I had no answers for Leanne. I couldn’t tell her that it would be okay. Clearly, things were far from okay.
And as for being wrongfully fired – I so wanted her to be telling the truth, for her to be the woman who’d found the guts and the grit to walk away. Who then, in a cruel twist of fate, simply got ill, as if life hadn’t been hard enough.
I wanted to believe Leanne – to believe in her. But if she was a woman living in the grip of substance abuse, who’d spent all her money feeding her addiction, hoping to dupe the gullible neighbour into feeling sorry for her and helping her out? Well – wouldn’t she say exactly the same thing?
I went to bed that night full of disturbing questions. Should I give Leanne the benefit of the doubt, ignoring my growing unease on the basis of one conversation? Or should I assume the worst, hand over my concerns to someone in authority, and potentially start a sequence of events that – should Leanne be telling the truth – would wreak yet more devastation on a woman and a little girl who had already faced more than enough?
It was a long night.
15
After the conversation with Leanne, it was inevitable that I’d wake up with Mum on my mind. To be honest, I thought about her far more than I wanted to.
I would often make a mental note to tell her something – if someone was rude to me, or a funny incident happened, or I had a mini-victory with an issue to do with the cottage. And then I’d remember that, even if I did phone or message to tell her, she wouldn’t be interested. Not unless she could twist it to revolve around her, and how I had made her feel.
The websites I’d been reading about emotional abuse were helping me realise that I didn’t make her feel anything. She was her own person, and how she chose to react to me was her responsibility. That, however, didn’t stop a deep-seated part of me from craving her approval or from hoping that one day she would be proud of me.
I’d have days when it looked like I was making progress – I’d cook dinner without thinking whether she’d like it or not, or leave a mess on the kitchen table and not worry that she was right about me not coping alone. Other times, her miserable moaning haunted my every step.
I didn’t know it was possible to miss someone so much while still being so happy not to have to see or hear from them.
I spent the morning going through the Buttonhole website, finding that Mum had continued to get more actively involved – she was running more workshops, had some quilts and other crafts up for sale. There was a blog about the recent embroidery course, and I was shocked to see a photograph of her looking delighted as she demonstrated a stitch. She had a new hairstyle and wore a cotton dress that made her look a decade younger.
For years I had wished and prayed that she’d get a life of her own, leaving me to get on with mine.
So why did it feel like she’d stabbed me in the chest with her crochet hook?
I took Nesbit out for a long walk once the temperature had eased. I’d called Steph, and she’d listened and sympathised and then ordered me to get back to the Dream List and focus on things I could change, rather than people I couldn’t.
I’d been making such good progress with the list that there weren’t many straightforward options left. It would need to be something big enough to concentrate my mind, but not so big I couldn’t do it soon. There was one obvious choice, but it was one of those items that seemed fun, cosy and romantic with a partner, but cold, scary and pointlessly uncomfortable if tried alone.
I mulled it over as Nesbit and I weaved amongst the trees, stopping to admire the wildflowers or chew on an old pine cone, not at all accidentally ambling in the vague direction of Sam’s house. As we walked and soaked up the peace and beauty of the forest, I had to acknowledge that being out here was like a massage to my stressed-out soul. My breathing slowed, the anxious thoughts settled, and the tension in my stomach and shoulders gradually eased. By the time we’d completely failed to locate either Sam’s house or the path back to Bigley, I’d made my mind up. Once I’d passed the same picnic clearing for the third time, which thankfully turned out to have a tiny blip of internet connection so I could figure out the rough direction for home, I’d convinced myself that sooner rather than later was the time to do it.
Item seven: a weekend hiking and camping in Bigley Forest Park.
I spent most of my free time for the next couple of weeks planning and prepping for the big trip. While I knew one night in a tent less than five miles from home wasn’t that exciting to some people, it was a huge deal to me and I was unashamedly treating it as such. I couldn’t find anything online about whether camping was permitted in the forest park, so I did the next best thing and asked around （I would of course have loved to have asked Sam, but I didn’t have his phone number, he was nowhere on social media and it didn’t seem like a good enough reason to drive over to his house）。