or whatever hippy shit Charlie’s into these days.
God knows who’s running that shop. None of you ever seem to do any work here.
Every time I visit it’s all seasonal festivities and endless biscuit-fueled committee meetings, which I’m starting to think are just excuses to— Mum, back off, will you, I’m like twenty minutes postpartum, I do not need mascara on! ”
“For the photos!” Bridget protested. “For Stuart!”
“He’ll be here in an hour,” Marly said from the doorway. “He chartered a boat from Portsmouth, apparently.”
“Oh, how sweet,” Bridget cooed.
“That’ll have cost a fortune,” Brianna said, but Oliver knew her well enough to see how pleased she was.
“Have you checked in with Galoshes? Everything OK?” Aspen asked him, preparing her weighing scales for the baby.
She was flicking through paperwork with her other hand; the frown between her eyebrows was so obvious to Oliver, a sentence that didn’t need saying.
“Aspen needs space to check these two out properly,” he announced to the room. “I’ll go relieve Galoshes,” he told her, kissing the top of her head. “You’re amazing.”
“Thank you,” she said, tilting her head up to look at him upside down.
Perhaps it was the new angle, but he saw her afresh for a moment, his beautiful, brave, extraordinary girlfriend, and a wave of wonder passed over him.
He felt the kind of lucky a person can only truly feel when they’ve been low enough to know how bad life can be.
She was everything. He could need nothing more.
Extraordinary, then, to head home to the stables and be greeted by two pajama-clad little whirlwinds racing from the front door in their slipper socks. To have everything he needed and so much more.
“Dad!” Effie yelled. “Is it true we’ve got a new cousin?”
He lifted her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist as her sister toddled determinedly up the track to join them, comforter in one hand, china teapot in the other.
“It’s true,” Oliver said, raising a hand to Galoshes as she smiled at him from the doorway.
“All OK?” he asked, as he put Effie down and reached for Hunter’s outstretched arms, gently extricating the teapot from her fingers before picking her up for a cuddle.
He breathed her in and felt himself instantly settle.
“They’re terrors,” Galoshes said. “Nobody ate any vegetables. I’ve been recruited to join the Paw Patrol. I think I’m getting a glitter-induced migraine.”
Oliver laughed. “Thank you,” he said.
“Anytime,” Galoshes said, ruffling Effie’s hair as she headed off. “Oh, and before you get cross with me about the pen on the new bedroom wall, just remember who convinced everyone to give you a second chance when Charlie and Berty first showed up here!”
“Oh, please—everyone gets a second chance on the Isle of Ormer,” Oliver said as he took Effie’s hand and hefted Hunter onto his other hip.
“We all need to stop advertising that fact,” Galoshes called over her shoulder. “This place is overflowing with troublemakers these days.”
Oliver snorted. It was true that the island population had grown over the last couple of years, and yes, there were more backstories to go around than you’d find in the average crowd, but there was nobody on this island who embodied its spirit better than Sally “Galoshes” Lowe.
The girls were too excited to sleep until their mum got home with news of their baby cousin’s name, so Oliver eventually conceded defeat, made hot milks and let them join him in front of the log burner. Aspen returned around eight, hands on hips, smile on her face.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Where’s my hot milk?”
They got the kids down within half an hour after that, milky and sleepy, loose-limbed. As Aspen and Oliver collapsed together on the sofa, nonalcoholic beers in hand, Oliver reached for Aspen’s ankles, pulling her feet into his lap.
“Tons of gossip from the B&B,” she said, yawning.
“Rosie and Charlie have got a new lead about Charlie’s adoption at last—some guy over in Jersey who claims to know something.
And the little boy who Marly and Rosie took in last year, the one with the dinosaur obsession?
Returning in the morning. Social services rang Marly while I was finishing up with Bri’s stats. He’s back in foster care.”
Marly and Rosie had begun fostering soon after Charlie’s arrival on Ormer, and they’d not looked back since.
“Berty’s picking him up off the first ferry tomorrow. Any excuse to drive that new tractor,” Aspen said, but her tone was fond now, softened by years of sharing a small island with her ex-boyfriend, a man whom she had come to love in a way she never could have if they’d stayed together.
“It never stops around here, does it?” Oliver said, with mock seriousness, shifting his hands across the arches of Aspen’s feet.
She gave a little moan and he smiled the slow smile of a man who knows it’s not going anywhere, they’re both too exhausted, but he likes that sound.
“It never stops,” she agreed. “And it all goes too fast.”
“You OK?” he asked, hand stilling on her ankle.
“Mm.” She shifted around so she could curl into him, her face against his chest. “Just…feeling big-sky feelings. It’s been a hell of a day.
I keep thinking that I’ve lived so many of the beautiful moments I used to imagine with you, and it makes me feel panicky, because it’s flying by and I can’t…
catch it all. I know it’s an incredibly lucky problem to have.
Loving your life so much you don’t want it to go by. But it’s getting to me all the same.”
She turned her face up to his, a silent invitation for a kiss. He pressed his lips to hers, cool and hops-sweet.
“You don’t need to catch it, Aspen,” he whispered. “You just need to let it fly.”
She nodded, leaning against his chest again.
They watched the fire die down, breathing together as the birds quieted outside the stables.
Oliver knew what people meant when they called their partner their other half.
It was not that he had not been whole before her, but rather that he wouldn’t be whole after her, now.
He had grown and changed around the woman curled at his chest, and then again, and again, until he was a man of four parts: Oliver, Aspen, Effie, Hunter.
Strange, really, that he had come here as Jones, determined to remake himself, and had ended up rewritten by the woman who had once shared his name.
The woman he hoped might accept the ring in his shirt pocket, and perhaps even choose to share his name again.