of returning to the mill and actually working there was just too good to be true.
She’d always been made so welcome there. In the four years she’d been the Miltons’ babysitter, The Old Mill House had been like a second home. Well, a first home, if Nina was really honest with herself. She’d always been so happy there. It had been a little sanctuary away from her own home when her parents had been fighting about who should move out and what belonged to whom in the run-up to their divorce. It had been tough being an only child and Nina had been secretly jealous of the Milton family, with their three young boys and inexhaustible number of cousins, aunts and uncles who were always popping over. The house was never empty and Nina couldn’t help wondering what it would be like now. Would it still be the happy drop-in centre that she remembered – or had the boys and the cousins all found places of their own and no longer felt the need to return to the family home?
All the same, Nina thought, how comforting it must be to have a family home to come back to, even if you chose to live on the other side of the world. It was a rare thing nowadays to have your parents still together and still living in the same home where the family had been brought up, and she couldn’t help envying the Milton boys that security, because she’d never had it in her own life.
Olivia anxiously buzzed around the house like a mad wasp. She straightened the hemline of a curtain, adjusted a vase on the mantelpiece, picked a few dead leaves from her house plants and plumped a few cushions. She wanted everything to be absolutely perfect for Nina’s visit.
She hadn’t spoken to Dudley about the possibility of a new secretary – not yet – she wanted to tell Dominic first. Wouldn’t he be surprised? She couldn’t wait to see the look on his face. At least it might replace his current demeanour. He’d been a little brooding of late and she was worried about him. Olivia was used to worrying about her youngest, of course. It had always been the same, she thought, picking up a silver-framed photo of the boys.
Billy, the eldest, was the brains of the brothers, always ready with the answers for Trivial Pursuit; Alex was the playboy, and had been chasing girls as soon as he’d been able to walk. Then there was Dominic. Olivia’s finger traced the face in the photograph. A mother wasn’t supposed to have favourites, but Dominic had always had a special place in her heart; he was the introvert, the artistic one, who’d spend his evenings painting a canvas whilst his brothers would be painting the town.
Not that he’d been short of admirers. The lovely Faye had been around almost as long as there’d been a Dominic, and the relationship had been quite serious throughout their teenage years. But, since Dominic had been away at university at one end of the country and Faye had been studying horticulture at the other, they seemed to have forgotten about their burgeoning relationship. However, since Olivia had employed Faye to give their garden a makeover, she now realised that the young girl was still very much in love with her son.
Olivia’s mind drifted back to the past and some of the family occasions when, as far as she was concerned, Dominic and Faye had been Norfolk’s sweetest couple. Birthdays, Christmases, New Years and countless afternoon teas and evening suppers had always included Faye. She had been an honorary member of the Milton family and Olivia couldn’t bear the thought of her not being a part of their family’s future, which was why she was, in her own unsubtle way, trying to get Faye and her son back together again.
Dominic was having none of it, of course.
‘Mum! Just stop!’ he’d insisted. ‘It isn’t going to happen. We’ve broken up. End of story.’
‘But Dommie—’
‘And don’t call me that. I’m not a child any more.’
No, Olivia thought, he wasn’t. He was a twenty-one-year-old graduate. A young, single man who really would benefit from the love of a good woman.
But where on earth was Dominic?, Olivia wondered, as she waited for Nina to arrive. It wasn’t just Faye he was avoiding lately, but everybody.
Nina couldn’t help but smile at the reflection that greeted her. The dress she’d pulled out of the wardrobe was old but pretty, and was certainly an improvement on her jeans.
She rubbed her hands over the goose bumps on her arms, that were fast turning into goose-mountains, and rummaged around on the floor of the wardrobe for her cotton jumper. She grinned. Not exactly the height of fashion, but she was a practical girl and refused to freeze just in case she ran into an old boyfriend she didn’t even want to impress any more.
For a moment, she thought about Matt, looking at the answer phone that was telling her she had five messages from him. He wasn’t going to give up that easily, was he? The first message had been the Matt she’d fallen in love with – the charming young man who had wooed her with his words as well as his good looks.
‘I miss you so much!’ he’d told her. ‘Call me. I can’t bear not seeing you. You’re everything to me.’ Her hand had hovered dangerously over the phone. The second message was similar but his voice sounded more anxious and, by the third message, the anxiety had turned to anger.
‘Where are you, Nina? What’s so important in your life that you can’t call me back? Who do you think you are, anyway? You can’t do this to me. I won’t let you!’
Nina’s hands had begun to quake in the way that was all too familiar from the past when Matt’s moods turned, and she’d listened to the fifth and final message with trepidation. It had been horrible. He’d sworn, called her names, said he never wanted to see her again – never, never, never – and then hung up. It was a pattern that she had come to know well.
Throughout their relationship, she’d often thought that she’d prefer him to physically hit her rather than inflict so much emotional abuse on her. It might, she thought, have been less painful in the long run.
Now, looking at her reflection, she knew she’d done the right thing in breaking up with him. Friends like Janey might be shocked by the split, but they’d only ever seen one side of Matt. They never saw the other man because he was an expert at hiding him to everybody but her.
She took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to think about Matt now. He was her past, and she was determined to make the very best of the present. She grabbed her hairbrush and decided to put a bit of make-up on in the hope that it might ward off the possibility of freckles. She’d once naively thought that freckles were like spots and that you grew out of them, but hers seemed to be getting more prominent as she charged through her twenties.
She glanced at the contents of her bathroom cabinet and pulled out a likely looking tube of foundation. Oil-free, retouch-free, perfume-free, high SPF, enduring and moisturising. That was all very well, but did it prevent freckles? Nina squirted a small amount onto her fingertips and got to work, and then, finally, she was ready to go, leaving her small flat for the bus and the short ride back into her past.
Dominic hadn’t been hiding, not consciously anyway. He’d just been busy. Busy thinking. It was summer, and that usually meant that it was summer project time.
It had begun five years ago during the sixth-form holidays. He’d set himself the challenge to create some huge canvas; some monstrously large painting that would occupy the whole length of the summer holidays. The last two efforts had even impressed his parents enough into hanging them in their hallway where they accosted unsuspecting visitors.
The first had been a view of the mill house from across the river, but its primitive style suggested more of a great white palace standing at the top of Niagara Falls. It was stunning, and any visitors who hadn’t seen it before were
