Page 27 of Finding Love at the Magical Curiosity Shop
‘Your extoldyou it was your fault. She strikes me as someone manipulative, narcissistic, and selfish. There is something fundamentally wrong with someone who’d leave a child and then blame someone else for their own failings. Do you honestly think anything you did would have changed that? You could have been an all-singing, all-dancing cowboy rockstar space-hopping billionaire, and she would still have wanted more.’
He sits upright and pulls back far enough to raise a sceptical eyebrow at me. ‘A cowboy rockstar space-hopping billionaire?’
I grin and hold my hands up. ‘I’m just saying, nothing would have been enough. It wasn’tyou.’
He shakes his head like he’s unsure of what to do with that sentence, and I sit beside him for a while, because I get the feeling he’s a bit shaken by sharing all of that.
‘Ava still sees her grandparents though?’ I ask when the silence grows heavy.
‘Yeah. They still wanted a relationship, and they’re the only family she’s got. I would never discourage that. And honestly, I’m glad of the break sometimes, which is a terrible thing to say and probably disqualifies me from any Father of the Year awards.’
I laugh. ‘Maybe it makes you Normal Person of the Year instead. Being a single parent is alot, I know – I grew up with one too. Ava’s lovely – you’re doing a great job even if it doesn’t feel like it.’
I know I’ve hit a nerve when his breathing hitches and he shakes his head in a disbelieving way. ‘I don’t know why I told you all that. I never share stuff like this with people I barely know. Actually, I never share stuff like this with people I know really well either. Are there mind-altering substances in this shop or what?’
He gets to his feet and looks around, like he’s searching for any mind-altering substances that might be hidden somewhere. ‘Suspicious incense! I bet you’re burning suspicious incense, right?’
I laugh out loud. ‘There’s no incense in the shop, Ren, suspicious or otherwise. And even if there was, I don’t think it’s known for having an instantaneous psychedelic drug kind of effect.’
‘I’ll feel better if you let me believe it’s suspicious incense.’
I laugh because I really didn’t have him down for beingthisadorable.
He paces a couple of times, and then holds a hand out to pull me up too, and when my fingers slip over his, his hand tightens and we hold each other’s gaze for a long few moments.
‘C’mere.’ It’s barely a whisper and I’m not entirely sure whether it was me or him who said it, but before he has a chance to rethink it, I pull him closer and reach up to slide my arms around him again, and just like the other day, he instantly sinks into it. His chin settles over my shoulder and his arms slip around me, his hands spreading out and covering as much of my back as possible, and after a few moments of my hands rubbing up and down, his rod-straight spine curves towards me, and he stumbles and has to replant his feet on the floor as his body loses some of its tension. He makes a noise of contentment that I’m entirely sure he doesn’t realise popped out, and it just makes me squeeze him tighter. This is a man utterlydesperatefor a hug, and time disappears as we stand there holding each other.
‘Why do we keep doing that?’ He sounds blissfully dazed as he pulls away.
‘Hugging? No idea, maybe it’s all the suspicious incense.’
He laughs out loud and his shoulders drop. ‘Okay, okay, I’m not very good at dealing with my feelings, but Iamgood at recycling and recognising rubbish. Now, about that dragon fruit table…’
I smack at his arm and defend my dragon fruit table again, and he laughs good-naturedly, and we go back to the easy companionship of him picking up things and commenting on them, me making the case for their right to stay, while also trying to tell myself I can’t keepeverythingand the whole point of decluttering is tothrow things away. He’s somehow a little bit lighter, a bit warmer and more jokey, and now I have a better idea of what he’s dealing with, it means even more that he’s given up his free time to help me, and that’s someone worth listening to.
7
‘Serious question –isthere likely to be anything else from the mermaid’s property? Should we be looking?’
‘I don’t know.’ I look over at him where he’s found a box of old records and is rifling through them, but I’ve already decided they can go. They belong with someone who specialises in record collecting, and the chances of someone who’s looking for that exact thing coming in here are slim to none. ‘I gravitate towards ocean-themed things, so there’s a lot, but I have no record of what things came from where, and yes, IknowI need to start keeping one.’
‘Don’t feel bad,’ Ren interrupts before my thoughts stray to my father’s faultless record-keeping and how much I’ve let that slide. ‘We’ve all been guilty of not keeping on top of paperwork.’
Instead of dwelling on it, I think more about how keen he is. ‘I didn’t know you were so invested in this mermaid’s diary… Youwantto believe in this, don’t you?’
‘I wish I could. IwishI could see that diary and not be as cynical as I am. I wish I could read it and simply believe in it rather than trying to pull the evidence to shreds, but that’s not me. I believe in facts, and so far, there isnothingin that book that can be proved.’
‘We could sneak another entry… You havenoidea how hard it’s been to stop myself reading the whole thing, but as it’s both of us, and Ava would never have to know…’
‘You mean, go behind my daughter’s back and do something that would break her heart and crush her soul if she found out?’
Just as I’m feeling like the world’s worst person for even suggesting it, his face breaks into a huge grin. ‘Heck yeah, I’m in!’
He recovers his composure and turns serious again. ‘What I mean is that I don’t want Ava to be disappointed, and the sooner we prove this is fake, the better.’
I let him keep telling himself that rather than admitting he’s actually quite interested and run upstairs to retrieve the book from my bag, and bring it back down again.
‘If nothing else, this has been good for Ava,’ he says as I find the page of the last entry we read. ‘It’s got her off social media. All she’s been doing online lately is googling history of mermaids in Britain, rather than obsessively following her friends’ feeds as they post photos from their sun-drenched foreign holidays that I can’t afford to take her on.’
