Five Winters(29)

I nodded, wondering whether Calum found the whole stepparenting thing as difficult as I did. It was a shame the two of us couldn’t get together to share notes. Discuss tactics. “Yes.”

In the music tent, we sat in a row, with Mark and me at either end and Jaimie and Grace in the middle.

“Are you okay?” I asked Jaimie, reaching for his hand.

He gave a brave smile. “I’ll have to be, won’t I? I can’t stop Harriet seeing someone. It’s just another thing to get used to, isn’t it?”

“Grace is right, you know. Nobody will ever replace you in their eyes.”

He sighed. “I know.”

The band began to play its set, one song following another and sounding—to my ears, at least—remarkably similar to the one that had preceded it. I kept hold of Jaimie’s hand, hoping the music would cheer him up. That sometime in the future he’d be able to accept Calum, if only because he loved his girls and their happiness was the most important thing.

And then I tried to imagine Emily and Olivia having fun with practical jokes. Would they like them? Probably. Didn’t all kids like them? I’d liked it when Mark sometimes roped me and Rosie in, persuading us to join him in jumping out from behind the fridge to spray poor Richard with our water pistols. Or to slide whoopee cushions into place on the sofa as somebody sat down.

Poor Richard and Sylvia. They must have been saints. Either that or very good at hiding their true feelings.

Mark may have moved on from practical jokes when he discovered football, girls, and cars, but I knew he’d still laugh his head off if anyone tried to trick him with fake dog poop. Some things never changed.

At the interval, Mark and I headed for the bar together to get more drinks, leaving Grace and Jaimie chatting animatedly about Jaimie’s latest renovation project.

“Why d’you think Jaimie and Grace didn’t get together when they were at uni?” I asked Mark as we waited to get served.

“Didn’t Jaimie meet Harriet very early on?” he said. “I think they were just all in the same group of friends. Besides, Grace was fated to meet me, wasn’t she?”

I knew that, as a mathematician who frequently got his mind blown about the origins of the universe, Mark would never really believe in such a thing as fate. But I was slightly fuzzy headed from drinking beer before lunchtime. Enjoying being in Mark’s company. So I teased, “Did an astrology expert see your meeting with Grace in the stars, then?”

He nodded. “Yep, that’s right. By the way, talking of stars, did you know there are two hundred billion trillion of them in the universe?”

I considered his question. “I think you’ve told me that before once. Only I’m pretty sure last time you said it was two hundred billion trillion and one.”

He laughed. “You’re right. I apologise. God, it’s so good to see you. You can’t imagine.”

I bloody well could.

“Rosie asked me to check up on you. Make sure you’re happy here. So are you?”

The question sobered me up instantly. It ought to have been straightforward to answer. After all, Mark had just told me how much happier Jaimie was since I’d moved here. But somehow I couldn’t help thinking of the day I’d actually moved away from Dalston. My churned-up feelings as Jaimie drove the hired van away from my flat. The way I’d craned my neck out the window to try and catch a last glimpse of my plane tree. It was still hard to accept I would never enjoy that garden again, not properly.

But then, what good was a garden on your own, really?

“Yes, I am,” I said. “The girls can be a bit hard work sometimes. But we’re getting there, slowly. I do miss some of the things I left behind, though. You lot, for one.”

I’d had every intention of saying that casually, but my voice went and cracked. And as we hadn’t been served yet, I didn’t even have a glass of beer to hide behind.

Mark was staring at me. “We miss you too,” he said, pulling me in for a hug. “But nothing’s changed really, has it? Not really. We’re still family. We still love you.”

Bloody hell. I was going to start crying in a minute.

I tried another smile—more successfully this time—and put some space between us. “I know you do. And I am all right, honestly. Tell Rosie that.”

“All right. But if you ever need to talk . . .”

God, I couldn’t smile again. “Thanks. I appreciate that. Look, you couldn’t bring my beer for me when you get served, could you? I’ve just thought of something I need to tell Jaimie.”

Sweet, waggy-tailed Jaimie, who didn’t deserve to have been discarded by Harriet for no good reason at all.

“Sure.”

I found him on his own in the music tent, Grace having popped to the loo. He looked a bit forlorn, and I guessed he’d probably been thinking about his girls.

I sat down next to him and gave him a big kiss.

“What was that for?” he asked, holding me.

I smiled back, shrugging. “No reason. Just because,” I said, and kissed him again.

Then I settled down to give folk music a better try than I’d done before. And sometime during the afternoon, a man with the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard sang a song called “Carrickfergus.”

“Oh,” I said, after it was over. “That was so beautiful. The words, the tune, the voice—everything.”