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

and pick up Lily together. She’s been so looking forward to you coming home.’

Noah wiped his face on his sleeve.

Josie kissed him, softly, on the lips and smiled. ‘And so have I.’

Chapter 62

SUNLIGHT, SHOWERS and an enamel rainbow.

Jonathan had been right after all.

Time travel was possible.

The little front garden was in need of attention, the previous owners had obviously had very little interest in gardening. Only the lilac by the gate seemed to be thriving. It was smothered in a canopy of heavy, pure-white blossoms. As Megan ducked beneath the loaded branches, a burst of perfume descended on her. A benediction, welcoming her home. She walked up the eight steps to the blockwork path slowly, taking in her surroundings. Someone had painted the door an insipid light blue. It used to be a shiny dark red. She was going to have so many decisions to make about what to keep and what to change.

She slid the key into the lock. Turned it.

Heard her heartbeat thud in her ears.

Anticipation. An unfamiliar but welcome emotion.

The door opened onto the sitting room. No hallway, no preamble – just straight into the heart of the house. The room was empty, stripped bare of all but small reminders of its most recent inhabitants: a scatter of fingermarks on the switch plate, a dent behind the front door where the handle had dinged against the plaster, holes in the walls where their pictures had hung. Megan made a quick mental note of all these small injuries to the fabric of the house. The beginning of a list of things she would need to put right.

She dropped her bag at the foot of the stairs, walked into the middle of the room and turned 360 degrees, taking in every little detail. She hadn’t realised how small the house was before, but anywhere would seem cramped after the high ceilings and large rooms of The View.

But it would do.

It had suited her before.

It would again.

She took another slow rotation, like a ballerina in a jewellery box, but without the tutu and the tinkling music. As she did so, she caught sight of the woman in the mirror above the fireplace. There was nothing fragile and glittery about her. She was in her mid-thirties. Her hair was caught up in a loose bun at the nape of her neck. She had pale skin. Good cheekbones. Dark-blue eyes. The woman in the mirror lifted her chin and looked straight at Megan. Her stare was steady and resolute.

Jonathan had sent her back to a new beginning.

What happened next was down to her.

Step one: she would wait for ‘the man with the van’ to arrive. He was bringing her stuff from the storage unit. There wasn’t a lot – a few sticks of furniture, her kitchenware, her bedding and some other bits and pieces. She’d taken very little from The View. Why take what was never hers? In truth, she could barely remember what she’d packed away during those bleak few weeks over Christmas. By that point all she’d wanted to do was get away from the house.

It had snowed the day she moved out, which seemed fitting.

Sarah had insisted that Megan come and stay with them for a while – be around a loving family, for a change. It had been the right decision. Those quiet, sad months of the new year had allowed her to grieve, to start to recover and to plan. She would for ever be grateful to her sister for that much-needed period of support and respite.

But now it was time to put her plan into action.

Over the next few days she would clean the house from top to bottom, get the Internet sorted, stock her fridge, maybe even find time to dig some dandelions out of the handkerchief of a lawn and put in some new plants – a signal to the neighbours that the house was owned once again, cared for once again. She wondered how many of them she would still know, how many would recognise her? She would need to have an explanation ready for her return to the house after all these years – a heavily edited version.

Then, in a fortnight’s time, she would begin work. Supply teaching at a large comprehensive with a poor Ofsted rating, on the outskirts of Middlesbrough. Tough area. Tough kids. The thought made her heart thump – with trepidation and excitement. It would be a fire-and-brimstone baptism back into real life. But what better choice was there than a school full of disaffected kids consumed by their own issues and problems?

She had been a good teacher and mentor of just such kids before.

They used to be her forte.

They had been her path to Jonathan.

They could, perhaps, be her salvation now.

She walked through to the back room, which merged into the galley kitchen that led out onto the tiny yard. A nice, straightforward ‘what you see is what you get’ house. The back room looked even shabbier than the front – more gouges and marks on the walls. Purple! Who in their right mind painted an already-dark room the colour of a prune? She was going to need Polyfilla and paint, lots and lots of paint. No matter, it would give her something to do. DIY, another step to reasserting her ownership of the house.

As she drifted around, touching surfaces and walls, reacquainting herself with what was, once again, hers, the tightness that had been ever-present in her chest for the past year began to ease. For the first time in months Megan felt full of energy. She lifted the blind, opened the back door and let the fresh air flood in. She took a deep breath, another and another.

The insipid blue front door, the purple walls, whatever technicoloured horrors lay in wait for her upstairs, the dents and scratches and marks, the scruffy evidence of other people in her home – she would get rid of it all.

She would paint the whole house white.

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