‘Will it be okay?’ His voice wobbled as she pulled him into a super-tight hug.
‘I don’t know,’ she murmured into his hair. ‘But we’re going to try.’ For a moment they watched the sunrise together. ‘We have to call them, you know. It’s not fair on your parents not knowing where you are.’
Gage closed his eyes and thought none of it was fair. But he nodded.
‘Look at the day, Gage.’ She kept her arm around him. ‘It’s going to be a beauty.’
He didn’t want the sun to move. It had taken so long to find her and he didn’t want to leave. Not yet. He didn’t want another second to pass.
‘We’ll work it out, Gage. I promise.’
There was a single-sentence mention in the morning news bulletin—that the boy who’d gone missing had been located and was well. Mya desperately wanted to call Brad and ask if everything truly was okay. But it wasn’t okay enough between them for her to be able to do that. And there was something else she had to do—urgently.
Utterly sleep-deprived, Mya walked up the overgrown path towards her parents’ house. She’d fantasised for so long about turning up there with a property deed in hand tied by a ribbon. Her gift to them—a Christmas gift. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? To be able to move them somewhere so much better. And she would do it; one day she would. It just wouldn’t be as soon as she’d hoped it might. And she was so sorry she hadn’t been able to be everything they’d wanted her to be.
Brad was right, she had lied—to her parents and to herself about what she really wanted. Because she was so scared of letting them down and of being let down herself.
She sat on the sofa and told them—about losing the scholarship, about working two jobs on top of summer school, about what she wanted to do for them more than anything.
Her parents were appalled, but not for the reason she’d feared.
‘We wouldn’t expect you to do that for us!’ her mother cried. ‘We’re okay here.’
‘You’re not.’ Mya wiped her own tears away. ‘I wanted to do this for you so much. I wanted you to be so proud of me and I’ve let you down.’
‘You’ve never let us down,’ her father argued gruffly. ‘We let you down. I gave up. I got injured and gave up and put all our hopes on you. That wasn’t fair.’
‘No wonder you’re so thin and tired,’ her mother exclaimed, rubbing Mya’s shoulder. ‘All we want for you is to be happy.’ She put her arms around her. ‘What would make you happy?’
So many things—her parents’ comfort now certainly helped. There was that other thing too—but she didn’t think he was hers to have.
‘Can we get rid of all those photos of me winning prizes?’ Mya half laughed and pushed her fringe from her eyes, determined to focus on the future and fixing things with her family.
‘They bother you?’
Mya nodded. They took down most of them together, leaving a few, finding a few others with the three of them together. The cousins turned up, and the Christmas eat-a-thon began. As the day faded, Mya picked up the discarded lid from a soda bottle and started playing with it, twisting it—tempted for the first time in ages to create something silly-but-stylish just for the sake of it.
Brad was almost two hours late getting to his parents’ place for the obligatory big Christmas lunch. The calls between Gage and his stepmother and his parents and their lawyers had gone on and on until they’d wrangled a solution for today at least. Gage would stay with his ‘stepmother’ until this afternoon, when he’d have time with each parent.
Poor kid. But at least now Brad knew what his client wanted, where he wanted to be and who he wanted to be with. He’d demonstrated it in an extreme way, but Brad was determined they’d work it out. He’d not stop working on it until they did.
He walked into the ridiculously decorated home and spied Lauren looking sulky at the overloaded table. He wasn’t in the least hungry and stared at the twenty perfect platters of food for the four of them. Hell, it was the last thing he felt like—some fake happy-family thing. Surely there was a better use for them today?
‘Why don’t we take all this food down to the local homeless shelter?’ he asked his mother.
She looked appalled.
‘We can’t eat it all.’ Brad shrugged. ‘Honestly, Mother, what’s the point? Let’s do something decent with it.’
He looked at his mother, who looked at his father, who said nothing.
‘Great idea,’ said Lauren, standing up.
‘Okay,’ said his mother slowly.
‘I’m not that hungry anyway,’ his father commented.
‘Good,’ Brad said. ‘Why don’t you two go down together to deliver it?’ He stared at his parents, who both stared, rather aghast, back at him.
‘That’s more your mother’s scene,’ his father eventually said.
‘It’s Christmas Day,’ Brad answered firmly. ‘You should be together.’ He moved forward. It’d be a relief to escape the picture-perfect scene with the empty undercurrents. ‘We’ll all go.’
Open-mouthed, Lauren watched him gather up a couple of platters.
‘Come on,’ Brad said insistently. ‘Let’s do it.’
He was surprised that they actually did. They loaded all the food into his father’s car, and Brad and Lauren followed in Brad’s car.
For two hours they stood and served food to the people who’d come to the shelter. Their platters had gone into the mix, and his parents were now fully engaged in dishwashing duty.
‘This was so much better than a strained dinner with them,’ Lauren muttered under her breath.
‘I know,’ Brad agreed. ‘Genius. But are you hungry now?’
‘Yeah, but not for any kind of roast.’ She looked slightly guilty. ‘How bad is that?’
‘Why don’t we go get Chinese?’ he suggested with a half-laugh. ‘The restaurant round the corner from me does really good yum char.’
‘Shouldn’t we have dinner with Mum and Dad?’
‘Nah, let’s leave them to it. We’ve done enough family bonding for the day.’
‘I actually think they’re happy the way they are,’ Lauren said as she pulled a chicken dish towards her, half an hour later.
‘You think?’ Brad asked.
‘Yes.’ Lauren chewed thoughtfully. ‘Surely if they weren’t, they’d have done something about it by now?’
‘I think they’re just used to it.’ He sat back and toyed with the food on his plate. ‘They’re apathetic and simply don’t care enough to do anything to change things.’
‘It’s a waste,’ Lauren said.
‘It is,’ Brad agreed. ‘Maybe they’ll learn something at the shelter.’ He grinned. ‘It might be a Christmas miracle.’
Lauren suddenly looked serious. ‘Have you seen Mya recently?’
Brad’s moment of lightness fled. He shook his head and stuffed rice into his mouth to keep from having to answer.
‘She’s not really a sister to you, is she?’ Lauren said slyly.
The observation caught him by surprise—he half laughed, half choked and shook his head again.
‘Is it going to work out?’
He shook his head again—slower that time.
‘Have you stuffed things up so badly I’m going to lose my best friend?’
He shook his head more vehemently. ‘Be there for her.’
Lauren studied him closely. ‘Why can’t you be?’
‘She doesn’t want me to.’
‘Really?’ Lauren frowned. ‘Mya had a thing for you for years. Even when you never saw her.’
Yeah, but the trouble was Mya had got to know him properly now. And though he’d offered her all he could, she’d turned him down. It hurt.
‘Don’t tell me you’re too apathetic to do anything about it, Brad,’ Lauren said softly. ‘Don’t make the same mistake as Mum and Dad.’
Lauren’s words haunted him over the next week. The memory of Mya positively tortured him. Night after night he replayed their last co
nversation in his head and he dreamed of the too few nights they’d been together.
She’d been furious with him for not opening up. She claimed he maintained as much of a false façade as his parents did. He’d not realised he did that. But she was right. He had opened up to her, though—a couple of times he had, and she’d been there for him in a way that had made his heart melt. So why was it that when he’d wanted to support her, she’d pushed him away? Until now he’d been too hurt to try to figure it out, but now he had to know.
Lauren was right too: he couldn’t be apathetic. He needed courage—Gage’s kind of courage. To run towards what you needed most—the one person you needed most. The one whose love and laughter meant everything.