took her hand, tears in her eyes. ‘No love, I was so wrong. I just, I saw it happening all over again. The lies and the messiness, people talking and… I’d spent so much time since that day trying to create this perfect family, trying to cover up. And all the years before that I spent trying to make you into this perfect automaton. I never even asked you what you wanted. I was more worried about what people thought than I was about my own daughter. And I’m so sorry.’
The last words were squeaked out through tears as Heather bowed her head.
‘It’s okay, Mum. It all worked out okay. And here we are.’
‘I thought you’d come back. We kept trying to find you. I thought, “eventually she’ll realise, she’ll know we’ll be here” but you never did. And then I got the call from Anna…’ Heather hiccuped, working herself up, ‘and I thought, “there she is again, breaking up my family, thriving on drama”…how awful is that?’
‘It’s not, Mum, it makes sense,’ Megan shushed her, unsure of how to deal with such an emotional outpouring from a woman who had always been loving, but firm, distant. In control.
‘I’m so proud of you, you know. The way you’ve raised Skye, with so little support…you’ve just…you did it all by yourself…’
‘I didn’t, really,’ Megan shrugged, ‘I had Anna, I had Jeremy. A bunch of crazy old ex-actresses who kept trying to get me to do Kegel exercises all the time…’
‘They’re not wrong, you know,’ her mother laughed, wiping away her tears.
‘I wanted to show you I could do this, that I knew what I was doing…but I didn’t. I didn’t have a clue. But I wanted you to meet my daughter one day and love her as much as I do.’ Megan sniffed a little, trying not to give in to the overwhelming desire to throw her arms around her mother.
‘I do, we all do. It’s pretty impossible not to, isn’t it?’ Heather smiled, patting her daughter’s hand. ‘You did good, kid.’
‘I know,’ Megan nodded, ‘but we’ll do even better now.’
They sat quietly, sipping their tea for a while, letting the emotions sap away into the Earl Grey and silence.
‘So Lucas has been around a lot lately…’ Heather said slyly, raising an eyebrow at her daughter.
‘Some things don’t change,’ Megan laughed.
***
Megan had escaped to Lucas’ for a while after talking to her mum. It was like a great outpouring of everything that she’d felt and known and wondered about for most of her lifetime, and she was exhausted. But more than that, it was like the floodgates had opened. If she was going to be open with her mother, maybe she needed to do that with everyone. The problem was, Lucas was a calming presence, he always had been. She’d always loved to just sit there in the corner of his room whilst he fiddled on his guitar, or wrote down lyrics, half-humming to himself. She was safe in the quiet with him. Which was why she was currently curled up with him on his sofa, quietly enjoying the feel of him holding her and not expecting anything else.
‘You’re different now, you know,’ Lucas said suddenly, head tilted like he was trying to figure out exactly what it was that had changed.
Megan shrugged. ‘The whole “being a mother” thing might be a clue. She has to come first, always. I was pretty good at being selfish before.’ Still am, she thought to herself, somehow still guilty that she could be curled up with Lucas, pretending nothing was different, when her daughter was at home. Skye was fine, she was happy to spend time with her grandparents. But there was some little part of Megan telling her that she was selfish for having fun, that she shouldn’t be here at all. She tried to stamp it down, smiling at Lucas.
‘No, it’s not that, you were always terrible at putting yourself first anyway. You’re just less…angry now. You’re okay with who you are, and who they are,’ Lucas didn’t have to say he meant her parents, ‘you haven’t got that chip on your shoulder any more.’
‘Nothing to prove,’ Megan shrugged. ‘I disappointed them in the biggest way possible, threw away every dream they’d been trying to grow in me since I was a kid. After that, I was free.’
Lucas smiled sadly, pulling her in closer to drop a gentle kiss on her forehead. ‘And that’s why you never would have stayed with me.’
Megan looked up and nodded. ‘It’s why I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. In many ways, Skye gave me a reason to get out, to take the path I wanted. If I’d stayed with you, they would have controlled me in the same way they always did.’
‘I knew you loved me,’ Lucas said, ‘I knew it couldn’t have been that. I thought maybe you didn’t trust me. That you couldn’t trust me to look after you.’
She shook her head against his chest. ‘You did have a lot of contempt for those girls in the village who got knocked up, you said they’d never do anything with their lives.’
‘A lot of people never do anything with their lives. They lose it in a plodding circle of TV, food, work and sleep.’
‘Sounds nice,’ Megan yawned against him.
‘I could have come with you, you know. We could have started somewhere new together.’
Megan thought back to that night, when he asked her to stay, and she’d never felt so truly loved by someone in her entire life. She felt safe, like she wasn’t a disappointment or a disgrace.
‘I lay there for hours thinking through every alternative, you know. I thought about that. And then I thought about Clare, and what would happen if you weren’t there. That your mum never signed with her, and she’d be alone and isolated, and you’d never get the chance to play in a band, or make it big. I wanted that for you. And I couldn’t do that to Clare.’
Lucas huffed. ‘Wow, you really thought of everything.’
Megan nodded.
‘You could have put some of that in the note so that I didn’t have to spend the last ten years thinking you left me behind because I was a failure.’
‘Why on earth would you think you were a failure?’
‘Because you couldn’t trust me to take care of you.’
Megan sighed. ‘You took care of me for most of our lives. I knew you could take care of me, take care of us. But I didn’t know whether I could do it, and I needed to know. I could speak advanced French, and paint beautifully and write sonnets, but I didn’t know how to use a washing machine. I needed to know I could do something for myself, that I could be a mum and be decent and good. Not an angel, or a fallen angel, just a person.’
‘You’d have let me come with you if I was the father though, wouldn’t you?’ Lucas said sharply.
‘Probably. But only because it would have been your right,’ Megan sighed.
Lucas squeezed her. ‘You’re a bloody complicated woman, you know that?’
‘I was a complicated teenager. I’m pretty simple now.’
He tangled his fingers into her hair, his thumb stroking her neck. ‘Nope, always complicated, Megan McAllister. You’ll always make things more difficult than they need to be.’
‘And what does that mean, exactly?’ She pulled back to look at him.
‘It means that we both know this isn’t casual, we both know that we have something here that can last beyond Christmas and this village. And you’re going to pretend as long as you can that it doesn’t exist.’ Lucas leant in and kissed her gently, pulling back briefly to lock eyes with her. ‘I’ll let it go for now, but at some point you’re going to see what we are, Meg, and you’re going to have to make that decision.’
‘Nothing comes before my daughter, Luke, nothing.’
Lucas