By the end of the lunch, after we’d split the bill and said our goodbyes, I felt a thousand times better than I had this morning. I still felt the weight of my impending assignment, but it no longer felt like the crushing landslide it had before I’d left.
I even skipped a little.
Once I’d left the cobblestones behind, of course. Anyone with half a brain cell knew you didn’t skip on those. Walking was hard enough at the best of times. Unless you were a child—then you beelined for them because it was fun.
I smiled at a little girl who was doing just that on a cobbled section just to the side of the carpark and got in my car. Was Dad home yet? If he was, I wondered if he would have ten minutes for me to talk to him about my course.
I had to get it over and done with as soon as possible.
The drive back to Arrowwood Estate was quick and easy. That was one of the perks of living in the country—the only things likely to hold you up were tractors or livestock. It wasn’t unusual to see a road full of cows or sheep being ushered along by a farmer on a quad bike with his collies keeping them all together. Neither of those things had happened today, thankfully.
After I’d parked in the barn we’d converted into a garage when we’d opened a portion of the house to the public, I made my way to the house, clutching my keys tightly. The metal cut into my palm, but that only made me grip it harder.
“Dad? Are you home?”
Nothing.
“Aunt Cat? Dad? Alex?”
“In the library,” Aunt Cat said, passing me with two books tucked under her arm. When she noticed me looking at them, she shrugged and said, “I want to take up plumbing.”
I wasn’t going to ask.
“You do that.” I watched as she passed me on her way to the sweeping staircase and trotted up them, already opening the top book.
Plumbing?
You do you, Aunt Cat. You do you.
I walked into the library where my father was sitting in front of the fireplace reading a newspaper with his reading glasses balanced on the end of his nose. “Hi, Daddy.” I bent over the back of the sofa and kissed his cheek. “How was your trip?”
“Busy,” he replied, not looking up from his paper. “How are Adelaide and Evangeline?”
I wasn’t going to ask how he knew. “It was nice. We’ve all been busy lately, so it was nice to catch up.”
“I’m sure. How is Victoria?”
“She’s well,” I answered. “I’ll pass on your best next time we talk.”
“Please do.”
“When did you get back?”
“About half an hour ago.” He licked his finger and turned the page, tilting his head to read the top corner. “You had a phone call while I was out.”
I frowned. “I did?”
“Yes.” He finally looked up at me, and there was a coolness in his gaze that made me freeze in place. “From a…”
There was a scrap of paper on the table in front of him that I hadn’t noticed until now when he picked it up.
“Oh, yes. A Matthew Hornby. He said he’s your horticulture tutor.”
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
I was in so much trouble.
“Daddy—”
“He wanted me to pass on that you’d left one of your textbooks and your umbrella behind after your class this week.” He adjusted his glasses and pulled the note closer. “And if I would be so kind as to pass on that he hopes you’re doing well with your current assignment, and he’s looking forward to seeing the final outcome.”
“I can explain—”
“I don’t wish for you to explain, Gabriella.” He tossed the note down on the table and turned back to his paper. “What I would like is for you to leave me alone so that I can read my paper.”
My heart had sunk so far it wasn’t even in my body yet. It’d gone right through my feet, the floor, the surface of the Earth.
This wasn’t how he was supposed to find out.
“I understand,” I said in a small voice. I felt as though I was six years old again and I’d been caught smuggling biscuits out of the biscuit tin under my t-shirt. “I’ll be in my room if you need me.”
He didn’t respond, so I left him to his newspaper. I wrapped my arms around myself and went upstairs, almost falling backwards when I saw Aunt Cat standing there, hugging her books about plumbing.
“He’s so mad at you he didn’t even yell about the goats,” she said morosely. “I almost contemplated letting them out to annoy him, but I thought I might give him an aneurysm.”
I forced a weak smile.
“And let’s face it. Your brother wouldn’t know how to run this estate unless we wrote the instructions on the back of a vodka bottle.”