Finally Home

by Taylor, Helen Scott

  “You’re not going to hit me are you?” The smile in Jack’s voice released some of her tension. He came up beside her and put his arm around her waist. “I’ve called Emily and asked if she’ll keep Ryan for another day.” He threaded his fingers through hers. “I think we should have a ceremonial burning. I’ll burn the scrapbooks of press cuttings and you burn your journal. It does you no good to keep reading those notes.”

  Panic flared inside her. “I don’t think I can.”

  He tightened his grip on her waist, pulled her against his side. “You need to start somewhere.”

  She remembered the day she’d left Littlechurch five years ago, people watching on the pavement as she bundled Ryan into the back of a taxi and escaped. She had never returned. Not even to visit her husband’s grave. “Maybe I should go back to the place where it happened.”

  “How do you think that’ll help?”

  “I’m not sure it will, but I’d rather start there than with my book.”

  “We’ll go today.”

  “Are you sure you can spare the time? Who’s looking after the hotel while we’re both away?” She’d wrecked his personal life; she didn’t want to be guilty of wrecking his business as well.

  “It’s only one day, Mel.” He touched her face. “Come on. Let’s get going.”

  The journey passed without incident, although it took a long time to drive from Devon to Kent. By the time they arrived it was midafternoon.

  Jack’s Mercedes glided into the main street lined with old cottages that must have stood unchanged for hundreds of years. The church, the village hall, the village green with its duck pond—so many memories assailed her, many of them happy, from her childhood and the early days of her marriage.

  Melanie thought she’d feel nervous, but as the car stopped in the street in front of the pretty beamed cottage where she’d lived, she felt nothing but sadness. She remembered the day she and Marcus moved in. The plans they’d had. “How did it all go so wrong?”

  Jack took her hand. “Things have a nasty habit of doing that. All we can do is try again.”

  An elderly couple she recognized walked past the car and peered in curiously. Melanie tensed, but they only nodded and walked on.

  She leaned her head back against the seat and looked Jack’s way. “What did you do when everything went wrong in your life?”

  “First I was miserable. I didn’t get out of bed for a week, drank too much, watched lots of mindless drivel on television. Then I became angry. Trouble is, when your own body lets you down, guess who you get angry with?”

  “Weren’t you angry with Marianne for not showing up at the church? She could have let you know beforehand and spared you that.”

  “I didn’t care about Marianne as much as I cared about losing my career. That was the killer.” Jack stared out the windshield for a moment. “My old school football coach was the one who set me straight. I wish he were still alive. I’d take you to talk to him.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Lots of stuff, but in essence he said two things that struck home—it doesn’t matter how badly you lost in the last game, when you go out on the pitch the only game that matters is the one you’re playing now.”

  “What was the other thing?”

  Jack stared into the distance and grinned, the look full of affection. “There were too many cuss words for me to repeat verbatim, but paraphrased it was stop messing around and get back in the game.” He turned his grin on her, and the burst of love she felt was so strong it was unnerving.

  In silence, they drove a short distance down the road and parked outside the church. Jack opened the door for her and took her arm as they entered the gate and followed the path around the building to the churchyard. Marcus’s grave had a polished granite headstone inscribed with only his name and dates of birth and death. When the stonemasons had asked her to provide an inscription, she couldn’t think of a single nice thing she wanted to say about him.

  Most of her anger towards him had faded, but she hadn’t realized that until this moment. He hadn’t always been a bad man. There had been happy times. Maybe she’d give an inscription some thought and have it added to the headstone.

  Jack held her hand tightly, as if he thought she needed an anchor. There was no vase on the grave, so she laid down the bunch of flowers she’d brought.

  Strange that she had loved Marcus once and thought she’d spend the rest of her life with him. A different life. She looked at Jack and remembered his old coach’s comment about forgetting the bad game from the past and playing well now. Jack was her game now.

  “Do you want to visit your parent’s pub or the surgery?”

  “I’m not ready to see my parents, but I’d like to write them a letter.” If she was going to put the past behind her, that meant forgiving her mum and dad as well.

  They returned to the car and went half a mile down the road where Jack pulled up beside the village green. Melanie stared across the well-kept acre of grass and the smoothly mown cricket pitch to the old beamed White Hart Public House where she had grown up. The swell of memories was so poignant she clamped down on the feeling.

  Jack reached into the back of the car and grabbed a sheet of Greyfriar House Hotel headed notepaper out of his briefcase. Melanie composed her note, giving her parents a brief picture of what she and Ryan had been doing over the past five years and where she was with her life now. Jack silently studied the view out the window, giving her privacy. She hesitated over the final paragraph then finished by saying she would phone her mother in a few weeks, when she was more certain of her future plans.

  Twenty minutes later, they walked across the village green and she waited beneath an oak tree that was reputed to have seen the Norman invasion in 1066, while Jack posted her note through the pub letterbox.

  They returned to the car, and Jack followed her directions to the final stop she needed to make. He turned left off the main street, heading south. At the doctors’ surgery, Jack drove into the car park and cut the engine. The modern brick building, finished just before Marcus joined the practice, looked ugly and out of place at the end of a row of pretty country cottages.

  “That’s it?” Jack asked.

  “Hmm.” Melanie felt an unexpected twinge of nostalgia. She’d worked here for seven years and had friends here. Or so she’d thought.

  He quirked his eyebrows. “Maybe I should go in and ask for a reference for you.”

  She tried to smile at his quip and nearly managed. “I don’t think I want to know what they’d say.” She’d worked hard here and done a good job, but they probably wouldn’t remember anything about her except the last few weeks of turmoil and accusations. Strange that when she thought of the place, she only remembered those few bad weeks. So much else had happened while she was here.

  An older woman with gray hair and glasses came out the staff entrance and approached the car parked next to them. She clicked her key to unlock the doors and glanced in through the window at Melanie. She stopped in her tracks, her mouth open. Melanie tensed.

  “You know her?” Jack asked.

  “I used to work with her.”

  The woman approached her car and opened the door level with Melanie’s window. Then she paused and turned, her expression uncertain. Jack switched on the ignition and lowered the electric window, while Melanie sat stiffly, waiting for a cutting remark.

  “Melanie Marshall? I almost didn’t recognize you with your lovely h
air cut shorter.” She crouched and looked in at Jack with a smile. “Who’s this?”

  “Her fiancé,” Jack answered.

  “Oh, well. I’m glad to see you’ve moved on after all the unpleasantness.” She crouched again and frowned. “I’m sure I know you from somewhere, Mr.…?”

  “Summers,” Jack filled in.

  “You’re not the football player, are you?”

  Jack smiled and nodded.

  “My goodness.” She put a hand to her heart. “My son used to follow your team. Had a poster of you up on his wall. I expect we’ve still got it somewhere. Shame he’s not here, he’d have loved to meet you. Just wait till I tell him I saw you. He’ll be so jealous. What do you do now?”

  “I own a hotel.”

  “Well, that’s nice.” She poked Melanie in the shoulder. “You certainly fell on your feet. Good luck to you both.” She climbed in her car, still smiling at Jack, backed out of her space and drove away.

  Melanie sighed with relief. “I didn’t say a word.”

  “You didn’t need to. She said enough for both of you.” Jack stoked back her hair affectionately. “I bet that’s not how you imagined the conversation would go.”

  Melanie shook her head. If people here had moved on and forgiven her, maybe it was time she forgave herself.

  * * *

  Melanie was nervous by the time Jack came over from the hotel the following day. She still felt uncertain about destroying the little gray journal that held so much of her past.

  After she put Ryan to bed and Jack read him a story, Jack called her into his bedroom and beckoned her across to the chest of drawers. Laid on top were the three scrapbooks containing his press cuttings. “I’m ready to burn these and get rid of the last tie to my past.”

  “Your mother doesn’t mind?”

  He winced. “She’s not happy, but she understands it’s important to me.”

  Melanie opened the first one. The school photos and speech day programs had been removed.

  “That’s all I’ve let her keep,” he said defensively.

  “If she hadn’t taken them out, I would have.” Melanie closed the book. “I’ve got a box containing all the important things Ryan’s done. I wouldn’t let anyone destroy those. Things like that are important to mums.”

  “Why do women hoard?”

  “Nesting instinct,” she said with a sideways glance.

  Jack smiled and the slight tension between them dissolved.

  “You ready to ceremonially burn those bad old memories of yours?”

  Melanie sighed. He was right of course. Keeping a book in her nightstand detailing the worst time of her life wasn’t healthy. She could see that now. “Okay. Where are we going to do it?”

  Jack tucked his scrapbooks into a backpack and slung it across his shoulder. “Go and change into something warmer. You’ll need a coat and strong shoes.”

  Melanie glanced at the window. Dusk had darkened the sky to purple. “We’re not going hiking now, are we?”

  “Got it in one. Go on.” He patted her bottom and his hand lingered until the pat became a caress. He dragged in a breath and shoved his hand in his pocket. “Don’t be long.”

  After she changed, Melanie pulled the journal from the drawer, ran her hand over the cover, and only hesitated a moment before she went to find Jack waiting in the hall. He took her book and slipped it into his bag beside his folders.

  “Matches, check.” He dropped a box of them into the bag to join the books. “Celebratory drink, check.” He pulled a bottle of champagne from behind his back and slipped it into the bag. “Rug to sit on, check.” He pushed a tartan blanket into the bag and zipped it up.

  “No champagne glasses?” she asked.

  “They might break. We’ll have to drink from the bottle. I used to do it all the time.”

  “There speaks the professional sportsman used to indulging.” She gave him a mock look of reproof. “I thought we were getting rid of everything from the past. Surely that includes bad habits.”

  “A celebratory drink’s not a bad habit, it’s a reward for success. Tastes even better straight from the bottle.”

  He took her arm and they slipped out the front door to avoid passing Imelda and the housekeeper in the kitchen.

  Backpack over one shoulder, Jack took her hand and led her down the garden and over a style onto a narrow country road. A hundred yards on, they turned up a stony track that led directly onto Dartmoor.

  Dusk closed in, the shadows blending into the darkness as the two of them hiked up a small incline. They followed a path towards a heap of rocks in the distance, silhouetted against the deep purple sky by the brilliance of a nearly full moon.

  “We won’t go far. The moor can be dangerous in the dark if you don’t know your way.” He glanced at her and she caught the flash of his teeth. “This is my old stomping ground, so I know it well. But I’ll only take you to Carp Tor.” He pointed at the heap of rocks getting closer as they walked. “There’s a nice sheltered spot beneath the Tor where Emily and I used to build a fire and cook sausages. Think of the worst barbecue food you’ve ever tasted and you’ll have some idea what they were like—black on the outside, raw on the inside. I’m surprised we didn’t kill ourselves with food poisoning.”

  Melanie smiled to herself and remembered Emily calling Jack a big kid the first time she visited Hazelwood House. She hoped he never lost that quality. “You’re enjoying this.”

  “Course I am. It’s an adventure.”

  “Yes, Jack.” She patted his shoulder. “I hope your boy scout senses don’t fail you. I can’t see a thing now.”

  Jack pulled a flashlight from his pocket and snapped the switch before directing the beam onto the path. “Be Prepared. I haven’t forgotten the boy scout motto.”

  The last section of the path narrowed to single width. Jack suggested Melanie walk in front with the torch, and he followed. They climbed the steep incline to the Tor. When they reached the top, Melanie bent over, hands on her thighs to catch her breath.

  Jack took the torch and shone it into a sheltered nook beneath the pile of boulders. He unfastened the backpack, spread out the blanket and laid out the other things.

  She gratefully collapsed in the shelter of the rocks, hot from the hike up the hill but with chilly fingers and toes. As they approached the Tor, Jack had collected a handful of twigs. He tore a few pages from one of his scrapbooks and heaped the twigs on top. Then he lit the paper with a match.

  Melanie hugged her knees and watched the small flare as he sat beside her and busied himself ripping out pages and feeding the fire.

  “This doesn’t bother you at all, does it?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “So you’re not really making a sacrifice like me.”

  “If you’d had to talk my mother round, you wouldn’t say that. I’ll be hearing about this for months.”

  “You shouldn’t have made her give them up if she really wanted to keep them.”

  The grin dropped from his face. “It’s not healthy for her to dwell on the past either. All this business with Marco is down to that. She still hasn’t let my father go.” Jack crumpled a handful of sheets and tossed the ball of paper on the fire. “The old man was never worth all her heartache.” He picked up her gray book and put it in her lap. “Come on. Your turn.”

  Melanie turned the book over in her hands, opened it at random and angled it towards the firelight to read a few paragraphs. It was actually
rather boring. “It’s not very well written, is it?”

  “I’m not answering that. It’s one of those questions where a man’s damned if he agrees and damned if he doesn’t.”

  Melanie laughed. But her heart rate picked up as she took hold of the first page and ripped. She felt lightheaded as she balled up the sheet and tossed it on the fire. It caught with a little hiss and burned blue. “Look at that. My paper burns with a blue flame.”

  “So it does.”

  Melanie ripped out more sheets and they flared with little blue flashes among Jack’s gold-and-yellow flames.

  Silently, they both worked through their books, the fire burning fast and bright with the mixture of colors.

  When they’d both finished, they threw on the covers. Melanie’s book singed with a sickly smell before the cardboard inside the gray plastic caught light.

  While Melanie watched the last of the flames die away, Jack uncorked the champagne. “Don’t mention the drink to Mother. I forgot to bring a bottle over from the hotel so I whipped this from her cellar. I think it was an expensive one.”

  The cork popped, and foam cascaded over Jack’s hand. He took a swig from the bottle and handed it on. Melanie held it for a moment, remembering the blue flashes, the melting gray cover. That was the end of the past. No more worrying. People had forgiven her. She had decided to forgive herself.

  “To the future,” she said, and sipped from the bottle. Bubbles fizzed up her nose and she sneezed.

  Jack retrieved the bottle. “To the future.” He upended the bottle and chugged some down.

  “I can see there’s a knack to this indulgence business.”

  “Oh, there is.” He made her open her mouth and tipped in some champagne. Most of it trickled down her chin. He leaned in and tried to catch it on his tongue. They ended up in a giggling heap on the blanket, her hair half soaked with vintage champagne. Jack stared down at her and touched her cheek. “You’ve done it, love, burned the bad memories. The past has no hold over you now.” He touched his lips gently to hers and she threaded her fingers through the silky strands of his hair and pulled him closer.