and the feel of his body through the wool. Everything had been so simple then, dreaming of the day Tess and Cashel would marry, Suki would be First Lady … And then it had all gone wrong …
Taking the little blue sweater from Anna, she had blurted, ‘It’s lovely,’ before dissolving into tears. Without a word, Anna had gently picked Zach up from his beanbag, dressed him in the tiny sweater, and handed him to his mother. It was the only thing which soothed Tess in those days: holding her beloved son and burying her nose in the fine tufts of dark hair on his small head.
There was no need for them to be strangers, Anna had pointed out in her matter-of-fact way. Just because Cashel had stormed off saying he would never speak to Tess again, didn’t mean Anna had to follow suit.
‘We’ve known each other too long for that,’ she said in her firm, strong voice.
Anna Reilly had been unlike anyone else Tess knew. There were plenty of women with husbands who spent every waking moment in the pub and thought work was an occupation for those poor souls without an aptitude for betting on horses, but Anna did not allow this behaviour to beat her down. She was going to raise her boys as best she could, with or without Leonard Reilly’s help, and if that meant cleaning other people’s houses and scrubbing their doorsteps, so be it. The jobs she did in no way defined her. Her strength defined her.
Over the years, Tess often wondered whether Cashel knew that she and his mother had remained friends. In subtle ways, Anna would let her know when Cashel was home, and Tess understood that she wouldn’t be welcome in the house on Bridge Street until he’d gone.
‘You should have seen some of the houses he wanted to buy me,’ Anna joked when she showed Tess around it the first time. It was bigger than the place on Cottage Row that Cashel had grown up in, but not too big.
Through Anna, Tess had followed Cashel’s career from afar. At no time did Anna ask why it had happened that way, why had she broken Cashel’s heart. And Tess never tried to explain, for she felt certain that Anna wouldn’t understand. If it had been her darling Zach whose heart had been broken, Tess knew she’d find it hard to forgive. And yet Anna had been part of her life since she was a child; part housekeeper, part babysitter when it was required. She realized that Tess wasn’t heartless or stuck up, or any of the things Cashel had called her.
She’d been distraught when she first saw the signs of Anna’s decline into dementia. To ensure the old lady got the help she needed, Tess had phoned Riach, alerting him to the problem.
Like his mother, Riach held no malice for her. He was the one who made sure she could continue to visit his mother without revealing her surname to the nurses Cashel had hired.
‘Cashel would go mad if he knew you were visiting her,’ Riach told Tess.
‘I know,’ she said, her silvery-grey eyes cloudy. ‘But it’s not his business. It’s about me and your mother. We were friends.’
Now Cashel would surely be returning for the funeral, and for the first time in many years, they would come face to face.
Assuming Riach thought she should attend the funeral.
Suddenly Vivienne broke off munching through the biscuits, having spotted someone walking towards her shop window.
‘Excuse me, Tess,’ she said. ‘It looks as though I have a customer.’
The moment she was gone, Tess went to the back room to make a phone call.
Riach’s mobile rang so long, she thought she’d have to leave a message, but just as she was steeling herself for the voicemail announcement, he picked up.
‘Riach, I am so sorry. I just heard about Anna. You must be devastated.’
‘I am – we are,’ he said. ‘I knew it was coming, but it still hurts. I want to cry, only I keep thinking how she’d hate me to cry.’
‘She was a very strong woman,’ Tess said, ‘but she’d have wanted you to mourn her, so cry away.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, and Tess could hear the slight hitch in his voice.
‘Riach, I would like to be at the funeral, but only if you think it’s all right for me to come,’ she went on. ‘I don’t want to cause any more pain. You’ve enough to deal with, without me—’
Riach interrupted her. ‘She’d have wanted you there,’ he said.
‘What about Cashel?’
‘Cashel will have to get over himself,’ Riach said shortly. ‘This will be a day for my mother and the people she loved.’
Tess unexpectedly found she had a lump in her throat.
‘She did love you, you know,’ he said.
‘I loved her too,’ Tess said, beginning to cry. ‘I’ll miss her so much. I know it’s better that she won’t have to endure the living hell she was in—’
‘That’s what I said to Cashel,’ Riach interrupted her. ‘I don’t know if he agrees, though. She was the one person he could come back to, you see. I’ve got Charlotte and the kids, he has no one.’
There was silence. A long time ago, Cashel’s someone had been Tess.
‘You should be there, though,’ Riach went on. ‘I’ll call you when it’s all organized. You’ll have to see him, but I’ll tell him you’re coming.’
Tess wasn’t sure what was worse – Cashel knowing in advance that she was going to his mother’s funeral, or him suddenly seeing her there after all these years.
That evening, just as Tess was locking up the shop, Kevin sent her a text.
We need to talk, the message said. Are you in later?
She had an inkling of what he wanted to discuss. The depression in the building trade meant that even brilliant carpenters like Kevin – Tess had to admit that he was a genius at what he did – weren’t able to find work. Before he’d left, they’d sorted out the finances in a general way, neither of them touching the joint account but agreeing that, since Kevin would be living basically rent-free in his mother’s little apartment he could afford to put more money into the mortgage. Clearly that was now becoming too much.
She dialled his number. ‘Hello, Kevin. The answer to your message is yes,’ she said into the phone. ‘I’ll be in later tonight – where else would I be going?’ she laughed.
And on the other end of the phone there was a slight nervous chuckle that didn’t sound like her husband at all.
‘Yes. Where,’ he said.
‘It’s about money, isn’t it?’ Tess said finally. ‘Go on, tell me. You want to change things. Listen, Kevin, maybe …’ she paused, on the verge of saying, Maybe this has all been a mistake, maybe the separation has shown us what we really needed to know: that we were supposed to be together …
Something stopped her.
‘But we’ll talk about it tonight,’ she said breezily. ‘Do you want to have dinner? We’re having shepherd’s pie – not very exciting, I know, but
