Page 153 of You, As You Are

Iain took a steadying breath. “I messed things up.”

“How?” There was no accusation in Gareth’s voice. No judgement.

His heart pumped its fist against his ribs. “I let the best thing that’s ever happened to me slip through my fingers. I didn’t know how to deal with someone fighting to beinmy life instead of fighting to leave it, and instead I was the one who left.”

Gareth stayed quiet, which Iain was thankful for.

“I didn’t want to get too close unless I ruined her … but she’s the best thing that was ever almost mine.”

“Admitting what you’ve done wrong means you’re already halfway there to making it right. So what’s stopping you?”

Iain pursed his lips as he pondered. “I am … tidying up my mess.”

“Hm. Well, the big question is, what are you going to do next?” Gareth asked.

In a bout of confidence, Iain pushed back his chair and gradually stood, his ex-boss’ eyes tracking him all the way with a slow-forming, proud smile.

“I’m going to stop feeling sorry for myself and go for what I want,” he said, taking the name tag badge from his trouser pocket and setting it on the desk. “And what I want is her.”

* Early, yes.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

MAISIE

“I knowyou’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 notmyhead 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-rivalfrom 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.

“WellIworry 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 hernainhad 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?”

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