Page 35 of A Merry Little Christmas
After Maddy’s call, I immediately phoned Penny and told her I was fine to babysit Will, after all, the following evening.
‘It’s not a virus, so you won’t catch anything, and I’m feeling a whole lot better already.’
‘Oh. Well, that’s great. I hadn’t actually got round to contacting Martin to postpone the date. So I guess it’s on for tomorrow night, then.’
‘You don’t sound entirely sure about it.’
‘Oh, you know. It’s always a worry, wondering if they’re as “normal” as they seem to be from their profile.’
She seemed genuinely worried so I rushed to reassure her. ‘I think you’ll be all right, Penny. There can’t bethatmany weird psychopaths on dating sites,’ I joked.
She didn’t laugh. She just grunted. ‘You’d be surprised,’ she muttered bluntly.
I was about to ask her what she meant when she sighed and said, ‘I suppose the problem for me is that Tom and I were so perfect together, back in the day. It was like magic when we met – love at first sight for both of us – so he was always going to be a hard act to follow.’
‘What happened? With you and Tom, I mean?’ I asked softly. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’
There was a pause at the other end. ‘The sad thing is I don’t really know, Katja. We just kind of grew apart. My dad wasn’t well so I was spending a lot of time helping Mum look after him, which meant travelling to Wales and back most weekends. So Tom and Will were left to their own devices, and they started doing exciting things at weekends, just the two of them. And I started worrying that Will had a stronger bond with Tom than with me.’ She sighed. ‘To be honest, my head was totallyscrambled at the time because I was losing my lovely dad to dementia. It was all just a horrible, horrible mess. The worst time of my life. It put a strain on my relationship with Tom and we never got back what we had before.’
‘But you like each other, don’t you?’ I’d seen the pair of them together once when Tom called at the café to collect Will for the weekend. ‘You still make each other laugh.’
‘We do.’ She paused. ‘But things were said back then that can’t be unsaid, you know? We reached our sell-by date and I just can’t see it working between us now – however much Will might want Tom to move back in with us.’
She sounded so sad, talking about it. But I knew what she meant about sell-by dates. Looking back, Richard and I had definitely reached our sell-by date, although towards the end of our time together, I was doing a jolly good job of convincing myself that we were fine.
It was only when I joined Richard in New York and discovered he was already involved with someone else that all the little clues I’d missed – signposting that he was losing interest in me – began to become blindingly obvious...
*****
As I got ready for work the next morning, I thought about Penny and Tom, and how sad it was that their relationship, which had started out so strong, had crumbled in the end.
They’d had Will together, though.
That was one very good thing that had come out of their love for each other.
Was Caleb coming to the realisation thatwe’dreached our sell-by date? Is that why it felt to me as if we were drifting away from one another?
I shrugged on my winter coat, pulled on my favourite old boots and trudged out into the snow. The day was piercingly cold but with a clear blue sky overhead, and as I reached the high street, my eye caught the poster in the village store window, advertising the Jingle Bell Forest. My mind was suddenly flooded with images of Caleb and me walking hand in hand through the snow and the pine trees, cosying up together as we drank hot chocolate beneath a Christmas tree that winked and sparkled with colourful lights...
The thought of this cheered me up a little as I walked across the snowy village green.
Caleb had typed it into his diary and said the date was set in stone, and he’d joked that nothing would tempt him to change it.
Hopefully, a romantic visit to that gorgeous enchanted forest on the Saturday before Christmas would bring us close again. It was only a few weeks away now.
Arriving at the café, I stamped my feet outside and removed my boots on the doormat just inside, changing into my flats for the busy day ahead. With Christmas fast approaching, there was an air of excitement in the café these days... shoppers snatching a quick coffee... people meeting up with old friends they didn’t see from one end of the year to the next... and customers treating themselves to the gloriously festive hot drinks on offer – including this year’s star turn, Black Forest hot chocolate topped with whipped cream and cherries.
As I said hello to Ellie behind the counter and made my way through the back, I was breathing in the scent of cinnamon and ginger from the deliciously festive Stollen bites Maddy must have been making on her early shift. It smelled as if they’d just been baked – and sure enough, when I entered the kitchen, there was Maddy bringing a tray of the goodies out of the oven. Maisie was also there, carefully transferring the bakes from another tray onto a cooling rack with tongs.
‘Smells much too tempting in here,’ I remarked with a smile. ‘No wonder you’ve offered to help, Maisie.’
She grinned at me. Then she looked at Maddy. ‘Can I?’ She held up one of the warm Stollen bites on her tongs.
‘Go on, then. You can be this morning’s tester.’
‘Is that a real job?’
‘Well, if it isn’t, it definitely should be,’ said Maddy, and we all chuckled. ‘Careful, though. They’re hot,’ she added, sweeping the cake onto a tea plate for Maisie. ‘So how’s the boyfriend? Fergie, isn’t it?’
