Page 3 of Such a Sweet Girl

Pulling up my feed, I scrolled through reels of my favourite bakers and pastry chefs, drooling over the delicious food they so cleverly edit together. Saving inspirational recipes and following people who I longed to be.

After a few minutes, Nick ripped the paper wrapped from the muffin, and that familiar rush of anticipation hit. The need for a kind word about something that I cared about might be pathetic, but it was undeniably a need. Ineededsomeone to love my art.

His teeth sunk into the muffin. I waited. A groan. A sigh. Something. Anything?

‘Oh come on!’ He shouted, slamming down the muffin and madly hitting the buttons on his controller. ‘No, go wide, Ellis.’

Nothing.

Just back to his game.

Perhaps the muffins were bad. What did I know? I had no training.

Just another rock in the stomach. Another seed of doubt watered.

TWO

ALEXANDER

Elmo, my demon-in-cat-form, stared at me, disinterest in his little green eyes. His fluffy black body stretched out on the bed as though purposely trying to get in my way.

‘Listen, you little pest. I have less than thirty minutes until my cab is here, and I need to finish packing my case.’

Elmo rolled onto his other side, pressing his paws against my suitcase while side-eyeing me.

‘Dave is coming to stay for the month—and don’t be looking at me like that—I know you love him.’

Rolling my neatly pressed clothes into bundles, I fit them into the case with Tetris-like precision. Every summer followed the same pattern for the past few years: I’d save all my time off for the summer, and head over to the US to see my son.

A soft smile turned my lips as the memories of years past flitted into my mind. Wiling away the hot days teaching him to swim in the lake. Catching fish until the sun dipped. Watching movies until all hours of the night, neither of us wanting to go to bed until our eyes became heavy.

‘I thought it would kill me when his mom moved him back over there,’ I said to Elmo, who twitched his tail and ignored me.

It hadn’t been easy, but having him to myself for a whole month with no school or work had been glorious. Truly uninterrupted time together.

Until he’d hit his late teens, anyway. Being with his dad for a month was no longer an adventure. I’d become a chore. And now that he’d hit his early twenties, I was fairly certain we were on borrowed time. He didn’t want to hang out. My questions were met with curt, monosyllabic grunts.

Sometimes I didn’t know why I bothered to keep it up. Should I sell the lake house and give in to the inevitable distance that grew between us? I’d only purchased it the previous year, deciding to buy when one of the holiday homes had become available. It was a few miles from the spot where we usually rented the same house every year, on the other side of the long stretch of water. I’d hoped it being ours would make a difference, would cement over some of the cracks that had formed.

Summers had become an awkward, socially redundant prison for the both of us. Nick gamed with his friends, talking until late to them through his headset, while I inevitably fell into work.

I loved my son, but I’d also given up every ounce of free time and money for him over the years. Relationships had fallen apart as I had sent half of my earnings to his mother to help raise him, leaving little for fun money, my days off all stored up to spend solely on him. I never regretted becoming a father at fifteen, but neither could I deny the significant impact it had had on me, especially when Nick had moved half way around the world.

‘I thought it would be different when he reached adulthood,’ I said to Elmo, reaching over to scratch his tummy. The miserly fluffball gave a reluctant purr, unable to resist the attention. ‘I thought we’d have more in common.’

I’d worked my ass off to finally get to a top position in the engineering company I worked for. Years of hard slog, climbingevery rung through exhaustion and hard work. Nick was seven years older than I was when I had him, and what did he have to show for it? He’d changed his degree course three times in as many years, costing me more and more in fees. I couldn’t even blame his lack of motivation on his mom. When he’d gone to high school, she’d trained in real estate and had become an absolute force to be reckoned with. She could sell a shack to an oligarch for a million dollars without them knowing what hit them.

Maybe the two of us working so hard to fill the chasms in our broken relationship had left Nick spoiled. The over indulgence in his every whim to make up for a lack of a solid home had become more of a curse than a blessing.

My phone dinged, and I sat heavily on the edge of the bed. A security alert for the lake house. I didn’t check the cameras often when Nick was in the house—but they were handy to have when it stood empty for most of the year.

The alert came from a camera at the rear of the property. Pulling it up, I scanned the image, failing to see anything out of place until a woman came stumbling out of the trees and onto the back deck.

‘A pretty little thing,’ I mumbled to Elmo, tipping the phone screen to show him. But what on earth was she doing sneaking into the rear of the home? The road ringed around the lake, with each house spanning from it like spokes on a very large, and somewhat misshapen, wheel.

Long, dark sweeps of hair cascaded to her lower back, skimming the short shorts she wore. She held something, but I couldn’t make it out on the image.

Who was she?

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