The Damaged Hearts Bargain (Tetherington Hearts #2)

Chapter Eight

T urning the key was easier than Cal had thought. The key slid into the lock and she turned it just like that.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, standing in front of the unlocked but still closed front door.

If she waited much longer then the neighbors would be after her for breaking and entering. Like she needed another potential brush with the police today.

Which made her think about Lucy. Lucy sitting over her as she lay on the pavement. Lucy with her crooked smile. Tall Lucy.

“Get a grip,” she mumbled.

But as she’d been thinking about Lucy, she’d pushed on the front door and it had opened, just a crack, but enough to get started with. Cal took a deep breath and pushed it the rest of the way open.

It wasn’t that she’d been an unhappy child. She hadn’t, she didn’t think. Up until a certain age she’d been… just a kid. She’d had too much energy, more than she’d known what to do with. She was easily persuaded to do things for fun. She had a tendency not to obey rules that she didn’t see the point of.

She hadn’t been bad though. Not bad. Not that deep down to the core immoral blackness that made people kill puppies and run over old ladies and things. She’d never been bad. Naughty, disobedient, a tearaway, all of those things. But not bad.

Which made it all that much harder to understand really. Maybe not now, now when she knew that people saw what they wanted to see and more often than not took the easy way out, the lazy answer. But back then it had been. Back when she’d stood up and looked around and suddenly known that while she might not see herself as bad, everyone else obviously did.

The house smelled musty, which was a bit of a relief. She’d been afraid that pushing the door in would let out the smell of childhood, all fishfingers and her mum’s perfume. The scent was familiar, but not triggering, not as bad as she’d feared.

It was alright enough that she walked inside and let the door close behind her.

Alright enough that she began a slow walk around the downstairs.

Her mum had had a new kitchen table, and the old gas fire was gone, replaced by something a bit sleeker. The TV in the corner was new, but that was to be expected after so long. But the ornaments on the mantelpiece weren’t, and the battered couch wasn’t either.

There was just… so much of it.

She tried to imagine emptying the room out, deciding what got donated, what could go into the big skip she’d need to order, and just couldn’t quite get her head around it.

So she dropped to the couch and had a sit down to think about things, picking at the plaster Rosalee had stuck on her cheek.

Rosalee.

It had hurt being told to leave like that even though Cal was pretty sure Rosalee had thought she was being kind.

It was one thing running away, thinking you had no place in a town. It was quite another being told to get the hell out.

Christ. She shouldn’t have come back, should she?

Maybe it’d be better just to burn the house to the ground and walk away.

She was eyeing the new gas fire speculatively when her phone rang.

“Cal.”

“Jesus, you sound far away. ”

Cal sat up straighter. Of all the voices she’d thought she might hear, Syd’s was not one of them. Syd had been fun, generous, funny. But she’d also been logical and not sentimental at all. Of all the people Cal would have thought might have begged her to come back, Syd wasn’t one of them.

“I am far away,” Cal said.

Syd chuckled. “And you think I’m calling to beg you to come back, don’t you?”

“No!”

Syd laughed a full-throated laugh this time. “Well, that’s a good thing. You’ve been replaced, Callan Roberts.”

Cal grinned. “I have?”

“A nice young boy took over your position, both in the bar and the bedroom. His name’s Cameron. You’d hate him.”

“What makes you think that?”

“He rides a Suzuki.”

Cal grunted. “Fair. I already want to puncture his tires. So if you’re not ringing to throw yourself at me, why are you ringing?”

There was a quiet, crackling pause. “To check up on you, I suppose.”

“On me?” Cal wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that. No one had checked up on her for a long time.

“Yeah, on you. You left because your mother died, remember? And you might not have been close, but that can do things to a person. Plus, you don’t seem like the kind of woman who’s going to let it all out and cry. More the kind that’s going to snap one day and strap a bomb to their chest before walking into a shopping center.”

Cal took this in for a second. “So you called to check on me.”

“For the safety of shoppers everywhere.”

“Right.”

“So, how are you?”

“Fine,” Cal said automatically.

Syd sucked in a breath. “Let’s try that again, shall we? How are you? ”

Cal looked around the living room, tried again to imagine throwing the familiar old couch into a skip and watching it being taken away and felt her arms and legs go heavy. “Overwhelmed?” she tried.

“Where are you?”

“In my mother’s house. My house. Looking at everything and trying to decide what I’m going to do with it all and thinking that it’d probably be easier just to burn the place down.”

“It’s alright for things to be hard, you know.”

“Like things have ever been easy,” Cal said, putting her feet up on the coffee table.

“Yes, but you handle the easy stuff. You leave before the actual hard stuff starts, Cal. I’m not saying you deserve all this, but it’s a good life lesson. Sometimes you can’t run away from things. Isn’t there someone there who can help you?”

“Like who?” Cal asked. “I’m an only child.”

“You grew up there,” Syd said. “You must have had friends. I can’t believe that the great and seductive Cal Roberts could have been a loner.”

Cal thought about this. She had had friends. Most of whom had moved on to careers in London or Birmingham or Manchester. A handful were still around, though she doubted any would be pleased to see her. The ones that stayed were the ones that had the biggest attachment to the town.

The ones that were most likely to hate her.

“Nah, I’ll get it done,” she said, closing her eyes so she didn’t have to see all the ornaments on the mantelpiece.

“It’s alright to ask for help, Cal. It’s alright to feel things, it’s alright to be sad, everything you feel is valid.”

“You’re really not putting that psychology degree to good enough use being a bar manager, are you?”

Syd laughed. “You can joke if you like, but when you’re in a difficult situation it can help to talk about it, you know?”

“With you, you mean?”

“If you like.”

It wasn’t often that things got messy. For the most part, Cal believed in the old camping rule: leave a place better than you found it. Or, in her case, a person. She thought she was kind, she was always honest about things, she tried not to hurt anyone. But maybe Syd hadn’t quite got the right message.

“Listen,” she said softly. “You’re a great woman, Syd.”

“But you don’t want to marry me,” Syd said. “I know that, Cal. And I’m really not calling you to beg you to come back to me. I’m calling as a friend, someone who cares about you. It wouldn’t kill you to trust someone once in a while. You can’t go through life moving on every six weeks. Some things have to be permanent.”

Cal sniffed. “Not so far, they haven’t.”

“One day they’ll have to be.” Syd sighed. “Apart from anything else, Cal, you’ve got a big heart. One day you’ll find a woman that you want to be permanent, someone that it’ll be worth trusting, and then things’ll change.”

“So now you’re trying to marry me off?” joked Cal.

“I’m trying to tell you that life changes. It’s supposed to change. And it’s alright to trust people along the way, to build relationships, to ask for help. Humans are social creatures, Cal. We need each other.”

“And you’re planning on changing my life over the telephone, are you?”

“Not what I’m saying—”

“You know, I’ve come back here and everyone’s staring at me. Everyone hates me. Do you know how that feels? How hard it is just to walk along the street. But I’m here, I’m doing what needs to be done. So don’t tell me I only do the easy stuff, I don’t.”

“Cal—”

“As for trusting people, these are all people I trusted. And look at me now. I didn’t leave here because I wanted to. I was driven out. Betrayed by the one person who I thought I could trust above all others. So don’t tell me I need to trust people.”

“Cal!”

“What?”

“Okay, alright, I’m sorry. I was just trying to help. Trying to be nice. To give you someone to talk to. ”

Cal took a deep breath. “Right, yes. Sorry. It’s just… It’s hard being here.”

“Find someone, Cal. Whoever it is. Find someone you can talk to, someone who can help you. If you handle all this alone, you’ll explode.”

“Yeah, yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

“Would it be alright if I called sometimes?”

“Yes,” Cal said. “I’d like that.”

“You won’t bite my head off?”

“I’ll keep head-biting to a minimum.”

“I’ll consider that a promise,” Syd said. “Look after yourself, Cal.”

Cal hung up, sliding her phone back into her pocket. She had no intention of asking for help. No intention of hanging around for longer than it took to take care of the house and put it up for sale. She was far stronger than Syd thought.

But it was, she had to admit, nice to be cared about. Nice to be checked on. Mostly.

She took another look around the living room. She’d made a start. She’d entered the house. But the ornaments on the mantelpiece were staring at her. She’d put them in a box, she thought. Wrap them all up, a token gesture that she was going to do all this.

And then it’d practically be dinner time and she could leave.