Page 19 of The Damaged Hearts Bargain

“I’m not forcing you to go on a date, Luce,” he said gently. “I’m just saying that you should be open minded to what’s around you. Look at me and George.”

“What about you and George?”

Billy grinned even wider. “We’ve known each other practically forever. But I never thought he could be my other half. I don’t even know why, he was just ‘George, the man that works at the bookshop.’ Until one day I saw him on the street and he suddenly became ‘George, the man whose hair gleams in the sunlight’.”

“It’s that simple, huh?”

“It can be, if you let it,” Billy said. “I mean, she might end up being a serial killer or a Tory or something equally horrible, in which case, you should end the date immediately.”

“It’s not a date,” Lucy said again.

But she was beginning to wonder.

Chapter Eight

Turning the key was easier than Cal had thought. The key slid into the lock and she turned it just like that.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, standing in front of the unlocked but still closed front door.

If she waited much longer then the neighbors would be after her for breaking and entering. Like she needed another potential brush with the police today.

Which made her think about Lucy. Lucy sitting over her as she lay on the pavement. Lucy with her crooked smile. Tall Lucy.

“Get a grip,” she mumbled.

But as she’d been thinking about Lucy, she’d pushed on the front door and it had opened, just a crack, but enough to get started with. Cal took a deep breath and pushed it the rest of the way open.

It wasn’t that she’d been an unhappy child. She hadn’t, she didn’t think. Up until a certain age she’d been… just a kid. She’d had too much energy, more than she’d known what to do with. She was easily persuaded to do things for fun. She had a tendency not to obey rules that she didn’t see the point of.

She hadn’t been bad though. Not bad. Not that deep down to the core immoral blackness that made people kill puppies and run over old ladies and things. She’d never been bad. Naughty, disobedient, a tearaway, all of those things. But not bad.

Which made it all that much harder to understand really.Maybe not now, now when she knew that people saw what they wanted to see and more often than not took the easy way out, the lazy answer. But back then it had been. Back when she’d stood up and looked around and suddenly known that while she might not see herself as bad, everyone else obviously did.

The house smelled musty, which was a bit of a relief. She’d been afraid that pushing the door in would let out the smell of childhood, all fishfingers and her mum’s perfume. The scent was familiar, but not triggering, not as bad as she’d feared.

It was alright enough that she walked inside and let the door close behind her.

Alright enough that she began a slow walk around the downstairs.

Her mum had had a new kitchen table, and the old gas fire was gone, replaced by something a bit sleeker. The TV in the corner was new, but that was to be expected after so long. But the ornaments on the mantelpiece weren’t, and the battered couch wasn’t either.

There was just… so much of it.

She tried to imagine emptying the room out, deciding what got donated, what could go into the big skip she’d need to order, and just couldn’t quite get her head around it.

So she dropped to the couch and had a sit down to think about things, picking at the plaster Rosalee had stuck on her cheek.

Rosalee.

It had hurt being told to leave like that even though Cal was pretty sure Rosalee had thought she was being kind.

It was one thing running away, thinking you had no place in a town. It was quite another being told to get the hell out.

Christ. She shouldn’t have come back, should she?

Maybe it’d be better just to burn the house to the ground and walk away.

She was eyeing the new gas fire speculatively when her phone rang.

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