As a child, FIONA HARPER was constantly teased for two things: having her nose in a book and living in a dream world. Things haven’t changed much since then, but at least she’s found a career that puts her runaway imagination to use!

Fiona loves dancing, so clear the floor if you’re ever at a party with her, and her current creative craze (one of a long list!) is jewellery making. She loves good books, good films and good food, especially anything cinnamon-flavoured, and she can always find room in her diet for chocolate or champagne!

Fiona loves to hear from readers and you can contact her through fiona@fionaharper.com or find her on her Facebook page (Fiona Harper Romance Author) or tweet her! (@FiHarperAuthor)

Make My Wish Come True
Fiona Harper

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For my go-to girls—

Donna and Barbara, and Heidi and Daisy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to both Anna Boatman and Anna Baggaley, who are both brilliant editors and lovely to work with. To all the team at Harlequin UK, for giving me the chance to write the kind of books I’ve always dreamed of writing. Also, to my very first editor at Harlequin, Kim Young. I know I wouldn’t be taking the next step in my career if it hadn’t been for her support and belief in me. I’d also like to say a big thank you to my amazing agent, Lizzy Kremer.

I’d especially like to thank Daisy Cummins for allowing me to pick her brains on the work of an assistant director and for the invaluable insider information on the film industry. I’d also like to say a cheeky thank-you to my sister, Kirsteen, my step-sisters, Justine and Alexandra, and to both my daughters, for helping to give me plenty of insight into the complicated, wonderful, exasperating, but ultimately inspiring, world of sisterhood. I love you all, and I couldn’t have written this book without you.

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.

CHAPTER FOUR

It was so quiet in the house that Juliet was tempted to slump into an armchair with a bottle of wine and not get up again. The only thing that stopped her was a good, hard look at the kitchen clock. It was only ten past three on Saturday afternoon. She’d resisted the urge to do that kind of thing after Greg had left and she certainly wasn’t going to do it now. Besides, she had too much to do. The clotted cream fudge the kids were giving out as teacher presents this year wouldn’t make itself.

She was just measuring out the golden syrup when she became aware of a dull electronic hum in a nearby garden. She listened to its comforting droning while she boiled the mixture, then whisked it until it began to crystallise, but as she poured it into the pan to cool she frowned.

The mower had started off as a muffled hum, but now it sounded as if it was much closer, almost as if it was right outside her kitchen window. She walked over to the other side of the room, wiping her hands on her apron, to look out over her back garden.

The next second she was running outside, wooden spoon still in her hand.

‘Will! What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ she shouted.

Her next-door neighbour just looked up then kept walking the mower along her lawn. ‘I think I’m cutting your grass,’ he said, totally deadpan.

Juliet’s mouth opened and closed. She put her hands on her hips and frowned. Eventually she said, ‘I was going to get around to that myself, you know.’

‘Do you want me to stop?’ he yelled over the noise of the engine.

She frowned even harder. She knew he would if she asked him to, but the thought of having to add one more job to her schedule made her shoulders sag. He was almost two-thirds of the way through now, anyway. It would be silly to ask him to stop, but it didn’t sit comfortably with her to let him do it for nothing, so she went back inside and returned a few minutes later with two brightly patterned bone-china mugs of tea and held one aloft. He nodded but didn’t come and collect it until he’d dealt with the extra tough grass round the bottom of her lone apple tree.

She sipped her tea and watched him over the rim of her mug as he switched the mower off and jogged lightly up her long, thin garden to join her. She blushed as he approached.

She’d always considered him a nice-looking man. He was tall and sporty looking, with chestnut-brown hair and eyes that she thought of as warm, even though she couldn’t remember the precise colour. He was younger than her by a couple of years, but she never got the feeling he was taking pity on the middle-aged woman next door. Besides, she didn’t look too bad for a woman who’d just hit forty. She took good care of herself, dressed nicely.

‘Thanks,’ Will said as he took the mug from her and gave her one of his rare but rather captivating smiles.

They both stood and looked at Juliet’s freshly mown garden. ‘Actually, it’s me that needs to thank you. I’ve been meaning to do that for weeks.’

He shrugged. ‘I was doing my garden anyway …’

‘I know. I could hear you while I was in the kitchen making fudge for the kids’ teacher presents. It just took me a while to work out the rumble of the mower had moved closer and was in my garden instead of yours.’

His eyebrows lifted. ‘Fudge? That sounds very labour-intensive.’

She sighed and shook her head. ‘I’ve always done something home-made. It started off when Violet was little and Greg was just starting the business. It was the cheap option back then, and somehow it’s just become a tradition.’

His eyelids lowered a little, as if he was studying her. Juliet resisted the urge to fidget. It was always so difficult to tell what Will was thinking.

‘Traditions like that aren’t carved in stone, you know. You can change them any time you want. Wouldn’t it be quicker to just run down to the supermarket and pick up a bottle?’

‘I suppose so … but the teachers get so much wine and chocolate this time of year, I just wanted to give them something special.’ Her expression softened and her lips curved. ‘And I don’t want to be accused of contributing to the alcoholism of primary school teachers …’

‘But contributing to their obesity is okay?’

‘Shut up,’ she said, and laughed softly.

He turned to study the garden as he drank his tea. She’d thought, when they first met, that maybe there was a little flicker of something between them. She’d quickly eradicated it, of course, since she’d still been married to Greg and Will had been tied up with a serious girlfriend. And then after Greg had left she just hadn’t been in any shape to think about men at all – unless abject hatred was involved. She looked across at him, frowning as he stared at a patch of clumpy grass near the greenhouse, and wondered if she was going to have to tell him not to get the strimmer out, but then he turned to her and spoke first.

‘If you don’t mind me saying, Juliet, you look like you’ve had one hell of a week.’

‘Thanks!’ she said in mock outrage. Will didn’t always say a lot, but when he did, he definitely didn’t mince his words. He wasn’t wrong, though. She sighed and held out her hand for his empty mug. ‘Come in for another one of those when you’re finished and I’ll tell you all about it. I even have fudge cooling in the pan …’

Wills ears pricked up. She knew he had a fondness sweet things, and she could always make another batch for the kids’ teachers.

‘It’s a deal,’ he said, and smiled again, more gently this time, and something at the bottom of Juliet’s stomach quivered.

She held her breath and nodded. And then she took the mugs into the kitchen and closed the door without looking back.

She didn’t know if she liked that quiver.

It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant sensation, but it wasn’t an altogether comfortable one, either.

Twenty minutes later Will appeared in her kitchen and sat down on one of the mismatched chairs she’d paid an inordinate amount of money for in a second-hand furniture shop down the high street. The sextet of chairs now surrounding her heavy oak kitchen table said quirky, eclectic, free-spirited … Which was the look she’d been going for. Even if she did feel a bit of a fake when she sat in them sometimes.

He looked all fresh and windblown and she felt her stomach do that weird thing again. She’d been with Greg so long that she’d all but forgotten what the first flush of attraction felt like. Was this it? Or was it just her IBS flaring up again? She really couldn’t say.

‘Please tell me there really is fudge,’ he said, looking at the tray still cooling on the kitchen counter.

She picked it up and placed it into the centre of the kitchen table, but it went too quiet as he watched her cut it into neat squares and suddenly she felt very self-conscious under his gaze. ‘More tea?’ she asked a little too loudly, and prised a generous helping of clotted cream fudge onto a plate.

Will shook his head. ‘I think I’ve already drunk a gallon this afternoon.’

Juliet frowned as she divided one of the fudge squares in two and popped it on a plate for herself. ‘It’s a bit rich to eat on its own.’ She scanned the kitchen, looking for something else to offer him, and her gaze came to rest on a bottle sitting near the hob, one she’d opened for the casserole she’d made yesterday. She grabbed the red wine and plonked it down on the kitchen table with a thud.

Will’s eyebrows raised.

‘You’re right,’ she said, sighing. ‘It has been one hell of a week.’

She peeked out of the window. Although it was just after four, the sun was close to setting. It was practically evening. Not too early for a civilised glass of wine with a friend.

He didn’t exactly smile, but his eyes warmed, so she fetched a couple of glasses from the cabinet and poured them both a modest amount. It didn’t take long to fill him in on the whole story of Aunt Sylvia’s great escape the day before. Somehow her glass emptied and she found herself reaching for the bottle and dishing out more wine – a more generous helping this time. It seemed a shame to leave a tiny bit in the bottom of the bottle.

When she was halfway through it, she started to wonder about the wisdom of too much Merlot with only half a square of fudge to line one’s stomach, especially as Will had listened so sympathetically to her tale of woe that she just kept talking.

‘It seems so quiet at the weekends when the kids are at Greg’s,’ she said, her shoulders slumping a little. ‘I know I moan that they drive me insane when they’re here, but it’s even worse when they’re gone.’ She sighed. ‘Oh, well. I suppose at least I’ve got them all to myself for Christmas this year.’

Will, who’d been not-so-surreptitiously reaching for another piece of fudge, looked at her. ‘I thought you said Greg and the new girlfriend were supposed to be coming here for a united family Christmas?’

She shook her head. And then nodded. ‘Well, I offered, but apparently Anoushka made plans that were just too good to pass up. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that came through her job, Greg said.’ She hated the tinge of bitterness that had crept into her tone. ‘They’re going to Bali, or somewhere like that. Escaping the Christmas madness.’

Will looked puzzled. ‘That doesn’t sound like the Greg I know.’

Juliet shrugged. It didn’t sound like the Greg she knew either. He hadn’t been like that when they’d been married. She’d have loved it if he’d wanted to drop everything just to be with her, or if he’d whisked her off on an exotic holiday. But work and commitments had always come first with Greg. And she’d understood that. Supported it, even. But he’d changed the moment he’d met flipping Anoushka, and for some reason that really cheesed her off.

She shook her head and took another large slug of wine. ‘She’s the love of his life, apparently. At least, that’s the only explanation he gave me when I called him on it.’

Without warning her eyes filled with moisture. She quickly looked down at the table and worked her eyelashes hard, trying to get it to evaporate. After a few seconds a warm hand covered hers. She took in a shuddering breath then peered at Will through the long fringe that had fallen over her face when she’d bowed her head.

His expression might have seemed neutral to a stranger, but Juliet glimpsed the understanding in his eyes. ‘I know it’s hard …’

She nodded. After a few seconds she slid her hand from underneath his and curled her fingers round the stem of her wine glass. She knew he knew.

‘It’s just that once you have a ring on your finger, you think you’ve earned the right to be the love of someone’s life. I mean, if they didn’t feel that way, why would they marry you in the first place?’ This was a question she’d asked herself a thousand times since Greg’s surprise exit, and a thousand times more since he’d met the fabulous Anoushka.

‘I wouldn’t mind …’ Now the confessions had started spilling out of her she couldn’t seem to stop. ‘But she’s not the trophy wife upgrade, is she? I think I could have coped with that better, because Greg was always fussy about appearances, and I know I’m hurtling into middle age …’

Will gave her a look that might have said Stop it! but she ignored him.

‘But she’s two months older than me. She’s shorter and at least a dress size bigger. She’s not Juliet mark two, the sleeker, faster model. She’s just … different.’

Not her.

Maybe that’s why Greg had never once told her she was the love of his life. Not that she’d realised his omission until far, far too late.

‘More fool him, then,’ Will said firmly, but Juliet couldn’t read his expression. It wasn’t a possessive kind of look, more a I’m sticking up for my friend kind of look. What had the hand thing been about, then? Did he like her? And did she want him to? Oh, she was so confused!

She didn’t want to be ‘back on the market’ again. It was too nerve-racking. The Juliet who used to date and go dancing and knew how to talk to men who weren’t her husband seemed like a creature from a parallel universe.

‘Did you feel this way when Samantha left?’ she asked.

‘If you mean, did I understand my significant other running off then hooking up with an older, fatter woman, then no.’

Juliet couldn’t help but laugh. This was what she liked about Will. He always made her feel better. His presence was … comforting.

He gave her a wry smile. ‘Did I second-guess myself for months afterwards? Yes. I know Sam and I weren’t together anywhere close to the amount of time you were with Greg, but it does get better. You just need to give yourself time, Juliet.’

Time. How unfortunate that time was a commodity in short supply in her life at the moment. Juggling kids and home had been hard enough when there’d been another adult around. Doing it on her own now there was a part-time job and a senile aunt thrown into the mix was nigh on impossible. Will was right, though. She needed time.

Oh, not just the days and weeks and months ticking past, although that had helped. She didn’t even really want Greg back any more. She just didn’t want to be jealous of what he had now. If life was fair, it would be her who was having a passionate affair, while her ex moped around his empty house regretting what he’d so carelessly thrown away.

A snuffle of laughter almost escaped. Yeah, right. Passionate affair? Who in their right mind would want one of those with her?

‘It gets so complicated, doesn’t it?’ she said thoughtfully, and then, just to see how Will would respond to the probe, she threw in another question. ‘And have you had enough time? Have you moved on?’

Will thought for a moment, and then he nodded. ‘I think I have.’

Which led to something else she wanted to know. ‘So why haven’t I seen a steady parade of attractive women beating down your door?’

‘Well, there hasn’t been any actual door beating as such, but I’ve been on a few dates.’

Oh. She hadn’t expected him to say that. ‘Anyone nice?’ she asked nonchalantly and twisted the stem of her wine glass in her fingers.

He sighed. ‘That’s not the problem.’

She glanced up at him. ‘Then what is?’

He shook his head gently. ‘I just always seem to go for the wrong type …’

‘What does that mean?’

‘There have been a few girls I’ve been out with that have sparked my interest, but I let it fizzle out after a few dinners. The ones I want to see again always end up reminding me of Sam.’

‘Really?’

‘I don’t mean looks-wise, I mean personality-wise …’ He lifted one shoulder then let it drop again. ‘Even when I try not to, I end up asking out someone who turns out to be just like her – free-spirited, unpredictable.’

‘Exciting, you mean,’ Juliet said, feeling her stomach sink. There it was again, that phrase. Free-spirited. It seemed that was what men wanted, even when they didn’t want to want it.

Will held her gaze. ‘Unreliable.’

She found she couldn’t look away. ‘And you don’t want that?’

‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I’m ready to stay in one place, put down some roots. That’s why I bought that big old house next door in the first place.’

‘Probably shouldn’t have made the big old marriage proposal to go with it without finding out if she wanted that too.’

That’s when Sam had run. And, unlike Greg, who’d at least had the decency to have a conversation with her before he’d left, Sam had just upped and gone, packed her bags and disappeared, leaving only a short and unsatisfactory note.

A flicker of discomfort crossed Will’s features. She began to apologise, but he shook his head and dismissed the words before they’d left her mouth. This was why she didn’t drink much, and especially not on an empty stomach; she always ended up saying things she regretted later.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘And that’s why I’m not in the market for another relationship like that – another woman like that. I’m looking for someone sensible, grounded. Someone who understands the concepts of home and family.’

Those words could have been instantly forgettable, if not for the way he was looking at her. Brown. His eyes were brown. Her pulse skipped again and she held her breath.

Something new appeared in Will’s expression. Something that looked suspiciously like a question.

In an instant, Juliet was out of her seat and clearing away wine glasses and fussing with fudge pans. Why? she asked herself, as she placed the empty wine bottle in the glass recycling. Why couldn’t you have just stayed still and looked back at the good-looking man who seems to like you? Why did you have to scurry away like Polly’s scared hamster?

Even now she couldn’t stop her busyness. It seemed to be her default position when anything uncomfortable happened. Eventually, she managed to slow herself down enough to not put on a pair of rubber gloves and start the washing-up. Instead she turned to look at Will, who was pushing his chair back and reaching for the jacket that was half-dangling on the floor.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered.

His mouth didn’t move from the straight line it was set in, but somehow she felt as if he was giving her the slightest of smiles. ‘For what?’

For not being ready, she wanted to say, but all she did was swallow.

Will gave her an infinitesimal tilt of the head. ‘The fudge was fabulous, by the way …’

‘Thanks,’ she said weakly as he disappeared through the back door. She heard him collect the mower and wrestle it back into his own garden, and when everything was silent outside once more she sat back down at her kitchen table and finished the entire pan of fudge off on her own.

CHAPTER FIVE

Gemma stopped her car outside Juliet’s house, engine still running, but didn’t pull onto the drive. She sat there for a few moments, staring at the neatly-clipped evergreen hedge.

This was stupid. She was a grown woman in her thirties, but every time she approached Juliet’s front door the same thing happened: the years peeled away and suddenly she felt like a little kid who was merely something to be tolerated, a problem to be managed.

She drew in a long breath and blew it out again. This was no big deal. Just Juliet. She handled tougher situations on a daily basis at work.

Don’t care. It doesn’t matter what she thinks of you.

She pulled down the sun visor in her sports car and checked her reflection in the mirror. Apart from a couple of blonde ringlets, only her eyes were visible. As she stared at herself they transformed from round and wide like Bambi’s to apathetic and hooded like Garbo’s.

Good. She was ready.

Visiting one’s relations shouldn’t really involve goals and manoeuvres and tactical planning, but Gemma had learned the hard way that going in and dealing with Juliet without a battle plan was like going to war with a water pistol. The plan for today: a flying visit. She would swoop in, deliver the kids’ Christmas presents, chat for as long as she absolutely had to, then exit by fourteen hundred hours. It should be a piece of cake.

She took a deep breath and let it out again before edging her car onto the noisy gravel drive. She was sure Juliet had resisted paving, not only because she liked the old-fashioned look of the little stones, but because no one could approach her domain without her knowledge.

The place looked gorgeous, as it always did at Christmas. The steep gables and red brick of Juliet’s Victorian house suited the season so well. Plain white fairy lights were wound round a tree in the front garden and the struts of the covered porch. An evergreen wreath, complete with pine cones, silver jingle bells and a big red velvet bow graced the glossy black front door with its stained-glass panels, and the lights of a Christmas tree twinkled tantalisingly through the leaded windows of the living room. No doubt, half a forest’s worth of greenery would be inside, tastefully draped on fireplaces and wound round the banisters.

Gemma turned off the engine, got out of the car then went round to the boot to retrieve the two big bags of presents she’d bought for her nieces and nephews. When she’d been shopping for them she’d felt warm and fuzzy – generous – but now the overflowing bags just seemed a little bit much, as if she was trying to make up for something.

Which she was. Not that Juliet knew that yet, of course.

As she closed the boot, Juliet opened the front door and stood waiting for her on the front step. She smiled – albeit thinly – and wrapped her arms across her middle to stave off the chill of the December afternoon. Gemma wished she could experience a little lift of joy at their reunion, but her stomach began a downward journey, like a lift travelling all the way to the basement.

‘Hi!’ she said, walking towards Juliet, her own smile feeling just as brittle and fake. She avoided a full hug, using her laden-down arms as an excuse, and just leaned in to kiss Juliet’s cheek.

There was a stampede of feet once she got into the hall and three small forms came racing towards her and flung their arms around her hips and legs and middle, emitting squeals of, ‘Auntie Gemma!’ ‘Here, let me take those,’ Juliet said, and began to relieve Gemma of her bags before she’d even given an answer.

‘Hey, Josh …’ Gemma said a little breathlessly. ‘You’re squeezing a little hard, mate.’

He looked up at her, still squeezing. He was surprisingly strong for someone that small. ‘I’m Jake. That’s Josh,’ he said, and the other twin just giggled and started squeezing just as hard.

‘Whoever you are, cut it out!’ she yelled. ‘Or I’ll put those Christmas presents back in the car and take them back home.’

That did the trick. Both boys released her and stood watching her hopefully, faces a picture of angelic innocence.

Juliet shook her head. ‘You know the rule, boys. No presents until Christmas morning.’ And she disappeared upstairs with the parcels, much to the very vocal disappointment of the twins. With no brightly wrapped incentive to keep them hugging her, the smaller ones ran off again, leaving the way open for their older sister.

Polly was staring at her in a most unnerving fashion. Gemma smiled at her.

‘You sent me a card that said “Happy Birthday Groovy Eight Year Old”,’ Polly said in an accusing tone. ‘I’m ten.’

Whoops. To be honest, Polly was lucky she’d got one at all. Gemma wasn’t very good at that sort of thing. ‘Sorry,’ she said with a big smile, ‘but you’re growing up so fast I can hardly keep track! Look at you!’

Thankfully, Polly seemed appeased by that answer. ‘You can make it up to me next year,’ she said matter-of-factly.

Gemma smiled and gave her a kiss. ‘I promise I’ll get you one with a big eleven on it.’

Polly just blinked. ‘I was thinking more in terms of cash. And notes are better than coins.’

Gemma bit back a giggle. She’d got her old man’s wheeler-dealer instincts, this one. But she remembered how galling it was to be thought younger than you were at that age, especially when you were the younger sister, always straining to catch up to your older sibling and never getting any closer. She pulled a ten-pound note out her pocket. ‘Why don’t I start now?’ she said in a whisper. ‘But don’t tell the others.’

‘Don’t tell the others what?’ a voice said from the top of the stairs.

Gemma spun round. ‘Violet!’ She waited while her eldest niece descended the stairs then scooped her into a hug. She didn’t always get it right with the little ones, but she and Vi got on like a house on fire. She pulled back and took a good look at her niece. ‘Nice outfit, and I would kill for those legs!’

Violet was wearing a Fearless Vampire Killers T-shirt and skinny jeans that looked sprayed on.

‘I’d kill for a pair of those shoes,’ she said, indicating Gemma’s bright red suede heels, ‘but Mum won’t let me.’

‘You’ll have to forgive her,’ she said, glancing up, ‘she’s too old to remember what having fun is like.’

‘But you’re old too!’ Violet protested. ‘And you know how to have fun.’

‘Thanks … I think,’ Gemma said, laughing softly, and then she leaned closer. ‘Has that cute boy you mentioned in your last email asked you out yet?’

Violet blushed and shook her head. She started to answer, but Juliet appeared on the landing at that moment, so they just shared a conspiratorial smile.

Juliet frowned as she came back down the stairs and Gemma could feel her sister’s disapproval radiating stronger with every step. She knew Juliet and Violet had been going through a bit of a bumpy patch – didn’t all fifteen-year-olds do that with their mothers? – but she couldn’t really help it if Vi saw her as the cool auntie she could talk to about stuff.

When Juliet reached the hall she smiled sweetly and said, ‘It’s really lovely to see you after such a long time.’ But Gemma heard the reproach beneath her words, as only a sibling could. That was the way Juliet did things. Nothing showed on the surface; all the negative stuff simmered unhealthily underneath. Gemma couldn’t stand all that passive-aggressive business.

‘Lovely to see you too,’ she said, smiling back and wishing Juliet’s perfect shell would crack just once, just to see if she was really human.

‘Tea?’ Juliet asked, and led the way through to the kitchen.

Gemma nodded, but braced herself while Juliet filled the kettle. In her experience, her sister always asked the most dangerous questions while doing mundane tasks.

And here it came …

‘It’s very early for you to be bringing the kids’ Christmas presents,’ Juliet said as she flicked off the tap and placed the kettle on its stand.

Translation? How have you managed to deliver actual presents more than a week before the day, instead of sending guilt-inflated gift cards that arrive in the first week of January?

Gemma tried to ignore it. She wasn’t as heartless as Juliet made her sound. She nearly always worked right up until Christmas Eve and then dashed off on her annual Christmas holiday – the only proper break she had all year, because she always seemed to be working in the summer. And the kids never complained about having plenty of money to spend on iTunes or in the toy shop.

She shrugged. ‘Just trying to be a bit more organised this year. How’s Aunt Sylvia?’ she added, attempting to deflect the conversation elsewhere. She’d tell Juliet the real reason for delivering the presents at some point. But later. After she’d had a chance to soften her up a little.

A slow, slightly un-Juliet-like smile lifted the corners of her mouth. Almost a naughty smile – except that couldn’t be. Because, Gemma knew that if she and Juliet had been born on the same day, her sister would have been the good twin and she would have been the evil one.

She decided to probe what that strange little smile was all about. ‘What’s up? Is something the matter with Aunt Sylvia?’

Juliet picked up the kettle and poured boiling water into a waiting teapot. ‘Oh, she’s about the same as she has been for the last few months. Actually, I thought we could pay her a visit this afternoon. Violet’s going to mind the little ones for a couple of hours.’

Gemma glanced at the clock in dismay. A couple of hours?

So much for a flying visit.

Juliet led the way into the day room at Greenacres and pulled out one of the high-backed armchairs so Gemma could sit opposite their great-aunt. As much as the thought of that fluffy sweet waiting patiently for Gemma in the depths of Aunt Sylvia’s handbag tickled her, she had more serious reasons for insisting Gemma came here this afternoon.

She wanted her sister to see just how far their great-aunt had deteriorated, hoping – in vain, maybe – that it’d prompt Gemma into spending more time with her family. It wouldn’t be long before Sylvia forgot them both completely.

‘Hello, Aunt Sylvia,’ Juliet said, watching closely as Gemma lowered herself into the chair. She then pulled one round for herself. ‘Look who’s here!’

Sylvia blinked and looked at her new visitor. ‘Gemma!’ she exclaimed and pressed her wrinkly fingers over her mouth while her eyes shone.

‘Hi, Auntie Syl,’ Gemma said. ‘Long time no see.’

‘Too long,’ Sylvia said sharply, but then smiled again. ‘Never mind. You’re here now – that’s all that matters.’ She turned to look at Juliet. ‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

Sylvia’s brow wrinkled slightly.

Her aunt stared blankly at her for a few seconds before returning her attention back to Gemma. ‘Oh,’ she said suddenly, ‘I just remembered! I’ve been saving something special for you.’ She reached down beside her chair for her handbag and rummaged inside for a few seconds before dropping something small into Gemma’s hand.

It was the punchline Juliet had been anticipating for more than a week, but now the moment had arrived, she really didn’t feel much like laughing.

Of course Sylvia would remember Gemma. Everybody did. It was Juliet who was turning shades of grey, disappearing quietly into the wallpaper of her humdrum life.

Gemma was looking at the object in her palm, a bemused expression on her face. Juliet held out her hand to take it from her. She knew where the bin was and Gemma didn’t. ‘Here, let me …’ She began to rise, but then Gemma dropped the item into her waiting hand and she discovered it was neither sticky nor fluffy. In fact, it was slightly heavy and the tiniest bit cold. Delicate. She looked down at her palm and found a gold and diamond ring sparkling there.

‘I couldn’t possibly …’ Gemma was saying.

Juliet dropped the ring back into Gemma’s hand then stood up and backed away.

Her grandmother’s engagement ring – the one she’d left to Sylvia on strict instructions that their eldest granddaughter would get it when they were both gone.

Despite the protestations, Aunt Sylvia pressed Gemma’s fingers closed around the three diamonds in their rose gold setting. ‘No, you have it. It would look better on a pretty thing like you than on my bony old fingers.’

Gemma’s eyebrows raised slightly, but she didn’t look shocked, or guilty, Juliet realised. Didn’t she know?

Of course she didn’t know. That would involve being present for family events and listening to what other people said, and neither of those things were Gemma’s strong suit. Juliet scowled as Gemma kissed their great-aunt and slid the ring into her pocket. ‘Thank you, Auntie Syl. This means a lot to me.’

And she said it with such a sweet sincerity that Juliet wanted to scream. In fact, she must have made a muffled noise of some sort, because Sylvia turned to look at her again. ‘Didn’t you say you were going to get the tea, dear?’

‘Uh …’ Juliet’s mouth refused to work properly. She swallowed and tried again. ‘I just …’

She had to get away, get out of here. Otherwise she was going to create a scene. And Juliet never created scenes. Even when Greg had left she’d only let big silent tears fall down her face as she’d watched him climb into his car, slam the door and drive away.

She looked towards the day-room door, and then, without deciding to, she was walking. Out of the room, down the corridor and into the small kitchenette that the nurses used to make their tea. Juliet was here so often that they let her use it whenever she visited. She stared at the dull white cabinet in front of her. She knew the teabags were inside, but she didn’t reach out and open the door.

She felt something rising inside her chest, something bitter and dark. This was no bubble of naughty laughter at a fluffy sweet. It was cold, tasting of emptiness. It scared her so much that she squashed it down again, closed her eyes and concentrated on making it disappear.

When she thought she’d finally regained control, she opened the cupboard door, retrieved the cheerful Union Jack teabag tin someone had saved after the Jubilee and made tea for three.

What else could she do?

Helping was what Juliet did. And if people only half-remembered her when she did that, she’d probably disappear completely if she stopped.

Gemma glanced across at Juliet as they drove back to her house from the nursing home.

‘What’s up with you?’

Juliet’s face was a picture of calm, but she was clutching the steering wheel so hard the tendons were standing out on the backs of her hands. She flicked the indicator and sailed round a corner at an even speed. ‘Nothing.’

Gemma could let this drop. That’s what Juliet obviously wanted her to do. And it was the option she usually chose. There was enough tension between the two of them without adding more issues into the mix, but today – because she was feeling a little guilty maybe – she decided to press on. ‘Well, it’s obviously not nothing, because you’ve got a face like a smacked fish.’

Beautifully done, Gemma. You waded in nice and gentle-like.

And then she just kept going: ‘You wanted the ring, didn’t you?’

She regretted that comment the moment it left her mouth. Why had she said that? Why? She’d told herself she was going to tread round the subject carefully, give Juliet the opportunity to tell her herself. She’d guessed that her sister’s mood had something to do with Gran’s ring, because she’d been behaving almost normally up until that point.

‘No,’ Juliet said, but the serene mask was slipping. Her jaw was tense and she glared at the oncoming traffic as she waited to turn right at a junction.

‘Yes, you did. It’s just the kind of old-fashioned stuff you go all gooey over.’

Juliet suddenly swerved into the kerb and stopped, yanking the handbrake on before turning to look at Gemma. ‘It’s not about the ring! Not about the diamonds and gold, anyway …’ She shook her head and let out an exasperated sigh. ‘It’s about … Oh, forget it. You wouldn’t understand.’

‘I’m not a little kid any more, Juliet. You could try to give me the chance to understand, but you never do. So tell me … What is it that is so wonderfully complex that my poor little brain could never hope to grasp?’

Juliet kept her eyes on the road ahead, and when she spoke her voice was heavy. ‘I just wanted someone to think about me first for once, that’s all. I’m tired of being second best.’ She thought for a moment. ‘No, it’s not quite that … I’m tired of being the warm-up act.’

Gemma turned to look at her, nose wrinkled. ‘Huh?’

‘It’s the story of my life,’ Juliet said bitterly. ‘Take Greg – I feel like I was one he settled for until the real love of his life came along. I was keeping bloody Anoushka’s seat warm, basically.’

If Gemma didn’t know any better, she’d have thought Bloody Anoushka was the woman’s full name, because Juliet never called her anything else these days.

When she spoke again, her voice had taken on a grim tone. ‘And then there’s you …’

Gemma instantly rose to her own defence. ‘What did I do?’

Juliet looked over her shoulder, indicated, released the handbrake and started driving towards home again. ‘Don’t pretend to know you weren’t the favourite. Once you arrived Mum and Dad just doted on you and I just seemed to fade into the background, like I was the one they practised on until they were ready for you.’

Gemma’s mouth dropped open. How could Juliet believe such things? Didn’t she know that all their mother had talked about when Gemma had visited was how lovely Juliet’s wedding had been, and what a good cook she was, how adorable her children were and why didn’t Gemma find a nice man like Greg instead of wasting her time with all those losers?

Her stomach dived. Oh, hell.

If that was what Juliet believed, no wonder there was always a whiff of resentment in the air when they got together. Unfortunately, it was probably going to take another decade for them to unravel that issue, and Gemma had more pressing matters on her mind, like stopping a fully-fledged Juliet meltdown when she let slip what she’d been avoiding bringing up all afternoon.

First things first … She racked her brain to find a way to bring the conversation onto a happier note. She really needed Juliet to be feeling warm and forgiving when she broke the news.

‘I think you should have the ring,’ she said, nodding to herself. ‘After all, you’re the eldest. It makes sense.’

Juliet carried on driving, but at the same time she seemed to go very still, and Gemma suddenly realised that maybe she was the last one to catch on to who the ring had been intended for all along.

‘I meant it when I said it wasn’t about a couple of diamonds,’ Juliet said. ‘Anyway, it’s Aunt Sylvia’s ring now. She can give it to whoever she wants.’

Gemma frowned. ‘She did seem a little bit mixed up today …’

Juliet let out a weary sigh. ‘It’s more than that, Gemma! You’d know that if you were around more. I visit twice a week, and only a handful of times since October has she remembered who I was.’

‘Don’t be daft!’ Aunt Sylvia couldn’t possibly be that bad. At least, Gemma didn’t want to believe things had deteriorated so badly. Surely that couldn’t happen to the spunky old lady who’d always seemed so sharp, who’d always been able to beat her at rummy, no matter how hard she’d tried? ‘Of course she remembers you,’ she told Juliet. ‘She just has a bit of a problem with names now and again.’

‘You’re fooling yourself, seeing things from your own unique, Gemma-centred perspective as always,’ Juliet replied, regaining some of her usual self-righteous air. ‘Whether you want to admit it or not, she’s gone downhill very fast, and that’s just another reason why I really, really need your help this Christmas.’

Gemma’s eyes widened. On any other day she’d have been stupidly pleased to hear Juliet say something like that, but today that was the last thing she wanted to hear. All she was going to do now was prove Juliet right about her once again.

She swallowed. Oh, hell. She had to tell her. Couldn’t put it off any longer. She owed Juliet that at least.

So, as her sister pulled into her driveway and turned off the car engine, she blurted out the secret she’d been keeping all afternoon.

CHAPTER SIX

‘I can’t believe you!’ Juliet yelled, as she crashed through the front door and marched down the corridor. She wasn’t sure exactly where she was going, she just needed to keep striding. When she reached the study she turned round and headed back in Gemma’s direction, meeting her in the hall. ‘You’re jetting off to the Caribbean for Christmas and leaving me here on my own? Again?’

Her sister’s mouth opened and closed but no words came out.

‘Bloody St Lucia, as well!’ Juliet screamed. ‘Rub it in, why don’t you?’

She became aware of four pairs of eyes watching her from the living-room doorway, let out a shriek of frustration and strode off in the direction of the kitchen. Probably not a good idea. There were heavy things in there. And knives.

Gemma was either stupid enough or foolhardy enough to follow.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gemma said, her eyes looking large and moist and sorrowful. Juliet felt a tug of sympathy down in her gut, but she stamped on it. It wouldn’t work, not this time.

She sucked in a breath through her teeth, held it for a second and blew it out again. ‘You promised! I’m behind with the preparations, because every time I try to tick something off my list, something unexpected crops up. I’ve hardly got enough time to sleep before Christmas Day as it is – and that’s when I thought you were going to be around to help!’

‘Juliet, you make the whole thing such hard work. And that’s not what Christmas is about. It’s not called a holiday for nothing, you know. Why don’t you have a quiet Christmas, just you and the kids, and leave all the fuss for another year?’

Her sister really had no clue, had she? It was too late for that.

‘Aside from the kids – who have been behaving like monsters, by the way – I’ve arranged with the home for Aunt Sylvia to spend the day with us, Doris Waterman always comes because all her children now live in America, and then there’s a couple of au pairs who go to our church, and the last-minute additions of Uncle Tony and his new girlfriend.’

Gemma frowned. ‘Which one’s Uncle Tony?’

‘Gemma! You’re missing the point! I would never have invited so many if I’d thought you weren’t going to be here to help me.’

Juliet slumped down into a chair and laid her head on the kitchen table. Her right temple had started to throb right about the time Gemma had announced she had tickets to fly to St Lucia on the eighteenth and she was worried something was going to burst if she didn’t try to calm down a bit.

She felt like crying. Really crying. Not that eye-fanning, tissue-dabbing kind of crying, but the kind of sobbing that made one sound like a demented baboon and produced lots of snot.

Gemma swore softly, and Juliet heard the sound of a kitchen chair scraping on the flagstones before the rustle of fabric confirmed that her sister had joined her at the kitchen table. ‘I didn’t realise …’

Juliet lifted her head and stared at her sister. ‘You never do realise, that’s the problem.’ It was high time Gemma took responsibility for her actions. Juliet wasn’t going to let her off the hook because she’d mumbled out an apology and made puppy-dog eyes. ‘Why would you do such a thing?’

‘I don’t know!’ Gemma wailed. ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing! You sent me that snotty text and then there was a situation at work, and—’

‘Spare me,’ Juliet said drily. ‘We all know how wonderful your job is and how it’s so much more important than anyone else’s. It must be such a hard life sucking up to movie stars all day long. Boo hoo.’

Gemma glared at her. ‘There’s a lot more to it than that! I don’t just float around batting my eyelashes, you know. I’m one of the most sought-after Second ADs in the business.’

‘Oh, yes. Sorry. I forgot to bow down and worship at the Temple of Gemma! I do beg your pardon.’

A hardness appeared in her sister’s expression that Juliet had never seen before. ‘I think I preferred it when you let it all fester away inside, kept neatly in place with a ten-foot pole stuck up your bum,’ she informed her.

Juliet stood up and walked over to the window. ‘Well, you’re the one who pulled it out,’ she said in a superior tone. ‘It’s not my fault if you don’t like the stink.’

There was that. Gemma couldn’t deny that she was the one who’d unleashed this no-holds-barred version of her sister. The phrase be careful what you wish for came to mind, but she’d never been one for listening to advice. Especially her own.

It had just been a moment of impulsive madness at the end of a really long shoot, when all her mental energy had been used up and the only thing left floating around in her head were those tropical paradise fantasies she’d been indulging in for weeks. And then Juliet’s sniping text had arrived and it had just sent Gemma over the edge.

‘Why would you promise something like this and then go back on it?’ Juliet wailed.

To be honest, the gin had pretty much wiped that conversation from her memory banks. She couldn’t actually recall promising anything. ‘I always say I’ll be around for Christmas,’ she muttered, ‘and I never am.’

Juliet almost laughed at that. ‘And that’s supposed to make it better?’

Gemma shook her head. The second the words had left her mouth she’d realised how lame they sounded. But before she’d spoiled everything with the impulsive click on a holiday advert at the top of her web browser she really had been intending to spend Christmas in Tunbridge Wells with Juliet, not that her sister would ever believe that now.

I’m sorry,’ she said, really meaning it. ‘I promise I’ll come next year, stay a month if I have to.’ Why did she do these things? Sometimes she really needed to think before she reacted, especially when Juliet was involved.

Juliet folded her arms and looked at her. ‘If you have to …?’

Okay, that hadn’t come out right. ‘I meant, if you need me.’

The haughty look on her sister’s face told her she needed Gemma about as much as she needed a hole in the head. The realisation hit Gemma like a bullet to the chest. No wonder she avoided coming here. Juliet wasn’t interested in creating some balance in their relationship, and this … This was just another point-scoring exercise, with Gemma cast as the loser right from the outset.

Well, this time Gemma had some ammunition of her own to throw. ‘You know why I stay away? You really want to know?’

‘Enlighten me, o wise one …’

That sarcastic, supercilious tone Juliet often used on her, and only her, got right up her nose. ‘Because even if I do the right thing, I do it the wrong way. Even if I try, I haven’t tried hard enough. It’s exhausting being your sister! I can’t be the person you want me to be, because the person you want me to be is you! I’m not you, Juliet. And, guess what, I don’t want to be!’

Uh-oh. Maybe she’d gone a little too far with that one, because Juliet went very, very pink in the face and she seemed to be struggling to form a coherent sentence. Gemma’s eyes widened as Juliet marched right up to her and poked one beautifully French-polished nail in her chest.

‘Well, maybe I wish I could be as selfish as you are! Maybe I wish I could bugger off to the Caribbean and leave Christmas to someone else for once. God knows, I deserve it!’

As Gemma stared back at Juliet, her brain and mouth empty of words, she realised how much older her sister looked. How much more tired. There were new lines round her eyes and her highlights hadn’t been touched up in months. She hadn’t noticed earlier, because Juliet always looked so polished, and she supposed she always expected her to be that way, but looking at her now was like looking at one of those paintings made of dots – from a distance it all looked so put together and pretty, but close up it was a bit of a mess.

This wasn’t just some usual Juliet rant about family responsibility. Something was wrong. Something was really wrong. And it looked as if it had been building up for months and no one – not even Juliet – had noticed it.

Gemma had never really believed in bolts of inspiration from on high, but that’s what happened to her in the following seconds. A blinding moment of clarity.

‘Maybe you should,’ she said.

‘Maybe I should what?’

She looked Juliet straight in the eye. ‘Bugger off and leave Christmas to someone else for once.’

Juliet stared at her. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘You’re right,’ Gemma said, standing up and meeting her sister at eye level. ‘You always have to do it. Maybe it’s time someone took over.’

Juliet’s mouth twitched and Gemma couldn’t tell if she was going to laugh or cry. ‘And how – excepting angelic intervention – would that happen?’ she said, with more than a touch of desperation in her tone.

‘Take my plane tickets and go to St Lucia for a fortnight.’

Juliet stared at her sister. ‘Have you had an aneurysm or something? I can’t just drop everything, leave my kids behind and flit off to the Caribbean for a fortnight.’

Gemma stared right back at her. ‘Yes, you can.’

She shook her head. ‘No.’ And then she shook it some more. ‘That’s the kind of thing you do, Gemma. It’s not me. I can’t. And what would I do about Christmas? I’ve already invited everyone! I can’t cancel on them less than a fortnight before the big day. Who’ll cook the dinner and everything?’

‘I will,’ Gemma said, looking deadly serious. ‘We’ll swap. You can have my Christmas and I’ll do yours.’

That’s when Juliet began to laugh. And not just tittering giggles; she threw her head back and bellowed her amusement out until her lungs were sore and her eyes were streaming. The kids, who’d very sensibly been hiding out in the living room since the two sisters’ return, came running to see what all the hilarity was about. When Juliet opened her eyes, she found them all standing in the kitchen staring at her. Violet, in particular, looked a little worried. She was clutching on to Polly, who wasn’t fazed at all, just curious. The boys were young enough to join in and laugh along with her, without really knowing what the joke was about.

She took a steadying breath and smiled at them.

‘What’s up, Mum?’ Vi said, her expression watchful.

Juliet sighed. ‘Nothing. Auntie Gemma just said something really, really funny, that’s all.’

‘It wasn’t a joke,’ Gemma mumbled.

A little hiccup of laughter escaped from Juliet’s lips. ‘I know.’

Gemma put her hands on her hips. ‘I could cook Christmas dinner!’

The expression on her face reminded Juliet of when Gemma had been around two and Juliet seven, and Gemma had refused to wear nappies any more because her big sister didn’t. As always, she’d got her way, and, as always, everyone else had been clearing up the messes for weeks afterwards.

‘It requires not only cooking skills, but organisation and strategic planning,’ Juliet warned. ‘You can’t just get up in the morning and wing it, you know.’

Her sister glowered at her. ‘You have no idea what I do all day when I’m at work, do you? Logistics is my thing. It’s what I do best.’

Juliet did her hardest not to start laughing again. And failed.

The younger kids wandered off now the fun was over and it looked like another spat was brewing. Only Violet stayed to hear the whole thing out. ‘Why are you talking about Auntie Gemma cooking Christmas dinner?’ she asked. ‘You’re not going away, are you?’

That sobered Juliet up pretty quick. ‘No, darling. I’m not.’ She’d thought Vi had been the least upset of all her children when she’d had to break the news they weren’t going to be seeing their father over the Christmas holidays, but maybe she’d allowed herself to be fooled by a bit of teenage bravado. She walked over and hugged her eldest, and Violet even let her. ‘Gemma just made a joke about me going on her beach holiday and her staying here to look after you all. It wasn’t anything serious.’

Gemma huffed out a breath. ‘I said it wasn’t a joke! I was trying to be nice.’

‘You are nice, Auntie Gemma,’ Vi said, peeling one arm away from her mother and inviting her aunt to hug her from the other side. Gemma rolled her eyes, but she didn’t turn her niece down. So Juliet and Gemma stayed like that for a few moments, joined by a fifteen-year-old and almost touching, but as soon as Violet released them, she and Juliet retreated to opposite corners of the kitchen, eyeing each other like boxers in a ring.

Juliet kept staring at Gemma, but used a soothing voice on her daughter. ‘Can you go and check what the boys are up to, Vi? It’s gone awfully quiet, and that usually means trouble.’

Violet looked nervously between her aunt and her mother, then left to check on her brothers.

Gemma lifted her chin. ‘I meant what I said. The offer still stands.’

Juliet shook her head. It felt heavy on her shoulders. ‘I know you did,’ she said wearily, ‘and that’s the saddest thing of all. Because if you really knew me, if you really understood one tiny thing about me, you’d know that I’d never abandon my kids at Christmas.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Juliet woke up with her face stuck to something smooth and flat. And moist. She poked a finger at the edge of her mouth and discovered she’d been drooling. She blinked a couple of times and tried to make sense of her surroundings. The hard thing beneath her cheek was the kitchen table. The overhead light was on and its harsh glare made her want to close her eyes again, but she pushed her body up with her hands so she was sitting up straight and looked around. A heap of satiny fabric and tinsel lay strewn on the table in front of her.

Oh, yes. Polly’s angel costume.

The last thing she remembered was rubbing her eyes and telling herself just another ten minutes and then she’d crawl upstairs to bed, set the alarm for five thirty and then get up and finish it off in the morning.

She twisted her head to look at the clock on the wall. Ten past two. She moved her jaw, loosening it a little. She was exhausted, but that was hardly surprising. She’d always been pleased all of her children had wanted music lessons, but now she was starting to wonder if it had been such a good idea. Not only was there the inevitable ferrying of her brood to and from those lessons, but Christmas brought a flurry of rehearsals, dress rehearsals and finally the ear-splitting performances themselves.

And then there was the baking, the standing behind trestle tables and handing out glasses of wine poured from boxes that she always seemed to get roped into. She was on the PTA of both her children’s schools, and they didn’t even bother asking if she was going to organise the refreshments each year any more. They just assumed she’d take charge, pull together a rota of willing – and not-so-willing – helpers, wave a magic wand and, hey presto, wine and mince pies, orange squash and Santa-shaped cookies would appear from nowhere.

She linked her hands, straightened her arms above her head and stretched to loosen out the kinks in her spine, before yawning wide and long, and then she stared at the mass of half-finished angel costume on the table in front of her.

She just needed to finish tacking the tinsel round the hem, then make a halo out of a mangled coat hanger and more sparkly stuff and it’d be done. Of course, it should have been finished weeks ago, all ready to go, and it would have been – if she’d known about it. But at teatime, while stuffing her face with pasta and home-made tomato sauce, Polly had enquired loudly where her angel costume was.

‘What angel costume?’ Juliet had replied, her heart racing and an icy sensation washing over her.

‘The one for the carol concert,’ Polly had said and turned her attention to twirling tagliatelle round her fork. ‘Miss Barker gave us all a slip to take home with what we had to wear.’

Juliet stopped washing up and raced to where Polly had thrown her book bag in the hall when she’d come in from school. A quick search revealed two reading books, a host of drawings, an empty crisp packet and a pair of dirty socks. No slip. ‘There’s nothing there, Polls!’ she yelled and marched back into the kitchen, bag in hand as proof.

Polly had shrugged and slurped the last tail of pasta up into her mouth with a smack. ‘Oh,’ she said, totally unfazed. ‘It must still be in the drawer under my desk. Sorry. But I need to be an angel when I sing my solo at the concert tomorrow.’

Juliet had closed her eyes and counted to ten. And then twenty. When, oh when, would these schools learn that giving kids slips of paper to hand to their parents was a disaster waiting to happen? She really wanted to yell at someone, but she clenched her teeth and swallowed the feeling.

‘Never mind,’ she’d said, not as calmly as she’d have liked. ‘It’s fine. I’m sure we can do something with a pillowcase and a bit of tinsel.’

That was when her daughter’s ever-cool demeanour cracked. She stared back at Juliet in horror. ‘A pillowcase?’

Juliet nodded. ‘That’s all I can do at the last minute. The shops are shut and Violet has the dress rehearsal for her dance thing tonight.’

Polly’s eyes filled and her bottom lip wobbled while the edges of her mouth pulled down and out. She’d always made a strange rectangular shape like that when she cried, ever since she was a baby. Greg had always joked it made her look like a pillar box, but Juliet wasn’t finding it very funny as fat tears rolled down Polly’s cheeks and plopped onto her plate.

‘B – but Tegan has a Disney dress and Arabella’s grandma made her one from scratch, with real feathers on the wings and everything!’

Juliet crouched down by Polly’s chair and put her arm round her, ignoring the twins as they loudly and enthusiastically mimicked their sister’s wailing. ‘I’ll make it look really good, I promise. We’ll use the fancy pillowcases from the guest bedroom, the ones with frills on them.’

Polly crossed her arms and shook her head. ‘No. It won’t do! That’s not what I wanted. I need it to be perfect!’

That’s when Juliet had lost her only barely reined-in temper. Result? One tense-shouldered mother hunched over a sewing machine, and one tearful child who’d needed a few extra cuddles at bedtime. In the end she’d remembered the bridesmaid’s dress that Violet had worn for Greg’s sister’s wedding. Puff sleeves, a sash and full skirt in off-white silk. A few additions here and there and it would be wonderful.

She leaned back in her chair and pressed her hand over her mouth as she let out yet another gigantic yawn, then she pushed the chair away and sloped out of the kitchen and up the stairs to bed.

The alarm went off far too early the following morning, but Juliet didn’t have the time, or the energy, to argue with it. After dropping the kids off at their respective schools, she headed out of town to one of the nearby retail parks. Both boys wanted this year’s must-have toy – an action figure that did all sort of things Juliet couldn’t even remember, and didn’t really want to – but the Internet company she’d ordered them from had emailed her to say they only had one left in stock.

None of the other big websites could promise to deliver it before Christmas, if they even had it in stock at all, and the companies that did ‘click and collect’ were all showing it was sold out on their websites. How could she give one boy their dream present and not the other? But she knew that many of those big retailers didn’t allow you to reserve on the website if there were only a couple left in store. Her only hope was to try any place that might stock it and hope they still had one left on the shelf that wasn’t showing up for reservation on the website.

She was there early enough to find a parking space and jump out, check Toy World, discover they didn’t have any but the branch in Maidstone might have, and jump back in her car within fifteen minutes. By the time she got to Maidstone, however, it was a different story. When she’d scoured the shelves, trying to see if one was stuck at the back or hidden behind something else in the wrong spot, and had come up empty, she queued up at customer services. Of course, the store only had one member of staff on duty, an unusually spotty and slow-witted junior who needed to ask his supervisor to do everything for him. Probably even wipe his nose.

She was second in the queue when she heard the woman in front of her ask exactly the same question she was going to ask, and receive a weary no, so when her turn came she and the junior sales assistant just stared at each other and then she mumbled, ‘Never mind,’ and walked out of the shop.

By the time she got to Bluewater she’d almost lost the will to live. Inside the shopping centre was Juliet’s definition of hell. The wide walkways were crammed with people jostling each other, the queues at the cash tills in every shop seemed to snake for miles and the jaunty music pumping from the speakers in the ceiling was making her want to pick up something sharp and attack someone with it. Seriously, if she heard ‘Happy Holidays’ one more time she was going to scream!

Both toy shops she trudged to had felt-tip-written signs pinned on the inside of the windows, firmly warning customers they were out of stock of Robotron Xtreme, and in a haze of disappointment, she wandered into John Lewis and sought to soothe herself with the sight of all those desirable home furnishings. And it worked. Enough for her mind to clear and realise they had a toy department on the top floor, anyway.

She quickly ran to an escalator and marched up it and onto the next one. She was marching through the pink and girly toy section when she pulled up short. There, stuffed among the Barbies and Hello Kittys was the holy grail – Robotron Xtreme! Obviously dumped in the wrong department by someone who’d changed their mind.

She silently prayed blessings on that fickle soul as she lunged for it and hugged it to her chest with both arms. She wasn’t about to let it go, even if rugby-tackled.

Once the toy was paid for and in a bag, she was heading back to the car, but the euphoria she’d felt at the moment of sale started to drain away. By the time she was driving back towards Tunbridge Wells she felt as if she was in trance. A quick check of the clock on the dashboard revealed that she didn’t have time to go home, so she sped straight to the boys’ and Polly’s school, hid the present in the boot before she picked them up, then headed off to fetch Vi.

The twins were even more ear-splittingly energetic than usual on the drive over, and then she remembered it had been the class party that day and, despite each parent providing both a healthy and a ‘treat’ donation for the food, she suspected her boys had consumed nothing but E-numbers and the poor teacher would now be faced with disposing of multiple pots of cherry tomatoes and trays of rapidly curling brown-bread sandwiches.

‘I’m hungry,’ Josh whined.

‘Me too,’ his brother added.

‘I’m going to cook tea as soon as we get in …’ Lord, forgive her – dubious frozen casserole from the back of the freezer. ‘So you’ll just have to wait until then.’

She was as good as her word, too. Within twenty minutes of walking through the front door, she was dishing up tough-looking meat, slicing chunks off a home-made loaf to go with it and calling the kids to the table. Vi, Polly and Josh appeared, but Jake was nowhere to be seen.

‘Where’s your brother?’ she asked all of them, but directing most of her attention to Violet, who she was attempting to train up as her second-in-command.

Violet looked heavenwards and crossed her arms. ‘How should I know? I try to steer clear of the runts as much as possible.’

Juliet didn’t have time to lecture her daughter on her attitude to her brothers at the moment; Polly had to be at the parish church by six thirty to get ready for the carol concert, which started at seven fifteen. And she’d also said she’d try to pop in to her neighbours’ mulled wine and mince pie evening once the younger ones were safely tucked up in bed. Since she’d only be a few doors away, she’d bribed Violet to babysit for the evening. She even considered the tenner her daughter had wangled out of her for doing it a bargain. When was the last time she’d put on a nice dress and talked to adults about adult things?

And Will was going to be there. She half-wanted to see if that twinge of something she wasn’t quite ready to name happened again. Not that she knew what she’d do about it if it did.

She discovered Jake behind the sofa in the living room, surrounded by bits of gold foil. It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds to work out that her hungry little man had raided the Christmas tree for the Belgian chocolate decorations she’d hung there earlier in the week and now was regretting it thoroughly. He looked up at her with big eyes, his complexion grey.

Oh, no!

Juliet knew that look. She picked her son up under the arms as he clamped his hand across his mouth and mumbled, ‘I don’t feel very well.’

Thankfully, they had a downstairs toilet. Not so thankfully, they only made it as far as the hall before the inevitable happened. The sound of regurgitated party food and liquid chocolate hitting the flagstone floor was not pleasant. Juliet swallowed her revulsion down and just kept running.

When the worst of it was over, she called Violet to keep an eye on him, then returned to the hall with a mop, bucket and disinfectant to clear up the mess. It was only then that she realised that the tiles had not been the only casualty of Jake’s greediness. Polly’s angel costume had been draped across the chair in the entrance way, and while it had been covered in dry-cleaner’s plastic, the hem had been peeping out of the bottom. Streaks of pinky brown sick were now congealing on the tacked-on tinsel.

Forgetting about the floor, she grabbed the dress and ran to the utility room with it. The only thing to do was to rip all the hard work she’d done last night off the watermarked silk before it stained. Perhaps a strand of clean tinsel tied around the waist would add the extra sparkle it needed now the hemline was plain?

There was a wail behind her from the entrance to the utility room, and she turned to find her youngest daughter there, tears streaming down her face. Juliet left the dress and pulled Polly into a firm hug. ‘It’s okay,’ she said calmly, even though she could feel her internal thermostat rising, even though voices inside her head were screaming about the time ticking away, the hall floor and the grey-looking child hunched over the toilet in the room next door. ‘I’m going to fix it, and it’ll be just as pretty, you wait and see. Now go and eat your dinner.’

Polly nodded tearfully and trotted off back to the kitchen. Juliet stared at the dress, her head pounding. What had she thought she could do to rescue it? Something to do with tinsel, but she couldn’t remember what. It didn’t matter, anyway, because she didn’t have time for that now.

She rushed next door and checked on Jake, who was looking a bit sorry for himself but hadn’t been sick again. Hopefully, now he’d let the pressure off his overloaded stomach, he’d be okay. She was pretty sure this was the result of too much chocolate, not the dreaded sickness bug that had been going around school.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him, crouching down beside him and rubbing his back.

‘Bit better,’ he said mournfully.

She wiped his face and gently led him upstairs to brush his teeth, then brought him back downstairs and tucked him up on the sofa with a bucket next to him. Yes, her lovely upholstery was in danger there, but it was quicker to get to him if he needed her.

‘You just call me if you need me,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be right back. I’ve just got to go and check on Polly’s dress.’

The next fifteen minutes were spent running between Jake, the other children eating dinner in the kitchen and the utility room, to see if the sick stains were showing on the dress now the adornments had been removed. On one pass through the living room she stole a replacement strand of silver tinsel for Polly’s costume, then ran upstairs. She wouldn’t be needing her little black dress any more, but maybe she could smarten up what she had on for the carol concert. Higher heels and her silver cardigan ought to do it.

When she came back downstairs she went to find Violet. ‘You can be in charge while I run Polly to the church,’ she told her.

Violet crossed her arms. ‘I’m not clearing up if he’s sick.’

‘Fine,’ Juliet said, manhandling Polly out of her summer rain mac and into her winter coat – honestly, when would that child ever learn to dress for the appropriate season? ‘Then make sure he stays on the sofa and throws up in the bucket.’

Violet made a face and stomped off. Juliet grabbed the angel dress and her warmly wrapped-up child and headed for the car. She calculated she just about had time to drop Polly off, run back home to do her make-up – which would have to be a refreshing of what she already had on – brush her hair, find a pair of heels and then she could dash back to the church for the service, dragging Josh with her to give Violet some peace to look after Jake. And if he was looking perkier when she got back, maybe she’d pop into Mike and Sarah’s just to say Merry Christmas and drop off the nice bottle of wine she’d bought them. Surely one glass of mulled wine and twenty minutes of adult conversation wouldn’t be too much to ask?

She sat in the carol service, mentally rejigging her To Do list as children sang and recited poems and stumbled their way through Bible readings. She paused while Polly sang her solo, of course, but went straight back to thinking about Christmas cake and stocking fillers right afterwards, and all the while the tinny carols she’d heard in a thousand shops for the past month kept running round inside her head, so loud they threatened to drown out the Angel Gabriel on stage, announcing the birth of the Messiah in a manger made out of corrugated cardboard and hamster bedding.

She left the church feeling slightly, very slightly, less stressed about the rest of the evening. If she hadn’t been looking forward to being just Juliet for a while instead of a busy mum of four, she might have been tempted to climb into bed with a good book, but this was her one invite to do something this year where she wasn’t helping or serving – partly because of a packed timetable, but partly because invitations hadn’t been as forthcoming recently. Old friends weren’t quite sure what to do with her now she and Greg had split up.

Once Polly and Josh were back at home and brushing their teeth before bed, and Jake had been checked on and Violet mollified, Juliet ran upstairs to swipe some more lipstick across her drying lips and refresh her mascara. She let her hair out of her ponytail and brushed it quickly. She was just poking diamond studs into her ear holes when Violet knocked on her door.

‘What’s up?’ Juliet asked, squinting at her reflection in her dressing-table mirror. Had the lighting in here got worse, or was she starting to need glasses?

‘Abby’s invited me to a party and I want to know if I can go.’

Juliet pressed her lips together as she forced the stud through the soft flesh of her earlobe. She wasn’t keen on that girl. Abby had been caught bunking off school once and always seemed to have a crowd of boys hanging round her. ‘Will her parents be home?’

‘I think so.’

Juliet turned to look at her daughter. ‘Think so isn’t good enough. I need to know for certain. Get me her mother’s mobile number and I’ll talk to her about it.’

Violet reacted as if her mother had asked her to hold hands with her while walking down the high street. ‘You’re so embarrassing! No one else’s parents do that!’

Juliet decided not to fight that point now. ‘When is it?’

Violet played with the door handle and looked at her sock-clad feet. ‘Christmas Eve,’ she said quietly.

Juliet spun round, dropping the second stud on the carpet as she did so. ‘Christmas Eve! But you know that’s our special family night!’

Violet shrugged.

Juliet turned and crouched down, running her hand across the carpet in search of her lost earring. ‘We’ll talk about this later, Violet. Right now I haven’t got the time.’

There was a loud huff from the other side of the room. ‘That means no … you always say we’ll talk about it later when you’re going to say no! God, Mum …! I’m not a baby any more. I can go out with my friends if I want to. And I want to …’ She paused for dramatic effect. ‘Much more than playing stupid games with Miss Know-It-All and the runts!’

‘Violet!’ Juliet’s reply was terse but not explosive; even so, she felt the rage beginning to boil inside her, making her stomach quiver and her fingertips itchy. ‘I do not have time for this now!’

Violet flounced from the room, and Juliet continued to hunt for her lost earring, all the while feeling like a pressure cooker just about to blow. Eventually she gave up searching, yanked the first earring out and threw it on her dressing table, then shoved her feet in the first pair of heels she found in her wardrobe and clomped downstairs to say goodnight to the kids.

She was met at the bottom of the stairs by Jake, trailing the blanket she’d covered him with, puffing his cheeks out and trying to keep his mouth closed. The way his eyes were popping was slightly alarming.

She kept her voice low, soothing. ‘Jake … where’s the bucket, sweetie?’

He just shook his head and she saw the panic in his eyes.

‘Jake,’ she screamed, forgetting all about low and soothing, ‘where’s the bucket?’

Half a second after that the bucket was a moot point and Juliet was trying not to look at her shoes.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Juliet tried to work out what to do first – comfort Jake, clean up the hall for a second time or shout ‘Ewww’ about the slightly warm and squishy stuff that was seeping into her left shoe. She opted for the former and hugged her snivelling six-year-old to her, never minding what else was transferring itself onto her best black trousers.

She guided him upstairs, stood him in the bath and washed him down, and she was just tucking him into bed when the phone rang. She ignored it.

But then the distant cry came from downstairs. ‘Mum! It’s for you!’

Not wanting to yell so close to her poorly son, Juliet stuck her head out of the twins’ bedroom door before she yelled back her answer. ‘Tell them to call back later! I’m busy with your brother.’

Violet’s clumping steps came closer and then Juliet could see her face as she rounded the corner in the staircase. Instead of looking mildly put-upon, as she usually did when required to answer the phone, she was wide-eyed. ‘It’s a policeman,’ she said quietly. ‘He says he needs to talk to you.’

Juliet motioned for her eldest to go and keep an eye on one of her youngest and took the handset from Violet as she passed her on the landing.

‘Hello …?’ she said, as she stared down over the banisters at the ugly-looking puddle in the middle of her otherwise pristine entrance hall. Twice in one day. That had to be some kind of record.

‘Mrs Taylor?’

Juliet’s stomach dropped. She knew that voice, and she was having a horrible sense of déjà vu. ‘What has she done this time?’

There was a weary sigh and then PC Graham asked if she could come and talk to her great-aunt. Apparently, she had installed herself on the back seat of a bus and wasn’t inclined to get off again. She’d got on earlier in the afternoon and had been riding the 281 round its route ever since and was now loudly complaining about the lack of a tour guide.

Juliet closed her eyes and shook her head. That pressure-cooker feeling was back, so bad her ears were threatening to pop. ‘I can’t …’ she mumbled weakly. ‘I just can’t …’

She couldn’t do any of this. Not any more. It was all too much – the driving, the organising, the chasing round after everyone and never having any time for herself.

‘It would really help if you could—’

‘I can’t!’ she said louder. Didn’t the man understand English? ‘I’m on my own and I have a sick child and I just … can’t.’ And then she pressed the button to hang up the phone.

She stared at the handset for a couple of moments, and then she walked into her bedroom and shoved it under the stack of pillows and cushions she always arranged nicely at the head of the bed. It might have made a noise under there, but she couldn’t tell if it was a call coming in or the ringing in her ears.

She felt like an inflatable raft on a deep and churning river that was desperately trying to stay above the surface as it headed for the rapids. All she could do was cling on and hope she survived the ride. But instead of the sound of roaring water in her ears, all she could hear was ‘Happy Holidays.’

It was coming.

She could feel it coming.

Juliet picked up the nearest pillow, buried her face in it and screamed for all she was worth.

Violet stood in the doorway of Juliet’s bedroom, biting her lip.

Juliet began to shake. It started deep down and reverberated through her limbs. She hadn’t been aware of it, but she’d sunk to the floor and now her top half was draped over the edge of the bed, her legs crumpled beneath her. She steadied herself by placing a hand on the mattress and pushed herself to her feet.

It hadn’t been easy to keep a lid on it all before, but it had been do-able. However, since that chat – that argument – with Gemma a couple of days ago, she was starting to think she was losing her mind. From the look on Violet’s face, her daughter was starting to think so too.

Get a grip, Juliet. You can’t have that. You will not turn into your mother. You will not pile all the things on this sweet girl that she piled on you.

She pulled oxygen into her lungs as best she could, considering her ribs felt as if they were being squeezed in a vice and she was finding it strangely difficult to breathe properly. ‘Is Jake okay? He hasn’t been sick again, has he?’ Her voice was high and soft, much like Violet’s, actually. Much like her own when she’d been that age.

Violet shook her head. ‘He says he’s feeling better now it’s out. He wants to watch TV.’

Juliet shrugged. ‘Okay.’

Violet frowned. ‘But you always say no TV before bedtime.’

She just kept on staring at Violet, too weary to even say she didn’t care about that rule tonight.

Violet stepped forward. ‘Are you okay, Mum?’

Juliet pressed the fingers of one hand against her forehead and rubbed gently. Was she all right? She really didn’t know. She swallowed. ‘Um … I think I’m just a bit stressed, actually. I’m not feeling … not feeling very well. I think I’ll give the party a miss and just go to bed early.’

She looked longingly at the bed. She’d love to dive in it now, but there were children to be reassured and a puddle of sick to be cleared up still. She fancied she could catch a whiff of it, even up here in the bedroom.

She inhaled through her nose and out through her mouth, just as she learned at Pilates, and then she turned to face Violet. ‘Why don’t we all snuggle up on the sofa and watch a movie together? It’s been ages since we’ve done something like that.’

Some of the fear left Violet’s eyes and she nodded. And then she smiled gently. ‘I’ll go and get the others rounded up.’ Then she walked over to Juliet and flung her arms round her. ‘I’ll even clear up the sick, if you like?’

A tear slid down Juliet’s cheek and she squeezed her daughter back. ‘No, it’s fine,’ she whispered, ‘I’ll do that. You go and ask the others what they want to watch – and try and let it not turn into World War Three, okay?’

She nodded and walked towards the door, but glancing back repeatedly as Juliet swiped the single tear away with the end of her sleeve. Violet took one last look at the threshold before she disappeared down the stairs.

Juliet picked up the pillow, faintly smeared with nude lipstick, and peeled the slip off of it.

Just for a moment, she’d been staring at herself instead of Violet – overwhelmed, but trying to take on grown-up responsibilities to ease her mother’s load – and it had scared her more than even the screaming had.

She was woken by the sound of her sons pounding the life out of each other on the landing. She stumbled out of bed, her hair standing up on one side and told them to put a sock in it. Both boys froze and smiled innocently at her. From the way Jake had his brother in a headlock, she guessed he was fighting fit again.

She felt strangely light and strangely empty, as if something had stopped pushing her down, but at the same time she just couldn’t settle to anything. She kept wandering into rooms and forgetting why she’d gone in there. She didn’t even look in her Christmas notebook once. In the end, partly because she’d noticed the mismatching pillowcase she’d got out the evening before, she decided to change the rest of her bed linen. There was something about the smell and feel of clean sheets that made one feel as if everything was going to be all right.

As she was stripping the duvet cover she became aware of a presence in the doorway. She turned to find Violet there again. Was her daughter checking up on her? Had their roles somehow become reversed? Because it shouldn’t be that way, it really shouldn’t. She knew that from experience.

She smiled at Violet, a bright, sunny smile that she mostly had to fake, but she wanted her to know that everything was back to normal. No more outbursts. No more screaming. She didn’t even think she had the energy in her to do it this morning, anyway.

Violet studied her, but when she spoke, the question that came out of her mouth was a bit of a surprise. ‘Mum … What Auntie Gemma said about going on holiday wasn’t a joke, was it?’

Juliet tried to think up a breezy denial, but her head was empty. ‘No, it wasn’t a joke …’

Violet nodded thoughtfully. ‘We didn’t think it was.’

We?

But Juliet couldn’t think about that at the moment. She needed to reassure her daughter. ‘Auntie Gemma might not have meant it to be a joke, but it might as well have been.’ She opened her arms and walked towards her daughter. ‘I wouldn’t do it to you, sweetie. I wouldn’t go away and leave you at Christmas. I just couldn’t.’

Juliet folded her arms around her daughter and breathed in her scent.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Mum,’ Violet mumbled into her shoulder, ‘but maybe you should.’

Juliet pulled sharply back and stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

Vi looked up at the ceiling and shifted awkwardly. ‘You’re not happy.’

Tears sprang with force to the backs of Juliet’s eyes. ‘Of course I’m happy! I’ve got you … and Polly … and the boys. What more could I want?’

Violet looked back at her and one side of her mouth tipped up in a rueful smile. ‘If you’re anything like me, you might want a boyfriend.’

Juliet shook her head. She knew it had been two years and she really should want a boyfriend, but she wasn’t sure she did. Even her maybe-it-is, maybe-it-isn’t relationship with her next-door neighbour was enough to freak her out. ‘There’s more to life than boyfriends,’ she told Violet.

Vi gave her a one-shouldered shrug. She looked less than convinced by her mother’s pronouncement, and it made Juliet smile. Oh, to be that young and that carefree again – when the only thing you stressed about was whether the boy you liked liked you back. She’d forgotten life could be that simple.

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