Remember Me at Willoughby Close (Return to Willoughby Close #4) - Kate Hewitt Page 0,1

when Laura was only in her twenties. She still missed her, missed having her wisdom as well as her humour. Her dad, unfortunately, offered little of either.

“Yes, loads more,” she’d told Sam firmly.

“And we’d start new schools?”

“Of course we’d start new schools, doofus,” Maggie had interjected scornfully. “We’d be moving hundreds of miles away.”

“That’s the tricky part,” Laura had explained with a sympathetic look for both of them. “Leaving everything and everyone we know here, to start over. How would you feel about that?”

Sam had just shrugged, surprisingly nonplussed; he was leaving primary at the end of the year, and would have been starting a new school anyway. And, Laura knew, he didn’t have too many friends, preferring his own company and the world he constructed on a screen than the potential bullies who teased him because he was a little different, a little shy. Leaving Woodbridge would, she’d acknowledged sadly, be no hardship for her quirky son.

“What about you, Maggie?” Laura had asked. She knew her daughter had several close friends at school, but she also knew since Tim’s death Maggie had contemptuously declared them all fakes. No one, it seemed, had been there when she’d truly needed them. Laura could hardly blame a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls for not knowing how to deal with death, but it still hurt her daughter. A lot.

Although, she suspected, whatever her friends’ reactions, Maggie would have been angry anyway. Her daughter had been in a near-constant state of fury since the police had rung her mobile just a week before Christmas and informed them that her there had been an accident. Words to freeze the blood in her veins, for her heart to still, and yet it hadn’t. It had kept beating on, relentlessly, long after Tim’s had been stopped by a skid into a tree on the side of the road.

When Laura had asked her daughter her opinion about moving, Maggie had, at least, not been angry. She’d merely shrugged, chewing her thumbnail. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“You can think about it, of course. It’s not a decision any of us should take lightly.”

Maggie had nodded, and then, to Laura’s surprise, there had been a soft knock on her bedroom door two nights later. She’d startled awake, as she often did since Tim’s death, her heart thudding in her chest, her body twanging into tense alert, sure something was wrong; it was just a question of what…

“Mum?”

“Maggie? Is everything okay?” She glanced at the clock on the bedside table; it read two o’clock in the morning. Her heart rate ratcheted higher, panic her default setting since her husband’s death.

“I want to move.”

“Oh.” Laura had eased back against the pillows, filled with relief that nothing was wrong, or at least more wrong than it already was. “Okay, sweetheart. I’m glad you’ve made a decision. We can talk about it more in the morning.”

And when they had done so, Maggie hadn’t changed her mind. But apparently she had now.

Laura moved to the kitchen where boxes were piled on the worktop. She’d had the foresight to pack one with the essentials—kettle, teabags, and a carton of UHT milk. Unfortunately she’d forgotten to mark what box it was on the outside.

It had been typical of her, in the last year, to make such a hash of things. Her brain still felt as if it were fuzzy, as if everything was happening in slow motion, but she was the one who needed to catch up.

Her best friend Chantal, who lived in London, had told her that was normal. “Grief messes with you,” she’d told Laura seriously. “You have to give yourself a lot of time.”

Except how did one do that exactly, especially with two grieving children to shepherd and support? Time wasn’t a commodity you could buy in the shop; neither was it elastic, something you could stretch and expand to suit your needs. It simply was, and in her low moments Laura wondered if she’d ever have enough time to feel normal again. Time one day not to feel so sad…or so guilty.

Forcing these uncomfortable thoughts into a dark corner of her mind that felt as if it was getting bigger and bigger by the hour, Laura reached for the first box and tore the tape off the top with a satisfyingly loud rip. Sam looked up from his iPad, and then back down again, thumbs moving in concert over the screen.

“Ten more minutes on that thing,” she told him, “and then you can help me