The Legacy, Caroline Bond [popular books to read txt] 📗

drawn to the box. It looked old. A proper antique, beautifully made out of some sort of dark wood, with a lighter-wood pattern inlaid on the lid. Megan ran her fingers across the top, imagining Jonathan’s fingers doing the same. It was an object that invited touch. She picked it up. Whatever was inside slid around. She lifted the lid.

Inside the box was a set of keys. Megan recognised them instantly by the enamel rainbow fob. They were the keys to her old house in Darlington. She looked at them, confused.

She’d been given the key ring by a pupil at her first school when she was a newly qualified teacher. Her first-ever gift from a student – she’d been touched.

When she’d clipped the keys to her own home onto it, she’d felt proud.

When she’d had to hand those keys over, when she’d sold her house to move in with Jonathan, she’d felt sad.

Somehow, they were back in her possession.

Megan rested her head back and closed her eyes, feeling the cool weight of the house keys against her palm. The wine-loosened voices of Jonathan’s children leaked through the closed door and stained the peace.

She had a decision to make, one she’d been wrestling with all week.

How much to tell them?

How much they deserved to know?

Deserved. That was the word that was causing her problems. She owed Jonathan’s children nothing. Or did she? Did she owe them honesty? Or was Jonathan’s gift to her hers alone to cherish? On this and so much else, she was confused and conflicted.

She could – in theory – walk upstairs, right this minute, pack a bag and just walk out. Leave them to their wrangling and self-interest. Was that what Jonathan intended her to do? For her to take the escape route he’d prepared for her? Had that been his plan all along? She was tempted.

But what right had they to drive her out of her own home? Why should she give them free rein as they picked over his legacy, his belongings, his memory – like noisy vultures? Why should they be able to act is if she didn’t exist; no, worse, as if she’d never existed – as if her relationship with Jonathan was little more than a blip, an aberration? If she left them to it, wasn’t that tantamount to admitting she should never have been in his life in the first place?

There was also a slim, hard thread of curiosity running through Megan that wanted to see how they would treat her, now that she was truly alone. They would, of course, find out about the house in Darlington eventually, but until they did, her fate appeared to rest totally in their hands. What would they do with such power? Just how badly, or well, would they behave without their father’s influence? This weekend she would get to see them in their true colours.

And on top of all that, there was the problem of Jonathan’s macabre instruction not to hold his funeral until everything was decided. The thought of him lying on a mortuary slab – eyes closed for ever, heart still for ever – waiting for his last rites haunted her. His will had consigned both of them to purgatory; a purgatory whose duration and outcome were dependent on the whims of his children. What had he been playing it?

Another wave of rage pulsed through her. ‘Why, Jonathan, why?’

The sound of her own voice startled her.

The answer came in the unmistakeable sound of something breaking. Megan jumped. As she scrambled upright, the box slid off the bedcovers and fell down the gap between the bed and the wall – she would have to retrieve it later. She dropped the key ring into the top drawer of the desk, locked it and hurried across the room.

She pulled open the door.

Chloe was standing, barefoot, in the middle of the hall surrounded by a fan of smashed crockery. Behind her the doorway was filled with Noah and Liv and Angus. Their attention immediately swung from Chloe to Megan.

‘You klutz!’ Noah’s unhelpful contribution lit Chloe’s short fuse.

‘At least I was trying to clear up! Don’t just stand there gawping at me. Help!’ As always with Chloe, there was a shimmer of self-pity beneath her words.

Liv and Angus stepped forward, carefully, and started picking up the biggest pieces. Noah made no such move.

With a pang Megan realised that the broken pots were the bowls Sarah had made for her and Jonathan as a new life together present when she’d moved in, the only such present they’d received. ‘I’ll get the dustpan.’

‘No, it’s okay.’ Liv didn’t look up, but continued to retrieve chunks of pottery. ‘Tell me where it is and I’ll fetch it.’

‘I don’t mind.’ Megan made a move towards the kitchen.

Liv looked up. ‘I said, we’ll do it!’ Her voice was as sharp as the broken shards.

Defeated, Megan, left them to it.

Chapter 15

CHLOE SNAPPED awake. She lay in the glare of the moonlight, her heart thumping in her chest, simultaneously glad to have woken up and upset that she was now even more conscious of being alone in the small, dark hours of the night. Her phone told her it was 1.08 a.m.

She’d been having different versions of the same nightmare over and over again ever since her father died. In her dreams she would always be doing something ordinary: drying her hair, sitting at her till at work, shopping, looking at her phone or in a bar with her friends. Gradually she’d become aware of the sound of a baby crying. No one else in her dreams ever heard the child and they would carry on as normal, but she would grow increasingly distressed and would start searching for the baby. The weirdness was that she would look in totally illogical places: in handbags, underneath floorboards, behind mirrors, inside people’s mouths. The crying would grow louder, then fainter, then stop – only to start up again the minute she ceased searching.

She always