Forgiven

by Garrett Leigh

  The devil on my shoulder was a righteous bastard. I pushed the paper away, drank my tea, and tried to come to terms with the fact that perhaps I’d wanted this all along.

  Chapter Three

  Mia

  I circled Gus like an angry wolf. “You didn’t even tell me he was back, let alone that you were working for him.”

  “I’ve always worked for him,” Gus said mildly, barely glancing up from the apple tart I’d rage-baked when I’d made it home from the chip shop. “It’s a family business.”

  “Don’t technicality this bullshit. You work for his uncle.”

  “Not for the last year. Jon retired. I told you in my emails, but you stopped replying to them, so I’m assuming you stopped reading them too?”

  Of course I’d stopped reading them. My life had been falling apart, and hearing about the grief pit I’d left behind had cut too deep. Besides, my email account wasn’t secure, and I’d had nothing to say to Gus that would’ve been true.

  A face less welcome than Luke Daley’s flashed into my mind. I gritted my teeth and pushed it away. “So, Luke’s been back a year? Why? I thought he was in the Navy for life?”

  “Why don’t you ask him? I’m not gonna play messenger between you two. I did enough of that when I was a kid.”

  This was nothing like that. Back then Gus had pushed notes under my bedroom door that Luke had passed him at football practice. Notes I’d carried with me to France until I met someone else to turn me bitter and cold. “I’m not that interested,” I snapped. “I’m just pissed off you didn’t tell me.”

  “Why?” Gus pushed his empty plate away. “You haven’t mentioned him, like, ever, and the last thing I knew you were shacked up with some rich French dude. What the fuck is Luke to you?”

  I had no answer to that, because while fourteen-year-old Gus had been the only soul in the world who’d known Luke was sneaking in and out of my bedroom window every night while his father had lain dying in his own house, I’d never told him how much I loved him. I’d never even told Luke.

  Because he never gave me the fucking chance.

  Exhausted, I claimed a chair at the table and dug out a craggy wedge of tart with a spatula—the closest utensil Gus had to a serving spoon. I picked at it sullenly while Gus stared at me, and tried to ignore him. Luke-fuelled rage was hardly new, but it been a long time since my veins had buzzed with such irrational fury, and I hated him all over again for doing this to me, for leaving me, and for being so damn lovable in the first place.

  Gus kicked me. “You okay?”

  I sighed and ate more tart. “Yeah. Just tired.”

  * * *

  Somewhere between Paris and Rushmere, I’d naively convinced myself that running a florist in an English market town would be easier than running one in the French capital.

  I was wrong—very wrong. For starters, my shop in Paris had been gorgeous long before it had ever belonged to me, housed in a pristine building with original fixtures and natural light, and not crammed between a bank and a bakery that made the Greggs bakery across the street look like the Ritz.

  Still, at least it kept me busy. For days I saw no one but Gus and delivery men. Spoke to no one but suppliers and clients. By the end of the first week, most of my disasters were in hand. I’d joined the gym, the stock refrigerator I’d agonised over wiping my finances out to purchase had been installed, and I was expecting my first delivery of high-class blooms.

  I waited and waited for the sense of achievement to mean something. For my long dead pride to reawaken and take notice. But nothing happened. I traipsed home to my brother’s house every night, ate dessert for dinner, and fell into bed pretending I wasn’t checking one direction for my worst nightmare, and the other for my broken heart.

  Girl, you’re such a mess.

  Two days before opening, a hard-backed envelope arrived at the shop from France. The handwriting on the address label was unfamiliar, the contents unexpected, but the name printed on the paperwork no surprise. It was only a matter of time. The shock vibrating through me was only for the speed at which he’d found me.

  Gus peered over my shoulder. “What’s that?”

  “Divorce papers,” I blurted before I caught myself.

  Gus paused in the process of shoving a banana pretty much whole into his mouth—Jesus, does he ever stop eating—and blinked, his dark eyes widening enough to make him seem like a cartoon. “Whose divorce papers?”

  I was too blindsided to treat him to some heavy side-eye. My brother was sweet, kind, and good to the bone, but he’d never been particularly sharp. It was a full ten seconds before the penny dropped.

  “What the fuck?” He seized the papers from me and flicked through them. “Who the hell did you marry? And when?”

  I backed away from the counter, leaving Gus clutching the envelope. “It was four years ago.”

  “Four years?”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it?” I found a stool by the display window and fell onto it.

  “But who? And why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it was a mistake,” I whispered. “A big one, and I didn’t want you to know.”

  Gus was silent a moment, still leafing through the paperwork and muttering in French.

  I tuned him out and wondered if a day would ever pass without me scrambling to catch the loose threads of my life. Divorce. Fuck. I’d waited so long for this day, for this freedom, but I hadn’t accounted for the renewed sense of failure it would bring. A decade-old ache throbbed in my chest. I rubbed at it, as though I could push my entire existence back inside and hide it away from the world.

  Nothing happened.

  Gus appeared in front of me, apparently moving his broad frame like a ninja. “What happened, ma lutine? No judgement, I swear. I’m just trying to keep up after five years of silence.”

  I felt bad then, even if he had punctuated his plea by calling me a goddamn pixie. A shuddery sigh escaped me. “I can’t go into it all now, okay? But I meant what I said—it was a mistake, and I paid for it big time.”

  “Did he hurt you?” Gus suddenly seemed impossibly bigger.

  I curled my hand around his biceps. “Not how you’re thinking.”

  “You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

  “No?”

  “No. And you don’t have to batter someone to hurt them, Mia.”

  How did he know? The little brother I’d left behind had known only the pain of grief. Of losing our only living relative aside from each other. How could he possibly understand the torment of knowing someone you loved was deliberately tearing you apart, but being seemingly powerless to stop it?

  Seemingly. Fuck that word.

  I slid off my stool. “I will tell you about it one day...soon, I promise, but not now, okay? Please, Gus. I’ve got so much to do.”

  Gus opened his mouth, but whatever reply he may have made was cut off by a godawful crash.

  I pushed past him and dashed into the back room. A large chunk of the ceiling—the ceiling that should’ve been fixed—was on the floor by my newly installed fridge. Fresh water trickled through the hole it had left behind and the sight of it felt oddly symbolic, the worst kind of metaphor. Was this what my future held? A constant battle to patch up wounds, only for the crap to filter through anyway?

  “It’s the roof,” Gus said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Seriously. You think?”

  “I do. That’s why I told you to get it sorted before you got the decorators in.”

  Dim memories of him advising exactly that hovered at the edge of my despair, but I couldn’t remember why I’d opted to ignore him until I ran through the list of local reputable roofing specialists—the list that comprised one company. “Can you look at it?”

  “I did look at it.” Gus stared at me like I was a mutant. “And I told you there was
water gathering at the weakened part and it would cave in if you didn’t shore it up. I didn’t offer to fix it because you’d already told me to piss off three times that day, but I kind of assumed you’d take me seriously before you stuck plasterboard over a fucking crater.”

  “I hate you right now.”

  “So?”

  “So...” I elbowed him in the ribs. “Can you fix it or not?”

  “Not on my own.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You need me to climb up there with you?”

  “No... I need someone who actually knows what they’re doing to help me.”

  I took it all back. I was the slow one. The seconds ticked by as Gus eyed me like an unexploded bomb and I shook my head. “You’re not asking him.”

  “Mia, I need his ladders, his tools, his van. I can’t—”

  I shook my head. Stuff it. I’d leave the hole there. Customers wouldn’t come in the back, and even if they did, I could pretend it had just happened.

  Gus caught my arm as I began to back out of the room. “Come on,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. If Luke helps, I can get most of it done tonight. Get that soggy board down. Fresh plaster, some paint, and you’ll never know it was there.”

  Easy for him to say, but I knew without doubt that if Luke Daley set foot in my shop, it would all be over. The cracked resolve I was clinging to would fall away, and I’d be the mess someone else had always prophesied I would be. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Because this is supposed to be my safe space, away from arsehole men who’ve hurt me. But Gus didn’t know about any of that, not yet, and my precious safe space was about to be flooded with gallons of grotty water if we didn’t act fast. If I didn’t cave and let him bring the only man who could match the damage someone else had done to me ten times over.

  Growling, I wrenched myself from his grasp and turned on my heel to walk away. “Fine. But don’t expect me to talk to him.”

  Luke

  The hole wasn’t that big, but it had a ton of water collected beside it. One wrong move, and the whole thing would cave in.

  Brilliant.

  I set to work draining the water and shoring up the roof so it was strong enough to support the filled hole, all the while questioning my sanity for letting Gus talk me into helping him out, even though I knew it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d asked me to help him patch up the moon. He was the closest I had to a best friend.

  Still, I felt Mia’s presence every moment I was up on her fucking roof. Gus said she’d gone out, but I didn’t believe him. How could I, when I could smell her, goddamn it?

  Right. Because you know how she smells these days—

  I cut the thought dead before my mind could treat me to flashbacks of Mia’s soft scent. Laced with the rose shampoo her mother bought in Calais every couple of months, she’d always smelled like spring to me—bright and hopeful. Even in that last winter, when despair had gripped me so strongly I could see nothing else, Mia had always been there, leaving the bullshit platitudes to other people so she could simply hold my fucking hand.

  She had slim, delicate fingers, but her grip had been so strong, so tight. She’d never have let me go.

  “Luke.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  Gus was staring up at me from the shop floor. “I said, are you nearly done up there? I need to get this plaster up before it dries up.”

  How many times had I ripped him a new one for taking so long with a simple job that I’d had to mix the plaster three times over?

  Too many. I finished patching the hole, cutting myself off from Gus so I was alone on the roof.

  When I was done, I ventured to the edge and looked out over the town. Rushmere was in rural Buckinghamshire, close to London, but about as far from the sea as you could get in England. I didn’t miss the ocean all that much—I’d spent most of my encounters with it getting cold and wet—but I missed the clean air, the wide open space, and the numbness that came with a stormy expanse that seemed to lead nowhere. Seeing nothing but blue and grey every day, it had been easier to feel nothing too. Here, I could see everything. My mum’s house, my father’s grave, and Mia standing by the lake in Sandgrove Park, skimming stones across the water the way I’d taught her in middle school.

  My breath hitched. I’d barely caught a glimpse of her when she’d barrelled into me in the chip shop. In the week or so that had passed since, I’d convinced myself I was over it, that I could handle it when I inevitably saw her again, but I was sorely unprepared for the sight of her now. Face turned to the sky, wild blond hair blowing in the wind, she was fucking glorious, even if the slump of her slim shoulders gave away her misery.

  “Luke, for fuck’s sake. You look like you’re about to off yourself.”

  For the millionth time that day, I glared down at Gus—as dark as Mia was light, but only on the outside. “So what if I was? I’m still your fucking boss.”

  Gus’s easy grin was troubled. “Yeah, yeah, but get your arse down anyway. You’re making me nervous.”

  He disappeared again, making me wonder if this was how my life was going to be from now on—Gus pulling me out of angsty daydreams about his long-lost sister, and then leaving me hanging on a high street rooftop.

  Sighing, I slid down the ladder and chucked it on top of the van, securing it before I braved the inside of Mia’s flower shop. It was unrecognisable from the hair salon it had been a month ago. New floors, painted walls, and the biggest fridge I’d ever seen installed in the back room. “Jesus. How the hell did you get this done so quick? You’ve only taken a couple of days off.”

  Gus shrugged, barely glancing away from the plaster he was slapping on the ceiling. “You know what Mia’s like when she wants shit done. I don’t think she’s slept in the last three days.”

  I could believe that. Mia had always been a force of nature, bending the world to her will. I’d admired it, feared it, and now I missed it, resented it even, because it was right here—she was right here—but none of it was mine to witness. “What are you doing about that window?”

  “What?” Gus followed my gaze to the shop window. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s bowed—the frame’s rotten. You’re gonna get damp all over this snazzy new paintwork, if someone doesn’t peel it back and rob the place first.”

  Gus cursed and pushed past me to examine the dodgy window frame. “I don’t know jack about fixing windows. Does it need an entire new frame? Or can I patch it?”

  “It needs a new frame.”

  “Fuck’s sake.” Gus fished his phone out of his pocket and swiped through something, his expression darkening. “Damn it. It’ll have to wait, there’s no money left.”

  “No money?”

  “Yeah. She didn’t have much left from—anyway, uh, thanks, mate. I’ll get it sorted.”

  I took the hint. Gus had been torn about asking me for help in the first place, and I got the feeling we were both reaching our limits. We hadn’t talked about Mia since I’d taken over from Uncle Jon, and for a year it had been easy to pretend we’d never need to, but awkwardness shadowed our easy relationship now. Gus was guarded, and I was... Shit, I didn’t even know what I was. I just had to get out of this fucking shop.

  Gus went back to plastering, and I left him to it, pointing the van automatically in the direction of home.

  I should’ve gone straight there.

  But I didn’t.

  Chapter Four

  Mia

  I hated being emotional. Tears stung my eyes and my frustration just made them burn hotter. I pressed my hands against the split wood of the rail and tried to focus on the heron viewing point across the water, but something about the perfect serenity of the elegant birds scraped at my soul. Were they even real? So silent and still, they could’ve been plastic models. Fake. An illusion that let peo
ple see and assume what suited them.

  Like everything else.

  Like me.

  I’d always been good at perpetuating what suited other people. Swallowing my heartbreak, muting my grief, and walking away from my Paris dreams with my head held high when inside I was screaming. I’d always been fine, even when Luke left me, my mother died in my bed, and my husband had bankrupted our business and run off with my friend. I was fine. I had to be, because I always was.

  “Mia?”

  I jumped a mile and whirled around. Luke stood behind me, dressed in scruffy jeans, with a paint splattered T-shirt clinging to his muscular frame, his sandy hair too long and messy, his light brown eyes the perfect contradiction of a lifeline and the last thing on earth I wanted to see. “What are you doing here?”

  “Walking.”

  “Walking what? I don’t see a dog anywhere.”

  Luke whistled through his teeth. A black flat-coat retriever burst out of the trees with a stick in its mouth and beamed at me the way only dogs could. “He’s Fran’s.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  If he was trying to make small talk over his mother’s dog, he could fuck right off. I’d prepared myself in recent days to the possibility of running into him multiple times a week now he was apparently Gus’s BFF, but I wasn’t down for pretending there wasn’t ten years of silence between us. For acting like we were old friends who could do this normal bullshit.

  “Mia.”

  Why does he have to say my name? His voice had always melted me. Deep and gravelly once puberty had been done with it, just one syllable could make me wet.

  Damn it. I fought the irresistible wave of attraction as it washed over me. Countered it with bitterness and hate. “Listen, Luke, thanks for helping Gus with my roof, but I’m not in the mood to chat. Enjoy your walk.”

  I turned back to the lake, willing him to take his adorable dog and get out of my face. For a long moment, I thought he had, then the wooden rail shifted, and I glanced down to see work-hardened hands close to mine. Too close. Scarred, elegant fingers, and blunt nails. God, I’d always loved his hands.