Page 76 of The Holiday Cottage

But he didn’t leave and he didn’t take the lead. Instead, he gave her shoulder a quick squeeze and stayed by her side.

“Ralph is not going to want to be parted from Imogen and he has already had a pretty stressful day, so I’ll hang around for a bit if that’s all right.” He glanced at Imogen with a smile. “I’ll be right here for a while. Moral support. For Ralph. If that’s okay with you.”

Moral support. For Ralph.

Dorothy caught Sara’s eye.

“I—yes. If you’re sure.” Imogen looked startled, as if this was the first time anyone had ever been in her corner, and Dorothy felt a lump form in her throat.

She and Sara had been focusing on how they were feeling, but it must be a million times worse for Imogen, who was finding out things for the first time.

How much had she told Miles?

Some of it, surely, or why else would he be insisting on staying?

“Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.” Dorothy headed back into the cottage, but Imogen didn’t follow.

She clung to the dog’s lead. “What about Ralph?”

“He can come too! Dogs welcome.” Right now she wouldn’t have cared if Miles had invited a herd of elephants into her home. She was just relieved Imogen was here and not showing any signs of leaving. “Come into the living room. It’s cozy with the fire going.”

They all joined her inside and Imogen sat down on the sofa. Miles settled himself next to her, his long legs half filling the room, and Ralph immediately lay across Imogen’s feet.

Sara vanished toward the kitchen. “I’ll make us some tea.”

Dorothy decided that the only way to do this was to dive right in.

“First I need to apologize,” she said, “for not telling you exactly who I was right away. It was a shock seeing you, to be honest, that day last year in the conference room where we had that meeting. I was taken by surprise.”

“How did you know me?”

“It was when you smiled. You have the same little dimple in your cheek that Sara has. Your grandfather had it too. It doesn’t sound like much, but I knew. I knew right away.”

Imogen sat rigid, and Ralph raised his head and looked at her, sensing tension. Then he took a sneaky look at Miles, jumped onto the sofa and sprawled across the two of them, his head on Imogen’s lap.

Miles rolled his eyes. “These were clean jeans,” he murmured, “but you just make yourself at home.”

Imogen rubbed the dog’s fur and Ralph thumped his tail and settled in for some serious attention.

Sara returned with a tray loaded with mugs of tea. She put it on the low coffee table that formed the centerpiece of the room.

“I shared some of our history with Imogen.” Miles took the mug Sara offered him with a smile of thanks. “I didn’t know who she was.”

Dorothy was still wondering how the two of them had met, but there would be time to discover more about that later. For now she needed to keep the focus on the things that needed to be said.

“There is a lot to say, so why don’t I start at the beginning.” It sounded logical, but identifying the beginning wasn’t easy. “Tina was my first child. Phillip and I doted on her. Perhaps a little too much—”

Sara sighed. “Mum—”

“I’m sorry. It’s impossible not to rake over every minute of the past and try and work out how things went so wrong. You convince yourself that there must have been something you did, or didn’t do.” She felt Sara’s hand pressing her knee, a gentle prompt that she should move on. And she was right. This conversation wasn’t about her failings as a parent. “Everything was normal until Sara arrived. From the moment she was born, Tina resented her, and nothing Phillip and I did seemed to change that. Everyone told us that older siblings often resented younger, and it was just a question of time and patience. We did everything we were advised to do. We made sure we gave Tina special time so that she didn’t feel pushed aside, we praised her, we encouraged her, we involved her. We thought that maybe we were getting somewhere, but then at five months old Sara contracted meningitis.” She rarely thought about it now, but at the time it had consumed them. “She was in hospital for a month and I was by her side almost constantly. I tried to make sure I saw Tina too, but it was hard. We thought we were going to lose Sara. I don’t want to linger on that part of the story, except to say that when we returned home, things were worse. Tina wouldn’t let me out of her sight, and she hated me spending even a moment of my time with Sara. We spoke to doctors and did everything they suggested, but nothing seemed to help.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Sara muttered. “How could you possibly think it was your fault? The jealousy was there before I went into hospital. You said so yourself.”

“That’s true, but afterwards it was worse.” She turned her focus back to Imogen, reminding herself to try and stick to facts, not emotions. “We couldn’t leave her alone with Sara for a moment. I turned my back to take a phone call on one occasion—it was seconds, that was all—and when I looked back, Tina was holding a cushion over Sara’s face.” She stopped, conscious that this was Imogen’s mother she was talking about. “I’m sorry. This is so difficult. Maybe I should—”

“I want you to carry on.” Imogen’s voice was barely audible. “Please carry on.”

“We hoped that if we kept showing love and consistency, eventually she’d settle down, but she didn’t. She broke Sara’s toys, she shouted at her—that was the worst part. We never raised our voices, but Tina became verbally aggressive. It started to affect Sara. She was quiet at school, afraid to speak up or draw attention to herself. She hid in her bedroom if Tina was around.” Looking back now, she wondered how they’d got through it. It was funny how time had the ability to blunt the razor-sharp edges of pain. “We took Tina to a psychologist. He advised us to set firmer limits and hold her accountable for her behavior, but all that did was make her reject us more. Things got worse when she became a teenager. She stole from us, she lied, she skipped school and spent time with a crowd of kids older than her. Soon she was coming home drunk or high. Frequently, she’d stay out all night and we wouldn’t have a clue where she was. She was arrested for shoplifting, even though there was no reason for her to do that. I sometimes thought she chose to do the things she knew would worry us most.” She felt Sara’s hand on hers, squeezing.

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