Lost and Found on Foxglove Street (The Foxglove Street #9)

Chapter 25

25

When Ryan got home after walking Grace back to Foxglove Street, he found his grandmother in the kitchen, warming milk in a pan at the hob.

“I thought I’d enjoy a hot drink before bed,” she said. “Care to join me?”

“No thanks, Grandma. There’s hot chocolate in the cupboard if you’d like some.”

“Warm milk will be fine. I may add a little honey. Milk and honey together can be very comforting and help aid restful sleep.”

“Are you feeling okay tonight, Grandma?” Ryan asked, concerned that she might need a little help to get to sleep tonight.

“Yes, I’m quite fine. Perhaps I’m a little full after eating too much delicious pizza, but nothing more than that.” She gave him a reassuring look. “There’s no need to worry about me, Ryan.”

“Of course I worry, after everything you’ve been through.”

“If there’s any reason for you to worry, I shall tell you. Until then, stop fretting about me, boy.”

Ryan held his hands up in surrender, knowing he was at risk of irritating his grandmother with his constant questions about how she was feeling. He simply couldn’t help it. He adored her, and had been scared half to death when she’d been going through her cancer treatment. While she was a guest here in his home, he considered it his responsibility to make sure she was all right and, more importantly, not over-exerting herself.

“I take it you got Grace and little Stanley home okay?” Miriam asked.

Ryan nodded.

“I like Grace,” Miriam said. “She is a sweet young woman. She’s perfect for you.”

“Grandma, we only just met a couple of days ago. We barely know each other.”

Miriam waved this off. “You know enough. I think she does, too.”

“That sounds a bit cryptic.”

Miriam laughed and poured milk into a mug on the counter. “It makes me happy to see you spending time with a girl who makes you smile the way she does. When you get to my age in life, all you want is for your family to be happy and healthy. Out of all my grandchildren, you are the one I still worry about the most.”

“Me? Why do you worry about me? I’m all set.”

Ryan gestured to the house in which they stood to emphasise his point.

“Money and career success are wonderful, Ryan,” Miriam said, stirring honey into her mug of warm milk. “But those things don’t keep a person warm in bed at night. You need a partner, someone by your side, someone you love and who loves you in return.”

“It’s a bit premature to be thinking along those lines as far as Grace is concerned, Grandma.”

“No, I disagree. I know magic when I see it. After spending a lifetime with your grandfather, how could I not?”

Ryan felt a lump in his throat at his grandmother’s tender words. His grandparents had shared a love story for the ages, meeting when they were teenagers and remaining together for the rest of their lives. They’d been completely besotted with each other and had built a family that had always looked up to them as a model of what a strong and caring relationship between two people ought to look like. Quite how his grandmother had got through the loss of the man she’d known and loved since girlhood remained a mystery to Ryan.

That she’d had the additional trauma of a cancer diagnosis thrown into her life just a year after she’d lost him was a blow Ryan simply could not fathom.

The idea that his grandmother would compare the few short interactions he’d shared with Grace to what Miriam had shared with Ryan’s grandfather was so startling that it left him at a loss for words.

“I know you’ve had many relationships in your life, Ryan,” Miriam continued. “But I also know that none of those women have ever come close to what you’re looking for. And I also know that you still harbour dark memories about what happened to you when you were just a boy all those years ago on that stupid television music competition programme.”

Miriam’s brow furrowed in anger before her expression rearranged into her usual calm demeanour.

“But there’s no point dwelling on the past,” she said. “What’s done is done, and I don’t intend to drag all those unhappy memories back out into the light. All I’m saying is that I know that, even after all this time, whenever you meet a woman you like, you still find yourself waiting for the bubble to burst, as it did back then and with such spectacularly awful effect.”

“Grandma—”

“Let me finish,” Miriam interrupted, her tone kind. “There is a spark between you and Grace. It’s unmissable. Perhaps with Grace, instead of waiting for the bubble to burst, you should just enjoy the moment.”

Ryan gave his grandmother a smile, knowing she meant well, but uncomfortable with the razor-sharp insight she’d delivered about him.

“Thanks for the dating advice, Grandma,” he said. “I’ll bear it all in mind.”

Miriam’s gaze scoured his face for a long beat before she nodded and gave a half-shrug.

“You’re a grown man and you know your own mind. But don’t forget that an old fogey like me knows a thing or two about life and love.”

“I never doubted it.”

Miriam laughed and picked up her mug of warm milk. Crossing the kitchen, she kissed Ryan’s cheek.

“Goodnight, my darling boy,” she said.

“Goodnight, Grandma.”

Once Miriam had left to go upstairs, Ryan washed up the milk pan she’d used and wiped the counters, and then stuffed the empty pizza boxes into the recycling. His grandmother’s words echoed in his head as he finished the evening’s chores, and his thoughts turned inevitably to Grace.

When he’d walked her home tonight and they’d kissed goodbye, it had taken all his willpower not to ask himself inside her house in order to continue what they’d started. Releasing her from his embrace had been the last thing he’d wanted.

When Grace was in his arms, he felt… like everything was right in the world.

Ryan let that thought rattle through his head. It was accurate, but there was something else lurking beneath those simple words, something that dug much deeper.

Leaving the kitchen, he returned to the living room and picked up the new leather-bound notebook his grandmother had gifted him. He sat down on the sofa and grabbed a pen from the coffee table, mulling over the words that were spinning around inside his head.

As he tapped his pen on the first blank page of the notebook, he thought of the melody he’d begun picking out over the last few days while strumming on his acoustic guitar. He thought, too, of the fleeting lyrics he’d jotted down while experimenting with the new music.

Thoughts of Grace had filled his mind while he’d been playing the guitar and scrawling down those lyrics. She’d inspired him to write, even though he was supposed to be taking a break from work. Not that it had felt much like work to write the music Grace had sparked inside him.

Ryan fetched his guitar and the old notebook containing the lyrics he’d penned, and then sat back down and began playing softly, so as not to disturb his grandmother upstairs. The melody he’d sketched out continued to take shape as his fingers worked the guitar strings and found the notes he’d toyed with.

The melody was understated and tender, rising to a heart-felt and aching crescendo on the chorus. It was a classic mid-tempo love song that conjured romance and starlight and the timeless story of two hearts finding their way home to each other.

Ryan strummed the guitar, tested the chords, adjusted the notes as they climbed towards the bridge. He scrawled in the notebook, scratching out lyrics, switching words around, seeking the essence of the story that would unfold within the four-minute song.

Two hearts finding their way home to each other…

Never felt home until I found you…

For so long I was lost, until my heart found you…

Ryan played the guitar and scribbled out lyrics, made adjustments and tweaks, then played and scribbled some more.

Twenty minutes later, he was stunned to discover he’d found the perfect combination of music and lyrics for the love song, a blend of soul-stirring melody and yearning narrative that together conveyed the aching beauty of true love. The bridge refrain captured the story with simple elegance:

I was lost, until my heart found you.

And the echoing repeat of the lyrics in the chorus brought it all home with soul:

Lost and found, your heart is my home.

Ryan strummed the chords of the chorus and then the bridge, and stared in wonder at the notebook now covered in lyrics and notes and annotated progressions.

He loved it. He’d never written a song so quickly before, and while there were still adjustments and revisions to make once he was in the recording studio, the essence of it all was there.

The song was simple, but it was true and that was what mattered most of all when it came to songwriting. There had to be truth and honesty and…

… vulnerability .

This song had all those things in abundance.

He’d written this song from his heart and that’s what gave it power.

And the reason he’d written it was because of Grace.

Scanning the lyrics scribbled in the new notebook, he strummed his guitar and tried to convince himself that this song was just like any of the many dozens and dozens of others he’d written over the past ten years.

But he couldn’t convince himself of that, because it wasn’t true.

This song came from a much deeper place than anything else he’d ever written. And in writing it, in penning these lyrics that came from so deep inside, he was allowing himself to be vulnerable just through the simple act of committing the words to the page.

The enormity of it hit him straight through the heart. Perhaps his grandmother had been right, after all, when she described the magic that had sparked between Ryan and Grace.

And perhaps she’d been right, too, when she’d warned him not to hold back because he feared the bubble would burst.

Well, he hadn’t held back when he’d written this song. His heart was there on the pages of that notebook for anyone to see. After only a few days spent in Grace’s company, he was already falling for her.

Ryan let out a wry laugh at himself, remembering how he’d told Grace just a few hours ago that she was falling in love with that daft dog, Stanley, and that she’d have no choice but to keep him if no owner turned up to claim him. It amused him to discover now that, while he’d been dispensing this wisdom to her, he hadn’t yet comprehended just how hard he, too, was falling in love.

He thought back to the unlikely chain of events that had led him to this place, where he was penning what might just turn out to be the most brilliant love song of his songwriting career, and doing it in record time, too.

Grace was the inspiration for that love song, and if he was falling in love with her, then it was only thanks to the scruffy little dog that had brought them together in the first place.

A scruffy lost dog who had found his way to Grace at the precise moment when Ryan was walking past her house.

But for that moment of serendipity, they might never have crossed paths, despite living in the same town.

Ryan mulled it over, thinking of Stanley, the lost dog who’d found his way to Grace, in turn causing Ryan to find his way to her… and to start falling for her, too.

He was emotionally intelligent enough to admit that, just like Stanley, he too was lost in many ways, at least when it came to matters of the heart. Despite the heartache of the past, heartache he could barely bring himself to think about, let alone talk about, even after all these years, he didn’t want to be lost any longer.

He wanted to find his way to love and to a place where his heart felt at home.

It all came down to being lost and being found.

Lost and found.

Ryan picked up his pen once more and wrote the words at the top of the page above the song lyrics and music. That was the name of the song, he realised. Lost And Found . Some part of him had known it from the moment he’d begun writing, which was why the theme was threaded through every line of the lyrics, and now that it had crystallised in his mind, a sense of completion settled inside him.

He read the lyrics again, wondering what they’d sound like when sung aloud. As he’d composed the song, he’d only imagined the words sung inside his head while strumming the guitar. Now, though, his mind turned to the question of who might be the best vocal artist for this song, who was best suited for it, and who would do it most justice.

But those were questions for another time. The song needed a little more tinkering, a little more work here and there, before he considered the natural next steps in the process of turning scribbled notes and lyrics into a superstar hit record.

Ryan glanced at the clock and saw it was long past midnight. He’d lost track of time after his initial burst of songwriting, when he’d begun playing around with the words and the chords scrawled in his new notebook. Remembering that his grandmother had requested a day trip to the seaside tomorrow, and an early start to beat the beach crowds, he carried his guitar and notebooks to his work room and decided to call it a night.