Page 74 of You Had Me At Pumpkin Patch
For once, AI Serena didn’t even argue, or get her name wrong, accidentally-on-purpose. ‘Sure, Rosie. We’ve missed you.’
As Kelly belted out song lyrics to the clamour of drums, Rosie swept around the flat with Flick, throwing things into their collection of bags.
They yelled along to theso moving onsand theyeah, yeahs, until they were having a lot more fun than Rosie would have thought was possible, for such a dire assignment.
In all honesty, Rosie didn’t even like half of the things she was packing. She wasn’t sure how the next stage of her life would look, but she hadn’t missed her hair straighteners or other pointless gadgets.
‘I’ll send a van over for the rest,’ she told Cassius, who was looking sorrowful in the corner. Rosie had had her moment of triumph, and she was keen to make one more house call, so she could start the next day feeling fresh.
‘You don’t have to leave me,’ Cassius tried again, as though staying with someone who’d recently traded her in for a kinky sexbot was such a great option. ‘You’re welcome to stay.’
‘Thanks, but no thanks, Cassius. I’d rather eat my own toenails.’
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‘I wish I’d been recording that. His face!’
Rosie and her sister were still laughing as they pushed the last of the bags into the back of Flick’s Range Rover and flopped into the front seats, Operation Cassius conquered.
‘Even he deserves his privacy,’ Rosie replied. She was done with being unnecessarily nice to people who treated her badly, but what happened between a consenting adult and their rubber girlfriend was their business.
The next leg of their journey would be less fist-bumpingly triumphant, but it felt good to finally be confronting it – like a weight was already lifting. Rosie gave her sister the address, torn from the edge of the latest letter.
‘Is this to do with those smelly orange envelopes that kept arriving for you?’ Flick asked.
Rosie nodded. ‘Yep.’ She hadn’t yet told her family the story, but as the wild woman on the pumpkin farm, she’d come to care so much less about being judged. And quite frankly, she had nothing to be ashamed of. ‘Remember James?’
‘The smarmy fiancé who kept dumping you and never gave you a ring. Died in that freak cactus accident in Tucson, when he was meant to be at a business conference in Telford?’
‘That’s the guy.’ Her sister had a nifty way of boiling things down to the size of an Instagram-worthy caption.
‘Turns out that he was also engaged to another woman called Bianca. She was pregnant with his son when he died. I’d always suspected something but stupidly ignored it.’
Rosie explained about the watch James had suddenly acquired close to Father’s Day, inscribed ‘To Daddy’,which Bianca now said she’d bought for James as a present from their unborn son. When Rosie had noticed the inscription, James had made an unlikely excuse. As usual, Rosie had accepted it and had pretended everything was fine.
‘I knew he was a dick,’ Flick huffed.
‘He wasn’t always.’ Rosie had the urge to put that small word in for him, seeing as he wasn’t around to stick up for himself. Though that was all the praise she could muster.
Soon enough, they arrived outside the small newbuild where Bianca lived. It was gone ninep.m. She hadn’t told Bianca she was coming in case she hadn’t been able to get James’s watch and small bag of belongings from Cassius – and quite honestly, Rosie didn’t want to make athingof it.
The handover was simple enough. Rosie apologised for how long it had taken her – because it had been hard to face the truth until she’d seen pictures of Bianca’s son, looking just like James. And shedidremember suspecting he was up to something, and then seeing pregnant Bianca at James’s funeral, smelling like the perfume that had often strangely lingered on James’s skin. The funeral had been organised by James’s family, James having dumped Rosieagainabout a month before, and with-child Bianca still being a secret. And nobody knew who he might have been visiting in Tucson.
Bianca explained she hadn’t known about Rosie either, until the later stages. She apologised for bursting in on Rosie after the launch party to ask for James’s things. Her son now wanted them, and she hadn’t known how else to get to Rosie. Despite everything, Rosie wished them both well.
Between the truths Rosie had perhaps always suspected and the way she’d come to feel about Zain, any attachment to James had long gone. He had never given her the kind of love she deserved.
But there was one man who had.
The following day, it would be time to find him.
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Rosie gave her sister a hug and jumped out of the car. This was something she needed to face alone.
It had rained all morning, though Rosie had decided it wasnota sign that the sky was spraying a hosepipe on her plans. It was simply a reminder to wear wellies. Or perhaps that it was time for rainbows.
As she paced down the dirt track towards Agnes’s farmhouse, she could have sworn she saw a trace of one, hovering over the scaffolding around Agnes’s roof, as though it ended right here at Autumn Meadows Farm. Unless that was its beginning. Rosie had no clue, but she was about to find out. It was time to put an end to her hiding, and the cobweb of half-truths she’d inadvertently woven. She’d let her own and other people’s wings get caught up in them, and that didn’t feel good.
