Page 7 of Letting Go of Yesterday
‘The pair of you will manage it and Leo is going to love it, being the centre of attention at the whole event. He’s such a beautiful boy.’ Her face lit up but Nathan could hear the tinge of sadness in her voice. It always happened and not just with Ruth. No one could talk about his nephew without that same sadness creeping in somewhere along the line. ‘We’ll be helping out with catering, but don’t forget to let me know how I can donate too.’
‘Will’s the one who’s organising the financial stuff; for some reason people don’t trust me.’ Nathan attempted a laugh, but he didn’t quite pull it off. That legacy from his prison sentence hurt the most; the thought that anyone could think he’d take money from the charity set up to raise funds for research into his nephew’s condition broke his heart. Leo had been diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy just before his third birthday. It was a progressive muscle wasting disease and Will and his wife, Heather, had been told he might not make it to adulthood. Nathan shook off the thought every time it came into his head. Leo was an incredible little boy with the heart and courage of a lion, which made his name completely apt, and Nathan couldn’t even bear to imagine a world without him. He wouldn’t even contemplate it, because it wasn’t a world he wanted to live in. Instead, he threw everything he could into helping find a cure.
‘Well, that makes them idiots,’ Ruth declared loudly and then looked around her at anyone who might be about to issue forth a challenge.
‘You’re the best.’ He hugged her again before handing her the poster. ‘I’m meeting Will and then we’re going to price up a job in Padstow. It’ll be a really good contract if we can land it, so we need to be fortified with a Mehenick’s breakfast special.’
‘I’ll give you both some extra.’ Ruth dropped a perfect wink. ‘You go through and grab a table, there aren’t many left, and I’ll get this put up in the window straight away. You’ve done so well with all the fundraising this year and I know how proud your mum is of you.’
‘There are some upsides that come from having long evenings to fill.’ Nathan laughed so that Ruth would know he was joking, rather than feeling sorry for himself. The last thing he wanted was for her to worry about him, or report back to his mother that he sounded sad or lonely. Irene already worried about that far more than she ought to.
‘I’m sure you’d have plenty of takers if you even hinted that you were looking for some company.’ Ruth gave him a playful nudge. ‘Eligible bachelors are in short supply around here.’
‘It’s a shame I’m neither eligible nor a bachelor then.’ He laughed again. ‘Right, I’m going through to grab a table because my brother will never forgive me if I don’t deliver on my promise to buy him breakfast.’
‘I suspect you two would forgive each other anything if it came to it.’ Ruth gave him a final squeeze of the arm before moving off to get on with displaying the poster he’d just given her. She was right, there wasn’t anything he could imagine Will doing that he wouldn’t be able to forgive. They’d had to forgive one another for stuff plenty of times over the years, but they’d always had each other for support too. Having a brother like Will was something he was grateful for every single day.
To Nathan’s surprise, Will was already sitting at one of the tables when he walked through from the bakery.
‘Come on bro, I’m starving!’ Will patted his stomach as he spoke and Nathan grinned.
‘Yep, you look like you’re wasting away.’ Will was a bear of a man. At six feet four he was three inches taller than Nathan, and a good three and a half stone heavier. He was solid rather than overweight, but that was largely down to the running he was currently doing. Without their training for the half marathon, it might well have been a different story, given that he’d been crowned the Three Ports hotdog eating champion, ever since the annual speed eating contest had been introduced four years before.
‘Heather likes to have something to grab hold of.’ Will gave a little shimmy and laughed. He’d told Nathan, after his release from prison, that people were going to judge them anyway, so they might as well give them something to stare at. It was an idea Nathan had tried to embrace, but he’d never been quite as ‘in your face’ as his brother.
‘Please don’t start talking about your sex life before we eat, it’s going to put me off my breakfast if I get an image of your naked behind in my head. I’ve already seen your hairy buttocks far more times than I ever wanted to.’
‘Alright.’ Will held up his hands. ‘But maybe it’s time you got back in the saddle. It’s been over two years since you split up with Nicole. I hate the thought you might be on your own forever and you know how much it worries Mum.’
‘I’m not on my own, I’ve got all of you.’ Nathan kept his tone light. ‘And it’s not like there hasn’t been anyone in my life since we split.’
‘No one serious.’ Will sighed. ‘I’ve had loaves of bread that have lasted longer than your girlfriends and I’m a greedy bastard who eats four slices at a time.’
‘Maybe I just haven’t met the right person and I’m in no rush to go through all of that again anyway.’ Nathan shuddered at the thought. When he’d married Nicole, it had been forever as far as he was concerned and he’d thought she’d felt the same way, until the fraud investigators had come knocking on the door.
‘Well, big bro, your luck might just have changed, because guess who is sitting over there.’ Will gestured none-too-subtly towards a table in the far corner of the room where a woman with auburn hair, falling in soft waves just past her shoulders, was sitting with two children. He didn’t need her to turn around to know who she was; it was Rowan Adams, or Rowan Bellamy as she now was. She’d been in the year below him at school and he’d had the biggest crush of his young life on her. She’d always seemed standoffish and far too clever to be interested in someone like him. Then she’d seemed to change and they’d begun to get close, first as friends and then finally they’d kissed. He’d been certain that they were going to be together and he’d wanted that more than anything at the time. He’d planned to ask her if she’d start going out with him properly, but then her parents had split up and she’d pulled away from him again, before moving to London with her mum as soon as her GCSEs were over. Rowan had come back to visit her dad, but by then he was at college, studying construction, and his world had felt a million miles away from hers. Nathan hadn’t reached out to reconnect and neither had she. He’d caught glimpses of her over the years when she’d come to spend time with her father, and heard snippets of information about her life, but she’d gone back to keeping herself to herself and they’d never spoken.
‘She’s married with two kids now and up here to see her parents, so I don’t know why that makes me lucky.’ Nathan furrowed his brow.
‘Because rumour has it she’s left the husband and moved back here for good. You can finally do what you should have done more than twenty years ago and take her out.’
‘Are we relying on the Port Agnes rumour mill for information now?’ Nathan widened his eyes, giving his brother anare-you-madsort of look.
‘What have you got to lose?’ Will didn’t break eye contact with him. ‘I’d feel a lot better if you made a proper fresh start.’
‘Oh, you should have said, anything to be of service to you.’ He couldn’t help laughing again at the hopeful look on his brother’s face, but then something changed in Will’s eyes.
‘Please, Nath. It really would lift a burden off me if I knew you were happy with someone again.’
‘I know, but I don’t have to be in a couple to be happy. I promise. And I’d rather be on my own than with the wrong person.’ Nathan pretended to make a show of looking at the menu, as though he hadn’t known before he even left the house what he was going to order. Sometimes he just couldn’t stand to see the pain on Will’s face when they talked about the past and everything that the prison sentence had cost Nathan. Glancing over at Rowan’s table, he realised she was looking in his direction, but she jolted as their eyes met and turned her head away fast enough to pull a muscle. He had no doubt she’d heard all the gossip Port Agnes could muster about his time in prison and what he’d done to land himself in there, but only two people in the world knew the full story and they were both sitting at Nathan’s table.
‘Just promise me you’ll think about it. Even if you just go on one proper date with Rowan and finally tick that off your wish list. It’s been on there for about twenty-five years by my reckoning.’ Will clearly wasn’t giving up easily.
‘I promise.’ Nathan nodded, but he’d already thought about it and dismissed it. Rowan Bellamy had been too good for him two decades ago and she was sure as hell too good for him now. When she’d been appointed as the youngest ever headteacher at a prestigious private school on the Hampshire/Dorset border, it had been all over the Three Ports newspaper about the‘local girl made good’. Just because she was back in Port Agnes, it didn’t mean she’d want to go out with a man who’d been splashed over the same newspaper for far less honourable reasons. It was never going to happen, no matter how much Will or Nathan might wish it would.
5
Rowan had been back living in Port Agnes for four days, but the first time she’d been to visit, a week after discovering James’s affair, her mother had greeted her with the tea and sympathy she’d expected. Except the tea had been wine and even the sympathy had taken a different form than Rowan had expected. Of course Katrina had expressed sadness for what her daughter was going through, but she hadn’t ripped James apart the way Rowan had thought she might. A tiny part of her had felt aggrieved that her mother didn’t think James was the devil incarnate for cheating on his wife and children, and lying to Rowan for over twenty years about his true sexuality, but then Katrina had embarked on an affair that had ripped her own marriage apart. There might not have been two decades of lying about who she was, but she could hardly take the moral high ground on fidelity.
