Kitabı oku: «Make My Wish Come True»

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

PROLOGUE

Christmas 1981

Juliet sat on the brown velour sofa, her arms folded across her chest, and watched her sister play amidst the wreckage of wrapping paper and discarded curling ribbon. Gemma’s fair curls bounced as she chatted away to her new dolly and brushed its hair. Juliet glanced at her digital calculator, still in its packaging, sitting beside her on the sofa and felt a little bit sick.

That doll had been on her Christmas wish list, not Gemma’s. Mummy must have got mixed up somehow. But Daddy said Mummy was a bit sad at the moment, and it made her do strange things.

Gemma stopped brushing the doll’s hair and looked up. ‘When’s dinner?’ she asked. ‘I’m hungry.’

Juliet looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It said ten past four. She was hungry too. Christmas lunch should have been hours ago. She wanted to go and ask Daddy, but last time she’d ventured into the kitchen he’d been hunched over the table, crying softly.

‘Soon,’ she told Gemma, trying to smile.

Her sister nodded and returned to fussing with her doll. Juliet just sat there, feeling even sicker.

After a few moments, Gemma stood up and picked up the doll. ‘I’m going to go and show Mummy what I’ve done with Georgina’s hair,’ she said.

Juliet jumped off the sofa and stood in the doorway. This is what she’d been dreading. ‘Not right now,’ she told Gemma softly. ‘Mummy had to go out for a bit.’

Gemma’s eyebrows lifted in surprise, but she didn’t question her older sister’s words. That was because she was five. Juliet was nine and she was a big enough girl to know the truth. Daddy had said so. He’d also said Gemma was too little, that she wouldn’t understand, and that it was Juliet’s job to make sure she didn’t find out.

A sudden image of her mother running from the house, raw stuffing still clinging to her fingers, then jumping into the car and driving away left Juliet feeling breathless and shaky, but Gemma glanced back up at her, eyes so large and trusting, and she covered it all over with a smile.

‘Is she coming back soon?’ her sister asked, only half-interested in Juliet’s answer as she started twisting the doll’s hair, attempting her own five-year-old version of a plait.

Juliet kept smiling, even though it felt like her insides were being sucked into a big dark hole.

‘Yes,’ she said, and blinked back the moisture that had gathered in the corner of her eyes.

She bent down a little bit so she was on Gemma’s level. ‘If you want, I’ll show you how to plait Georgina’s hair

properly, and then you can show Mummy when she comes home.’

Gemma threw her arms round Juliet’s neck and squeezed her hard. ‘You’re such a good big sister, Juliet! I love you.’

People liked Gemma the best because she was cute and ‘bubbly’. Juliet didn’t know exactly what that meant, but she suspected it meant not shy and nervous, like she was. Sometimes she wished Gemma was different, but right now she understood why people liked it when her little sister directed all that enthusiastic affection at them.

She was a good big sister, wasn’t she? And she would keep on being a good big sister, the best she could be.

She sat down cross-legged on the carpet and Gemma sank down beside her. Juliet took the doll and with a frown of concentration began to braid its hair. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘this is how you do it …’

And once she’d shown Gemma, she let her have a go too. And while her sister chatted and plaited, her chubby little fingers almost tying themselves in knots, Juliet glanced towards the living-room door.

Maybe while Gemma was busy she ought to go and see if Daddy needed help cooking the dinner. Somebody had to do it. And she didn’t know if Mummy was ever coming back.

CHAPTER ONE

Juliet stopped and let the shoppers flow round her as she reached into her handbag and pulled out her Christmas notebook. She got a rush of warmth, of comfort, every time she picked it up, and this occasion was no different. She smiled as she looked at the pretty botanical print of poinsettia on the cover.

Other people had Christmas wish lists, but Juliet didn’t go in for wishing much these days. Wishing didn’t get you anywhere. If things were going to be perfect, you needed to plan, make lists, research. Juliet was very keen on making Christmas perfect, and this book was her road map, her shining beacon in the midst of all the festive chaos. It was diary, organiser, address book and To Do list all rolled into one, and once November came around it hardly left her side. She flipped it open and quickly found the page with today’s shopping list, marked with a colourful sticky tag.

Ah, yes.

Glacé cherries for the Rudolph cupcakes she’d promised to make for the Christmas Fayre, cinnamon sticks and cloves for mulling apple juice after the church carol service, two more rolls of Sellotape and a metre of red velvet ribbon.

She slid her book carefully back into her bag and began to dart through the Christmas shoppers with nimble ease, spotting gaps before they properly appeared, judging who was going to keep moving and who was going to stop and marvel at the pretty Christmas lights.

And marvel they should. Juliet was very proud of her hometown, and Tunbridge Wells was at its prettiest this time of year. No wonder so many of the supermarket chains and department stores filmed their big-budget Christmas adverts here every October. The Pantiles was the location of choice – one of the town’s oldest streets with its Victorian and Georgian buildings, its little shops nestling beneath the two-hundred-year-old colonnade. White lights hung between the white pillars and twisted round the branches of the trees that ran down the centre of the paved street, and every shop window was immaculately decorated with greenery and tempting Christmas fare. The scent of mulled wine and roasting chestnuts drifted from the traders in the market.

But Juliet really didn’t have time to stop and stare, to marvel or smell anything this afternoon. Her Christmas notebook was calling to her from inside her bag, tugging at her consciousness, reminding her of all the unticked boxes on her To Do list that were waiting hungrily to be filled.

She glanced at the old-fashioned clock mounted above one of the boutiques. Ten past two, and she had to be at the boys’ school by three twenty. Once she’d got her shopping, she needed to post a parcel for her elderly neighbour and then she’d just about have enough time to dash to the butchers and order the turkey.

That lovely plump bird was the linchpin to Christmas dinner. Crossing off that item would start a chain reaction throughout her To Do list, leaving it awash with little ticks. The thought made her slightly giddy. However, she was distracted from the image of all of those satisfied little boxes by strains of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ belting out from inside her handbag.

Gemma?

Juliet stopped walking and rummaged for her mobile.

Not Gemma.

Just St Martin’s primary, sending out an all-parent alert that head lice were rife in the school again. Great. With four heads to check she’d be spending the whole evening with a nit comb in her hand. A complete time suck. Just what she needed at the moment.

She closed the message and searched the display for a hint of any other new communication, but nothing flashed, nothing beeped. No new icons had appeared. She tucked the phone back inside her bag, angrier at her sister than she’d already had been. What had she expected?

Oh, she knew what Gemma’s working day was like, how difficult it was to make or receive personal calls, that she often only got a few seconds to reply to texts late at night. She bragged about it often enough when she made one of her ‘flying visits’ home.

No, that was being unkind.

Gemma didn’t really brag. It was just the way she told her stories about working on film sets, meeting exciting people, visiting exotic locations … Well, it was probably hard not to let it sound as if you were the kind of person who was much more interesting than the average suburban housewife.

The last time she’d seen Gemma had been at the bank holiday barbecue in August. Juliet had finally managed to corner her and ask her to pull her weight this Christmas. Much to her surprise, Gemma had agreed, but now there was total radio silence. Once again, Gemma was AWOL when anything family-related was on the cards.

The whole situation was starting to give Juliet a horrible sinking feeling. With the promise of extra help, she might have gone a bit overboard once the Christmas preparations had got underway. Now it wasn’t just a case of wanting her sister to display some sisterly loyalty; she might actually have to rely on her, and that was a very scary thought.

No need to panic yet, though. It was still only the first Friday in December and Gemma was due back in just over a week. She could manage until then. But maybe she’d send her sister another little reminder, just to make sure she didn’t forget there were things they needed to discuss …

She stared at her phone. What she really wanted to ask was why Gemma did everything she could to stay away from her family, even at Christmas, but she feared that it might only make Gemma run away faster and harder. Juliet exhaled slowly. Now was not the time to confront that issue, so instead she just fired off a jaunty little text – no demands, no pressure – and then she slid her phone back into her bag and started walking in the direction of the post office.

She’d only gone a dozen steps when her phone rang a second time. Now this was probably Gemma. When you wanted her she was nowhere to be found, and when you gave up waiting and carried on without her, suddenly she’d appear and throw all your careful plans into chaos. Typical.

‘Yes?’ she said, perhaps a little too sharply.

‘Mrs Taylor?’

The voice was low and rich, with the timbre of authority to it. Definitely not Gemma.

‘Yes?’ she said again, trying to sound more like an upstanding citizen than a fishwife.

‘This is PC Graham from Tunbridge Wells police station.’

Oh, God! Was everyone all right? The kids! Had there been an accident with the twins? Or had Violet bunked off with some of those new friends she’d started hanging around with? And she couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of scrape too-independent-for-her-own good Polly might have got herself into.

She couldn’t seem to speak. Couldn’t seem to ask the police officer any of that. She just made a tight little croaking noise that he must have taken as an invitation to carry on.

‘It’s regarding Sylvia Wade … She’s your great-aunt, I believe?’

Juliet cleared her throat and forced down her panic. Somebody needed her. This was no time to get all hysterical.

‘Can you tell me what’s happened? Is she hurt?’

‘Don’t worry, she’s … fine.’ She heard the officer take a deep breath. ‘Fighting fit, actually,’ he added with a wry hint to his tone. ‘I just think you need to get down to the Leisure Centre as soon as you can.’

Gemma rapped on the trailer door – loud enough to be heard, but not so firmly it might be interpreted as a demand. As she waited the icy wind cut into her cheeks and her knuckles froze into a fist. Glamorous job? Hah! Don’t make her laugh. She pulled the hood of her waterproof closer round her face and got ready to smile brightly.

He wouldn’t open the door himself, of course. Too used to having a faceless someone to do it for him.

She knocked a second time and her phone buzzed in her pocket. She ignored it. Even if it was the director, ranting and raving about the whereabouts of his A-list actor, answering it would only slow her down.

It seemed an age before she heard a muffled ‘Yeah?’ from the other side of the trailer door. If she’d gone by tone of voice alone, she’d have guessed he was soaking up the sun on a Caribbean beach, not freezing to death on the fringes of Western Ireland in December.

A wall of heat hit her when she stepped inside. No wonder he sounded so relaxed. The temperature in here really was verging on tropical. It was certainly warm enough for the six-foot hunk of blond gorgeousness she’d come looking for to only be dressed in a faded T-shirt and a pair of shorts as he lounged on a sofa further down the trailer. She closed the door behind her and instantly started to sweat in her layers of thermals and assorted woolly things.

‘Hey, Gemma,’ he said, and smiled, revealing his far too white teeth. For some reason she found all that symmetry slightly irritating.

Even more irritating was the state of his undress. He was supposed to be wearing the dark garb the wardrobe department had carefully selected to suggest a tortured hero on the verge of saving the world. However, she let none of her annoyance bleed through to her tone of voice. ‘They’re ready for you on set now, Toby.’ Her face was a mask of calm as she re-jigged times and schedules in the back of her head.

If she could hurry him along, they might not lose any filming time before the light went. She’d had to change the call sheet for the following day three times already. The last batch of A4 sheets sat ready and waiting in her makeshift office and she really didn’t want to dump them and start all over again.

She glanced around. Where was the girl from wardrobe? She’d seen her come in here not half an hour ago, and she could have sworn she hadn’t seen her leave. ‘Has Caitlin gone to fetch something from the truck?’ she asked innocently.

Toby just smirked and his eyes darted towards the back of the trailer where the bedroom was situated. ‘Something like that.’

Gemma’s stomach sank and she visualised dropping her call sheets into the waste-paper basket one by one, calling Tobias Thornton, action star and sex god, every name under the sun as she did so.

As great as her job was, she occasionally wished she didn’t work in the film industry. It spoilt all the fantasy. When this film came out, her friends would make her go and see it with them so she could tell them all the gossip and inside secrets, but while they sat in the dark and sighed at Toby’s drop-dead smile and killer abs, all she’d be thinking about was how many times she’d come close to wiping that smile off his face with her clipboard.

What she wouldn’t give for a real hero, the kind of man these actors pretended to be, but never were. The problem was that she always chose men who seemed dynamic and exciting, but eventually turned out to be a little … well, flaky.

There was a thud from somewhere near the bedroom and the wardrobe assistant emerged, holding a pair of dark trousers. ‘Oh, hi …’ she said airily. Too airily for the blotchy blush creeping up her neck. ‘I was just … you know … doing some emergency repairs on Toby’s leathers.’ She shot him a nervous look and giggled.

That could have explained Toby’s trouserless state and the slight delay, but Gemma doubted it. Caitlin’s hair was all mussed up and her sweater was on inside out.

She said nothing. She didn’t care what they got up to – although she’d thought Cait had a bit more sense. All she cared about was getting one hot film star back into his leathers and onto a speeding motorbike.

‘All fixed now?’ she asked, checking her watch yet again.

Caitlin nodded.

‘Great. Then perhaps you could help Toby into his clothes, so we can get going?’ She hadn’t been able to help that little inflection. Too tempting. But to take any sting out of the comment, she teamed it up with her best Second Assistant Director smile. Her secret weapon.

Toby and Caitlin exchanged guilty glances and then he ran a hand through his hair, looking just the tiniest bit sheepish.

Job done. In one smooth move she’d let them know she wasn’t a pushover, but that she also wasn’t going to get her knickers in a twist about it – as long as Toby was out of that trailer door in full costume in the next five minutes, of course.

The wry smile he gave her said: Message received and understood.

She smiled back, a real one this time, and pulled her hood up over her hair, only to discover that in the heat of the trailer her curls had frizzed to twice their usual volume. Fabulous. She jammed her hood over the fluff and headed for the door, bracing herself, and then she was out into the driving wind, clutching her coat closed as she trudged across the car park of the Victorian hunting lodge they were using as their base. She didn’t even take a moment to drink in the rugged scenery: the choppy, grey lough and the ancient rugged mountain that towered over it. She did use the opportunity to mutter a few choice words into the wind, words concerning toddler-brained actors, weather that seemed to have a personal vendetta against her and anything else that came to mind.

The warmth of Toby’s trailer had made coming back out into the freezing cold even worse, which didn’t improve her mood much. It also sparked a longing within her.

She wished she really was lazing on a palm-fringed beach. The urge to jump on a plane and do just that when this shoot was finished was becoming irresistible.

It had been a long job, maybe that was it. She really deserved a quiet, relaxing Christmas when this was all over, before she jumped on another plane to another far-flung location and it started all over again. She sighed. That sunlounger on a Caribbean beach was practically calling her name.

If only she hadn’t caved in to Juliet’s nagging and told her she’d spend Christmas at hers. Juliet had gone on and on about Christmas the last time Gemma had seen her and Gemma had eventually just blurted something out to keep her quiet.

It had all been Juliet’s next-door neighbour’s fault. If he hadn’t picked a fight with her, she’d have never had three G&Ts, and then she might have been able to talk her way out of it. At the very least she might have been able to remember exactly what Juliet had said to her. The only thing to do now was to play along and pick up the details piece by piece. Juliet was sure to give her chapter and verse at some point, anyway. Probably in the form of a laminated sheet with idiot-proof instructions.

But that wasn’t something she was going to worry about at this precise moment. It was time to get one up-himself action star onto the set. She signalled for the luxury four-wheel drive that was ready and waiting, puffs of smoke rhythmically pumping out of its exhaust. Toby emerged from his trailer as it pulled near and ten seconds later the car was speeding away up the drive. When it had disappeared from view, Gemma smiled to herself. Now that was why she earned her lovely fat pay cheque.

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and called through to a rather harried First AD to let him know that their star was on his way. Fabulous. Time to go and start dishing out those call sheets …

Her phone had just hit the bottom of her pocket when it buzzed at her again.

What now? She hoped desperately that they weren’t going to tell her it had started raining again and that she’d be back on A-list babysitting duty within ten minutes. But when she stared at the caller ID she realised it wasn’t either of those options.

I know you must be terribly busy rubbing shoulders with Brad Pitt or whoever, but I really need to talk to you about Christmas. ;-) Call me. Jx

The cute little winky face didn’t fool Gemma one bit. She could hear the silent screaming that had gone on while her sister had composed her breezy little message. She stared at it as the screen dimmed from bright to half-lit. She knew she needed to talk to Juliet about Christmas. She’d known it for about a fortnight now. But …

The image of a gently swaying palm tree over golden sand and a cocktail big enough to house goldfish flitted across her mind.

She sighed.

She wasn’t in the mood to talk about gingerbread recipes ad nauseam or debate whether to have turkey or goose for the big day. She also wasn’t in the mood to deal with thinly veiled comments on how she lived her life, how often she phoned or if she’d remembered to ask about the kids’ school reports. If she responded now she’d only come across as stressed and defensive. Which she was.

Later. She’d talk to Juliet later. When she’d finished work. When she had more time.

When she’d had a couple of gin and tonics, maybe.

CHAPTER TWO

Twenty minutes later Juliet found herself standing outside the ball pit in the local leisure centre’s soft-play area. She closed her eyes and opened them again, not quite able to believe what she was seeing. There was Great-aunt Sylvia, sitting in the middle of the thousands of brightly coloured plastic balls, looking grim. Apart from her aunt, herself and two uniformed officers, the play area was almost deserted. A few cross-looking mothers were hurrying their children into their coats and shoes and tutting about having to cut short their afternoon’s activities.

‘She won’t come out, no matter what we say,’ the petite female officer told Juliet. ‘She keeps asking for Mary.’

Juliet nodded. Well, no luck there. Her mother had been dead for almost five years. She stepped into the ball pond and waded towards her aunt. ‘Hello, Aunt Sylvia … These nice police officers are wondering if you’d like to come out of here now.’

Aunt Sylvia shot a withering look at the two uniformed people looking on. ‘I don’t like the look of that girl. Eyes are too close together. She’ll get up to no good when she grows up, you mark my words!’

Juliet stared at her great-aunt helplessly. Somewhere deep inside she wanted to weep – for the indignity of the situation the old woman was in now, for who she’d become and who she’d forgotten she’d once been – but Juliet didn’t do crying. Not in public, at least. And especially not when everyone else was expecting her to make everything right again.

She held out her hand. ‘It’s time to go home now, Aunt Sylvia. Come on …’

Her aunt’s head snapped round as she stopped glaring at the female police officer and transferred her attention to Juliet. ‘Mary!’ she exclaimed.

Juliet gave her a weak smile. She supposed that in her aunt’s dementia-riddled mind, the boundaries between mother and daughter had somehow blurred. And the older she got, the more she saw her mother’s face staring back in the mirror at her. Same brown eyes, same long nose and high cheekbones. Not exactly pretty, but with enough good bone structure that she’d never be plain, either. But in the last few months the grooves in her forehead had grown deeper and her eyes had become more hooded. Her age – and her divorce – were showing up there now.

Sylvia crossed her arms. ‘These people put me in here and won’t let me get out again,’ she said. ‘That’s why I said they had to fetch you. I knew you’d come and sort it all out! You always were such a good girl …’

‘I’m not Mary,’ she said soothingly. ‘It’s Juliet. Mary’s daughter.’

A flicker of confusion passed across the old woman’s features. Juliet inched a little closer, but her aunt, suddenly wary and now doubting the identification of her visitor, just backed away.

Juliet sighed. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. She lowered herself, jiggling slightly to push the balls out of the way, until her bottom made contact with the slippery plastic padded floor.

Aunt Sylvia suddenly smiled. ‘Oh, yes! I remember …’ She stared out across the sea of bright plastic for a moment, her lips in a slight curve, lost in a memory that Juliet suspected might evaporate before she managed to vocalise it.

But then she muttered, ‘Lively little thing, Mary’s daughter. She looked like an angel with those big blue eyes and white-blonde curls.’

Something inside Juliet sank. After all the hours spent with her great-aunt over the last couple of months …

She’d been blonder when she’d been little, but her hair had always been straight with a wavy kink. She’d never been blessed with the wispy ringlets her aunt was describing. It wasn’t this sister that Sylvia was remembering.

Her aunt blinked and turned to her again. ‘You know her, you say? Mary’s little girl?’

Juliet opened her mouth to explain it all patiently again, but closed it before any sound emerged. What was the point? ‘Yes, I know her,’ she replied wearily.

Sylvia smiled back. ‘Did she send you to me? She’s been away for such a long time.’

Gemma hadn’t seen Aunt Sylvia since last Easter, and the old woman could really do with regular visits from people she knew and remembered. Not that Juliet’s twice-weekly sessions seemed to be helping much. Back in the summer Sylvia had nearly always called her by name, even if there had been a handful of days when she’d smiled and nodded blankly, then referred to her as ‘that nice young girl’. But as the days had become shorter and greyer, her great-aunt had grown more and more confused, as if her memory was seeping away with the sunlight. Now she only knew who Juliet was one visit in four, and even then her recollection was patchy, fading in and out, like a badly tuned radio.

‘No, Gemma didn’t send me,’ she told her aunt. ‘But she’ll be home for Christmas this year, so you’ll see her then.’

‘Oh, good! Do you think she’ll want a sweetie when she gets here? Little girls like sweeties.’ Aunt Sylvia plunged her hands into the plastic balls beside her, not seeming to register the noisy rattling that echoed through the hangar-like building. She pulled her handbag out and rested it on her lap, then rummaged inside before proudly producing a small object, which she held carefully between thumb and forefinger. Juliet thought it might once have been a boiled sweet, but the lint and other old-lady gunk from the bottom of the bag had disguised it almost completely.

‘Here it is! Do you think she’d like it?’

Juliet thought of Gemma, how everything was so effortless for her, how she breezed in and out of everyone’s lives without a care in the world, and she found herself saying, ‘Yes. I think she’d like it very much. Why don’t you save it for her?’

Juliet had never really considered herself as having a naughty side, but she got a strange warm feeling when she thought of Gemma having not only to suck, but to swallow, the furry little ball of sugar when Juliet dragged her along for her next visit. Because drag Juliet would.

Sylvia dropped the sweet into a clean cotton handkerchief and placed it carefully back in the corner of her bag. Juliet wondered if it would have grown by the next time she saw it, like a strange kind of handbag snowball, rolling around in the fluff and debris.

‘It’s time to go home now,’ she repeated when her aunt closed her handbag and looked back up at her. Aunt Sylvia stared at her blankly for a second then held out a hand for Juliet to grasp hold of. She supported her aunt while she got to her feet, and then guided her back across the floor of the ball pond and helped her over the padded step that led to the main floor of the soft-play area.

The two police officers breathed out a sigh of relief and offered to take them back to Greenacres, the nursing home that really shouldn’t have lost Aunt Sylvia in the first place. Juliet was most cross about that. It wasn’t as if they didn’t charge enough.

The offer of a lift for Aunt Sylvia was tempting, but Juliet reckoned they’d get further if she just took the old lady back herself. She was used to Juliet’s car and was possibly less likely to get confused and distressed all over again if someone she knew – or almost knew – drove her.

Juliet checked her watch and felt her neck muscles tighten. Ten to three. She only just had enough time to take her aunt back to Greenacres, have a firm word with someone in charge, then race to St Martin’s to pick up her youngest three children.

They were just reaching her car, parked a little oddly in front of the leisure centre, when Juliet pulled up short.

The turkey!

Oh, well. There was nothing for it now. She was just going to have to cram that into her already packed schedule for tomorrow.

It doesn’t matter, she told herself. It’s fine. You can handle it. You’re good at organising and multi-tasking and getting things done.

Even so, once she’d checked her aunt was strapped in securely, then started up her car and made the ten-minute drive back to the nursing home, the empty row of boxes in her Christmas notebook began to haunt her.

Juliet drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and checked the clock on her car dashboard for the umpteenth time.

‘Ow!’ a small voice from behind her said.

She glanced in the rear-view mirror to see what her youngest three children were up to. ‘Polly, leave your brother alone.’

Polly stared back at her and pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, the picture of ten-year-old innocence. ‘I didn’t do anything he didn’t deserve.’ Ten-going-on-forty, that was.

Juliet unclipped her seatbelt and turned to face her daughter, who was wedged between her two younger brothers in their booster seats. ‘I’ve told you before, Polly, you can’t just rule over your brothers with a rod of iron because you’re older than them.’

Polly looked unimpressed. ‘Someone’s got to.’ She flicked a haughty look at Josh, who was obviously the accused in this situation. ‘These children are positively feral, Mother.’

Juliet didn’t have time to argue with a ten-year-old about her parenting skills, so she turned to Josh. ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing!’

She looked at Polly, knowing her daughter would be only too happy to testify against him.

‘He keeps moving his leg over onto my bit of the seat, and I’m compressed enough as it is. I did warn him I’d make him move it if he did it again.’

Well, she couldn’t fault Polly’s logic, but she could hardly let her daughter police the rest of the family’s behaviour – they’d all be locked up and sentenced to torture within the week if that were the case. Even Juliet. ‘If the boys give you trouble, you’re supposed to come to me about it,’ she told Polly. ‘Understand?’

Polly rolled her eyes, but eventually gave her a reluctant nod.

When Juliet turned back round to face forwards again, she noticed the clock on the dashboard. It was already three forty. Where in the world was Violet? She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket and sent another short and to-the-point text to her daughter, warning her that the taxi service was leaving in exactly three minutes, and that if she wasn’t here by then she’d have to get two buses home instead.

Just as she was turning the key in the ignition to start up the car, the door opened and Violet flopped into the passenger seat with a sigh. She was smiling, looking completely unconcerned that she’d kept the rest of them waiting.

She laughed, shaking her head. ‘You’ll never guess what Abby just said—’

Juliet turned the key and revved the car. ‘We’ve all been sitting here in the cold waiting for you, and you know the boys have swimming tonight!’

Violet’s warm, open expression closed down and she scowled back at her mother. ‘I’m not that late! God, Mum! And I was helping Kiera find her scarf, so it wasn’t my fault anyway.’

Juliet shook her head, clipped her belt back up and winced at the sound of crunching gears as she put her car into reverse.

Not my fault … Now where had she heard that before? Violet was turning into a mini version of Gemma.

As she drove she could see Violet out of the corner of her eye, hunched in the passenger seat, arms folded and scowling. The atmosphere wasn’t improved by the start of a squabble in the back seat, either, as Polly accused Josh of leaving his arm two millimetres further into her space than it should have been, and then Jake jumped in to defend his brother and deliberately drew Polly’s fire by invading her space from the other side.

‘Stop that!’ Juliet yelled. ‘Jake, you just kicked me in the back! Now, the three of you calm down and behave yourselves.’

And then she turned to her eldest daughter. They needed to have a little chat about her attitude, or else she’d turn out just like her aunt, causing mayhem for everyone else then refusing to take responsibility for it, but she realised she was now approaching a mini roundabout that always got clogged up at that time of day. ‘We’ll talk about this later, Vi,’ she said, glancing quickly in both directions. ‘But you’ve got to learn to express your opinions without being rude, because I won’t have you talking to me like—’

Unfortunately, the fight in the back seat erupted again at that moment and a deft kick in the back of her seat from Jake caused her to pitch forward. Her foot slipped off the clutch as she was crossing the roundabout and the car growled then stalled as it straddled the little white hump.

The car to her right slammed on its brakes and the driver leaned on his horn. Juliet’s heart pounded and her arms shook. The man was using his hands in the most creative of ways and she could lip-read enough of his tirade to know he thought she was a middle-class bitch who shouldn’t be allowed to operate a vehicle.

A stalled car in the middle of the junction meant that traffic backed up in all four directions. Horns blared. Drivers swore. All four of Juliet’s children started to scream and shout at each other, letting each other know, without holding back on the toilet-related insults, just whose fault it was.

Juliet found she couldn’t move. She was just frozen, fingers clenched around the steering wheel. She couldn’t even remember which pedal to press or what to do next to get the car started again. But the noise – the engines, the horns, the bickering children – was burrowing into her skull in a way she just couldn’t bear.

‘Will you just shut up!’ she bellowed at the top of her lungs, surprising herself with the volume, hearing the croak as her voice broke when she reached maximum decibels.

Outside the car the commotion continued, but inside everything went still and quiet. Violet, Polly, Josh and Jake stared at their mother open-mouthed.

She could feel the echo of her words pulsing around inside her head and it scared her slightly. She didn’t shout like that. Ever. And she certainly didn’t lose her temper with her children, not to this degree, anyway. Of course, she disciplined – she’d read countless books on how to do it properly – but she never just screamed at the kids. Right from when they were babies she’d always feared the kind of woman who did that was also the kind of woman who dragged toddlers down the street with their arms half out of their sockets or walloped them in the middle of supermarkets.

She’d had a feeling that things were a little off-kilter for weeks now, but she’d just put it down to the idea of Christmas looming ahead of her. As much as she loved the season, it would now be forever associated with the departure of the man she’d planned to spend her life with. If your husband choosing Boxing Day to announce your marriage was over didn’t leave a stain on a celebration, then she didn’t know what did.

Still, Juliet was good with stains, knew all the tricks and tips to get them to vanish. With the right amount of determination, you’d hardly ever know they’d been there once she’d finished with them. This one would be no different. She’d just have to try harder.

She became aware of quiet breathing beside her and in the back of the car. Silence verging on the miraculous. For the first time in years all four kids had shut up at the same time. She needed to reward them for that, didn’t she? Positive reinforcement.

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, and if she’d been able to feel anything in the numbness of the after-shock of her outburst, she’d have been pleased at how calm and rational she sounded.

‘Mum …?’ a shaky voice said from beside her. ‘Are you okay?’

Juliet took some air in and held it. There was nothing left now. Not the dizzying frustration, not the clawing sense of racing towards a goal that got ever further away. Not even the fear that Violet would turn out to be exactly like Gemma and push her away for ever. Just nothing. It was wonderful.

‘Yes,’ she said, letting the breath out again. ‘Everything’s fine.’

The ability to not only think but also drive returned, so she started the engine, yanked the car into gear and without making eye contact with any of the drivers giving her withering looks she carried on her journey to the swimming pool.

CHAPTER THREE

The kids were still a bit subdued over tea that evening, but once they’d all tidied their plates away and headed off in their individual directions the sounds of normality began to creep back into Juliet’s household – the stomp of Violet’s feet on the stairs, an argument breaking out on the landing, the tinny cacophony of a cartoon show somewhere on a television …

‘Your dad’s going to be here at seven thirty,’ Juliet yelled up the stairs. ‘Make sure you have your stuff together by then.’

And, miraculously, they did. By the time Greg rang the doorbell four overnight bags were lined up in the hall and four children were in various stages of getting their winter coats on.

Greg looked tense when she opened the door. ‘Are they ready?’

Juliet nodded. It was odd, her standing here and him standing there. She hadn’t quite got over the shock of it each time he arrived to pick up the kids for his allotted weekend. She still wasn’t really sure what had gone wrong between them. They’d thought themselves the perfect couple, and this their perfect house, and then their four perfect children had come along and they’d been so happy … But now she could see how smug they’d been in the middle of all that perfection, how complacent.

She hadn’t seen it coming. Not in the slightest.

It was as if on her rigidly maintained To Do list she’d forgotten to reserve a tick box for ‘prepare for the disintegrating of your life and a painful divorce’. How stupid of her. She was never normally that disorganised.

‘Can I open the car, Dad?’ Josh said, pushing past Juliet’s legs and reaching for the key in his father’s hand.

‘No, I want to!’ Jake said, trying to nudge his brother out of the way.

Greg handed the key over to Josh. ‘Josh can open the car up now and you can lock it when we get there,’ he told Jake. Both boys ran off in the direction of the drive. At least Violet and Polly stopped to give their mother a kiss on the cheek before they went out the door.

She ran after them, hugged them to her, one under each arm, and gave them a proper kiss. ‘Love you,’ she said, squeezing them, ‘and I’m sorry about earlier on.’

Violet shrugged.

Polly gave her an unblinking stare. ‘You know, as shock tactics go, it was really rather good.’

Juliet couldn’t help but smile. She ran after the boys and kissed them as she helped strap them into their booster seats in the back of Greg’s car.

When the doors were closed, the kids effectively sound-proofed from their conversation, Greg looked at her across the top of the car.

‘You look tired, Juliet,’ he said as he knocked on the window and signalled for Josh to return his keys. ‘Maybe you should try to chill out a little instead of doing the whole Christmas rigmarole this year?’

The smile immediately dropped from Juliet’s face. Oh, he sounded so polite and reasonable. So polite and reasonable she wanted to knock his block off. He still thought he had a say about how she behaved, or could comment on how she looked? Seriously? He’d given up that right when he’d moved out and moved on.

And there was nothing wrong with wanting to make Christmas a happy time, when nothing went wrong and everything was perfect. Greg’s surprise exit had put a blight on the festivities two years ago and last Christmas had been their first one living apart, the poor kids ferried from pillar to post and feeling very unsettled, so Juliet was determined this year should be extra special, especially as their father was being totally selfish about the whole thing.

‘Goodbye, Greg,’ she said through teeth so tightly clenched her jaw was starting to hurt, and then she bent and smiled brightly and waved to their children in the car. They didn’t need to know their mother and father were arguing again.

She kept it up as he shook his head and climbed into the driver’s seat and pulled away, but the effort of keeping that smile in place as they pulled out of the drive started to make her head pound. Once the Mercedes had rounded the hedge and joined the traffic on the road outside, she let it all out in a most colourful and unladylike word, the sort of thing she’d trained herself out of saying when the kids had been small, and then she hugged her arms around her to stave off the cold and marched back into her empty house in her slippers.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so galling if Greg hadn’t found it so easy to move on. They’d split, he’d grieved and now he had a new girlfriend. Easy as that. Sometimes Juliet wished she could find someone else, just so she could show him she wasn’t lagging behind, that he had no reason to pity her.

As she stalked into the kitchen and reached inside the fridge for a bottle of Pinot Grigio, she spotted her phone lying innocent and silent on the kitchen counter and her thoughts turned from one self-absorbed family member to another.

She kept eyeing her mobile while she emptied a generous amount of wine into a wine glass and took a large slug. And then she flexed her texting fingers.

When Gemma eventually fell into bed she didn’t even bother to put her pyjamas on. She just stripped down to her T-shirt and crawled under the covers. She picked her phone up off the bedside table and squinted at it. Two twenty-five. She had to be up in – what? – three hours? It was positively inhuman.

She flumped back heavily onto the soft down pillows and stared at the ceiling as tiredness rolled over her, but instead of sinking beneath those glorious waves, she was tossed and turned on them, feeling the pull of gravity on her eyelids but not quite able to surrender to unconsciousness.

Grunting, she reached for her phone and swiped the screen to wake it up. As usual, this was the only time she’d had all day to check her messages. The little badge on the app told her there were five waiting. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess who at least one of them was from. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she stared at the screen, promising a reprieve, but then, rather annoyingly, they refocused themselves again.

It had been the day from hell. Toby Thornton had had one of his legendary meltdowns and Gemma hadn’t even had the time to eat, let alone sit down in the last twenty-four hours. It was her job to sort things out again, to charm their star into setting foot on set again, and it was taking every last ounce of her resources to make that happen. Millions of dollars were at stake. She didn’t have time to indulge Juliet’s petty moans about the right kind of ivy or whether they should have a red or gold theme for the Christmas table settings.

She couldn’t deal with her sister now. She needed a bit of down time first, so she decided to check Facebook instead.

Cute cats who couldn’t spell … Sick-making chain-posts about how wonderful women friends were … Her cousin Shelley’s dog dressed in a party hat … Yada, yada, yada.

But then Gemma stopped scrolling and blinked. Holding her breath, she went back up and had a proper look at the photo in her timeline.

It was Michael. Damn, he looked good. Even though it had been seven months since they’d split, she still felt a little jolt go through her.

He’d look even better if he wasn’t wrapped around some trollop with glossy brown hair and a wide smile. Well, not wrapped around wrapped around. He was hugging her from the back, his arms draped over her shoulders like he was a preppy cardigan. Their cheeks were pressed together and they were laughing at the camera.

Cow.

Even though she knew she shouldn’t, she tapped his profile picture to visit his timeline. Big mistake. If she’d thought she’d felt terrible when she’d climbed into bed, she felt even worse now his status had smugly morphed from ‘in a relationship with Allie Cameron’ to ‘engaged to Allie Cameron’.

She felt sick. Her thumb was shaky on the home button as she hid the picture and closed the app without looking at it again. Suddenly she wasn’t sleepy in the least. Michael had been different from all the others. Perfect, she’d thought. He was supposed to have been the one that lasted.

Ugh. Well, she might as well get all the crap over with at once …

Without waiting to talk herself out of it, she checked her messages. As predicted, there was one from Juliet.

Gemma! Will you PLEASE reply to my texts! I know you don’t realise it, but you’re being very selfish. I need to talk to you. SOON. Call me! J x

She stared at her phone, unable to produce a noise from her open mouth. Who did Juliet think she was? Honestly! It wasn’t as if she was just lounging around doing nothing all day. There was a reason she hadn’t had time to text back. It was called having a job, having a life. Just because Juliet didn’t have one and decided to cram her days full with fussy little craft activities and gourmet cooking, it didn’t mean she could pass judgement on anyone who didn’t want to do the same.

But that was typical Juliet. If you weren’t doing things her way, you were doing them wrong. And it had always been like that, no matter how hard Gemma had tried.

No wonder the people she worked with felt more like family than her own sister did. Not the actors, of course. They were a law unto themselves. But the rest of the crew. For a few months at a time they’d live together, eat together, share everything. It felt more like home than sitting on Juliet’s pristine sofa trying not to drop biscuit crumbs. At least film people knew how to work as a team, and they needed and respected her contribution.

She lay still and stared at the ceiling. Why? Why was she putting herself through this? And the more she thought about it, the more she wondered if spending Christmas with her sister was a good idea after all. Goodwill to all mankind? Hah! The way she was feeling right now, Juliet might end Christmas night in a body bag.