“All right,” she agreed. “But I’ll get a taxi so you have the car if you need it, and please call me the moment you know anything.”
Helen stroked her hair. “Of course, darling.” She gave Josie some cash to cover the fare without even asking, and, given she was currently broke, Josie took it.
When she got out of the taxi at the cottage, for a moment Josie just stopped, her breath steaming out in front of her, and stared at her old home, looking at it properly in daylight. She hadn’t noticed in the dark last night that it looked smaller, somehow, even than when she’d last been here a few years ago. It was a semidetached cottage, flowerpots surrounding the front door, the small front lawn neatly mowed, hanging baskets below the one second-floor window you could see from the front of the house and, she knew, the two at the back. All her grandad’s work—he was the gardener. There was a black gate to the left of the cottage, which led to the back garden—that was the way she used to let herself in after school on the rare occasion that one of them wasn’t home, because they’d never bothered to lock the back door. They hadn’t used to worry about that sort of thing back then, not out here in their little village.
Her parents had lived on the other side of the village—to get some semblance of independence, Josie supposed, so that they weren’t living on top of her dad’s parents. Close enough, though, that they could access their help when they needed it, and could pop round once a week or so. She imagined that had been the plan, anyway. As a teenager, she used to go and stare at her parents’ old house sometimes on the sly, would take a detour on the way home from school, get off at a different bus stop and just go to look at it, to try to remember what it looked like on the inside, and to get a glimpse at the family who lived there now, their daughter too young for Josie to know. But despite that, it was this cottage that she stood outside now that featured most prominently in her memories of growing up.
She used the spare key—it was always in one of the plant pots, without fail—and let herself inside. She crossed through the living room and saw a photo from her exhibition—the one of Silverknowes Beach with a grey, moody sky, hanging in pride of place on the wall. Memo had bought it, telling her she wanted to be her first customer, and seeing it there almost made Josie break down. She took a breath and carried on walking through the house.
When she reached the kitchen she stared out at the back garden—bigger than you’d imagine from the front of the house. There had been a swing set there when she was younger. Even before her parents died, her grandparents had put it in for her, but they’d gotten rid of it when she’d become a teenager and had declared she no longer used it, given it to another family in the village, she thought. Behind her was the kitchen table that they’d all had dinner round and she even had the whisper of memories of her parents being here too, the five of them squeezed round a table built for four.
She set to work on washing up the tea and breakfast crockery from this morning, then closed her eyes very briefly, her hands in the soapy water. A heart attack. The words just wouldn’t go away, even though she’d just seen her, had seen that she’d been awake and talking. But this wasn’t supposed to happen yet. She couldn’t lose her grandmother—she wasn’t ready. She was supposed to have a handle on her life before that happened, was supposed to be settled with a husband or something, supposed to have her own family to lean on. She wasn’t ready yet to lose the parents who had raised her after her own died—she didn’t know how to go through it again.
There was a knock at the front door and Josie switched off the tap, determinedly swallowing the lump in her throat even though her mouth was dry.
When she opened the door, she just stared, then blinked several times. She thought fleetingly that maybe she’d passed out from emotional exhaustion, that this was some weird dream.
He stared back at her from the doorstep, his gaze flickering over her face, as if trying to gauge her reaction. In the cold sunlight, his eyes looked a crisper, darker green. His face was paler than usual, like it was absorbing some of the cold, and there were pockets of shadows under those eyes. His expression was that carefully neutral one, like it was ready to go either way, depending on what she said to him in that moment. She glanced behind him, to the taxi that was now pulling away from the gravel driveway, then shook her head when she looked back to his face. “Max. What are you doing here?” Because of all the people she might have expected to see, he had not been one of them.