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

head back into town, hunting for another fare. He was right, the wind was still strong. Her cheeks hurt as if they’d been slapped. But it was better than the oppressive heat at the solicitor’s. She started walking, relishing the fight against the elements. It was perfect weather for her grief, and anger. She walked until she was warm, her eyes watering, her lungs full of cold air. Blood pumped through her system, expanding her sore heart. Just before the clock tower she took the path down to the Italian Gardens, out of the worst of the wind. She couldn’t face going back to the house and the clamour of mounting questions that couldn’t be answered by the empty rooms.

At this time of year the gardens were bleak, a pattern of neat circles of heavy clay soil, empty of plants. Everything was sodden. At the heart of the gardens was a shallow pond choked with dead bulrushes. In the centre, Eros balanced precariously on his weather-beaten globe, his arm reaching out into thin air. At either end of the gardens stood two ornately painted wooden shelters, now faded and in need of repair. They dated back to the glory days of Scarborough, when the great and the good used to the promenade along the South Cliff – looking down on the poor unwashed below. Megan chose the shelter on the left. Inside, the sound of the waves was muffled, the force of the wind diminished. D loves G 4ever was scrawled in marker pen on the chalky wall. The place was scruffy, but at least it was peaceful.

She was not.

What she felt – what had begun coursing through her in that claustrophobic room as the solicitor had spoken so smoothly and professionally – was rage. It was a fury not directed at Ms Hewson, with her smart suit and kind face, or at Liv, or Chloe; not even at Noah, with his rudeness and insensitivity; but at Jonathan. For everything. Her emotions crackled. She had thought she couldn’t feel any worse than she already did, but she’d been wrong. She was incensed with him.

For sneaking off to the solicitor’s without telling her.

For spending weeks, if not months, secretly planning the whole charade.

For letting her walk into that meeting unprepared.

For thinking the whole thing was some sort of game that he could control from beyond his as-yet-unfilled grave.

For handing everything over to his kids.

For bowing to their resentment and cutting her out, just as they, she suspected, had wanted him to.

For abandoning her to face this on her own.

And on top of all that – as if that wasn’t enough – she was blindingly, roaringly furious at him for dying.

She had stayed with him through it all, and yet he had not stayed with her. And for that she was livid.

He had left her.

He had given up.

She had so many things she wanted to say that she would now never be able to. There was so much pent-up emotion inside her that had no possible outlet.

His dying was selfish.

He had been selfish.

There, she had finally admitted it to herself.

Megan banged her fists down on the bench. Once, twice, three, four, five times – harder and harder – trying to release some of the fury that had been building up since his death. No, that wasn’t true. The rage had been brewing inside her for far longer. It had been bubbling under the surface throughout the seemingly endless, stressful months of being trapped in the house with Jonathan. It had fermented silently inside her with every long, slow hour that she’d dedicated to loving and caring for him. Her secret rage had, it now felt, always been there, the dark underside to all that incessant positivity and hope.

Throughout his illness she had put his needs first, subsumed her own. Her sole objective had been to make his life as good as possible. She had changed shape around him. Reinvented herself to become the carer that his illness demanded, rather than the lover and partner she had once been.

She had been selfless.

And yet, all that time, he’d been planning and plotting behind her back, drafting this elaborate ending to their story.

Damn him.

Damn him.

Damn him!

Her tantrum raged and she indulged it. She let her grief flood out, feeling the scorch in her nose and throat. On and on it burnt – until there was no more fuel left.

The gardens came back into focus. Eros hadn’t moved. The wind was still blowing off the sea, and Jonathan was still dead. There was still today, and tomorrow, and all the other days after that to be got through. There was still the house – for a while at least – and his family to endure. And there were still Jonathan’s last wishes to be observed, before his soul could be put to rest.

Chapter 8

THE COUNTDOWN to their weekend get-together seemed interminable. Who knew a week could feel like a lifetime? Living in The View with Megan, but without her dad, was more uncomfortable than ever for Chloe. The meeting at the solicitor’s had obviously not helped. How could it? She and Megan were even more wary of each other than they were before. As the days dragged by, they rotated stiffly through the house like characters on a cuckoo clock. Despite their habit of polite avoidance, Chloe was still hyper-aware of Megan’s presence. Listening out for somebody all the time, feeling their sadness in the soft closing of a door or the clink of a solitary mug being lifted from a cupboard, was stressful and tiring. The longer it went on, the more Chloe was reminded of how much of the soul and energy of the house had come from her father.

Flowers were delivered to the house almost daily. Every time Chloe came home from work there seemed to be a new bouquet. Megan shoved them haphazardly into vases, still wrapped in their layers of unnecessary cellophane and tissue. She put the accompanying notes