Page 45 of From Now On

Should he be the one to raise them? Could he?

He takes a shaky breath. Begins to pace to work off the adrenaline. He cannot make a life-changing decision based on the overwhelming emotion he feels in this moment.

It wouldn’t be solely his life he would change.

He stalks down the hallway, pausing at the music room, Duke’s saxophone.

He should be here playing it. It’s what Mum and Bo would want.

But what doeshewant? Charlie cannot get his thoughts in order.

He hadn’t got on that plane for a reason.

Upstairs, in Duke’s room, the shelves are still crammed with books. He doesn’t seem to have taken too much. In Nina’s room, pieces of Blu Tack are stuck to the wall where posters used to be. An empty shelf – at least she had taken something.

A Coke can crumpled on the floor. He picks it up and takes it over to her bin but when he sees what she has already thrown away the can slips through his fingers. He covers his lips with his fingers, tries to quell the tears that threaten once more. Crouching down,he lifts them out. The wooden big fish and little fish he had carefully whittled all those years ago.

She had kept them.

Until now.

He puts them on the empty shelf before changing his mind. She doesn’t want them. Doesn’t want him.

It confirms the doubts he is wrestling with. He has no idea how children think. What they want.

But he could learn?

All you need is patience, imagination and a bit of faith.

Can he bring them together, not to recreate the family they have lost, but to form something new?

‘But it doesn’t look like anything.’

‘Not yet, maybe. But smooth away those rough edges and, in time, you’ll be left with something beautiful.’

Dazed, he stumbles back to the kitchen. There is an emotion he can’t identify in the pit of his stomach and he doesn’t know whether it is excitement or fear.

Perhaps deep down this is what he wanted all along, he just hadn’t realized it because the thought of becoming a substitute father is huge and terrifying. Bo is such a lot to live up to.

‘Do you think I can do it?’ he whispers.

‘All you can do is try your best, lad.’

He is back at the table. The one with the dents and the scratches he had been so desperate to hang on to an hour before. Now, he realizes it isn’t the table with the marks on that he wants but the family who made them.

His family.

He’ll fight for them if he has to.

Chapter Twenty-One

Nina

Nina expects a fight when she comes downstairs for breakfast, mobile in her pocket, but Aunt Violet is distracted. If she’s noticed Nina had taken her handset she doesn’t mention it.

While Duke shakes cornflakes into both of their bowls she revisits the webpages she had read last night.

If you have feelings for someone. Tell them. Be honest.

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