She could almost imagine it. Happy Christmas, Jacob! Here’s your four-year-old daughter! Just what you never wanted!
No. Not happening. Not to her Ivy.
‘Not a present,’ Clara said shortly. ‘Just something I need with me this Christmas.’
‘Intriguing.’
‘It’s really not.’
Jacob was silent for long minutes and Clara almost allowed herself to hope that he might let the rest of the journey pass the same way. But then he spoke again.
‘Were you planning to see your family this Christmas?’ he asked. ‘Before I made you change your plans, I mean.’
The question startled her. Her first instinct was to reply that she was spending Christmas with her family, except of course Jacob didn’t mean Ivy. He meant her mother and stepfather, or father and his girlfriend of the week, and all the little half-siblings that had replaced her on both sides.
‘No. Why would I?’
‘I know things were difficult between you—’ But he didn’t really know, she realised belatedly. She might have hinted that they weren’t close but she’d never gone into detail. Never explained what her childhood had been like. Why? Had it just never come up? After all, they’d eloped to Vegas a month and a half after meeting, and she’d left him the following Christmas. There had been no wedding invitations, no seating plans. And whenever he’d mentioned meeting her relatives she’d put him off—until he’d stopped suggesting it altogether.
She supposed she hadn’t wanted him to know how unlovable her own family had found her. Not when she was still hoping he really did love and want her.
And so he’d been left with the impression that her family relationships were ‘difficult’. Understatement of the year. ‘Difficult’ implied differences people could move past. Problems that could be solved.
Being unwanted, unnecessary—those problems didn’t have easy fixes. Once her mother had remarried and started her new family, after Clara’s dad had walked out, there’d been no place in her mother’s life for the accidental result of a teenage pregnancy and shotgun marriage. Clara was merely a reminder of her mistakes—to her mother, her stepdad and the whole community.
Far better to let them get on with their lives, while she made her own. The Fosters had been the closest thing Clara had had to a family in years—until Ivy came along. Now she knew exactly what family meant, and Clara wasn’t accepting anything less than a perfect family for her or her daughter.
‘I just wondered if things had changed. Since you left, I mean,’ Jacob went on, apparently unaware of quite how much she really didn’t want to have this conversation.
‘I can’t imagine any circumstances under which they would,’ Clara said firmly.
‘You might be surprised.’ Jacob sounded strangely far away, as if speaking about something he was experiencing right then, only elsewhere.
‘My family have never once surprised me.’ The words came out flat—the depressing truth by which Clara had lived her life since the age of seven. Until the day she’d turned eighteen and Clara had taken matters into her own hands instead. In the eight years between her mother’s remarriage and her eighteenth birthday, Clara had learned a most useful truth: never stay where you’re not wanted.
‘Wait until you get a phone call from them one day that changes your whole life,’ Jacob told her. ‘Then we’ll talk.’
He was thinking of his father, Clara realised, almost too late. The way life changed, never mind relationships, when days became sharply numbered.
That phone call would never come for her—just like she’d never make it. She didn’t even have contact numbers for her parents any more. But that was her decision—made moments after Ivy was born, and Clara had known deep in her bones that this tiny scrap of a baby was all the family she would ever need. She’d vowed silently, lying in her hospital bed, that Ivy would always be loved, wanted and cared for. She didn’t need grandparents who were incapable of doing that.
But that call had come for Jacob.
‘When did you find out?’ she asked. ‘About your dad, I mean.’
‘Six months ago. I was in New York on business when he called.’
‘And you flew home?’
‘Immediately.’
She smiled. That was further evidence that Jacob was beginning to realise the importance and the power of his family. The Fosters were the sort of family that stuck together through everything, because they were glued together with the sort of love that ought to come with a birth certificate...but sometimes didn’t. She didn’t understand how someone who’d grown up with all of that could be so against the idea of having it for their own family, their own children.
She’d been jealous of that kind of love, once. Even when they were married, she’d always felt on the outside. Now she could only imagine the kind of words they used to describe her in the Foster family.
But she’d been right to leave, Clara knew, and right to stay away. Even if she had been wanted in Jacob’s world—and if she’d been sure of that she’d never have felt she had to walk away in the first place—she knew that Ivy wasn’t. She wouldn’t put her daughter through that, not for anything.
‘Dad sent me back to the US,’ Jacob went on and Clara turned to him, surprised.
‘Why?’
‘Because he didn’t want his personal ill health to impact on the health of the business.’ That was a quote from James Foster, Clara could tell, even though she hadn’t seen the man in five years. Success mattered to the Fosters almost as much as family, she’d always thought.
Now she wondered if, sometimes, it might matter even more.
Still, she’d always been very fond of James Foster. A self-made millionaire who had made his fortune by inventing a medical instrument Clara didn’t even truly understand the application of, James had all of Jacob’s charm, good looks and determination. But it was his son who had taken the company—Foster Medical—to new heights. It was his business brain that had seen the opportunities in a shrinking market, and the path they needed to take.
And James had trusted Jacob to do just that. Not many fathers, Clara thought, would have so happily surrendered the reins of their life’s work to their son. She’d always admired James for making that decision.
Of course, he’d been repaid handsomely since then—in money, prestige and the simple pleasure of watching the company he’d founded go from strength to strength. Watching his son succeed, over and over again.
‘How is the business?’ she asked, trying not to sound bitter just speaking the word. She knew for a fact that business success had mattered more than her.
‘Booming. As is yours, by all accounts.’
That knowledge surprised her, although when she thought about it she realised it shouldn’t. He was hiring her company, not just her. Of course he’d look into how well they were doing.
‘Merry and I have worked very hard at building up Perfect London,’ she said.
‘I could tell.’ Jacob glanced across at her from the driver’s seat. ‘I’m glad everything worked out for you.’
‘Really?’ Clara raised her eyebrows. ‘Remember, I was married to you. I’m pretty sure there’s a part of you that wishes I’d failed miserably so that you could have swept in and told me you told me so.’
‘I never told you so,’ Jacob said, frowning. ‘I never even realised that you wanted to run your own business. If I had, I’d have helped you. Maybe we could even have worked together.’
Had she even known herself? All she kne
w for sure was that Jacob had never thought she wanted anything more than he could give her—and that she hadn’t known what she wanted to do with her life.
Had they really known each other at all? Their whole relationship—from meeting to the moment she’d left—had lasted a year and two days, and it seemed that they’d never talked about the things that really mattered until it was too late. All Jacob had known was the person Clara had shown him—a person so starved for love and attention that she’d done everything she could to be what he wanted.
She’d escaped her family, found a job and a flat-share with a friend, and thought that was all she needed until she’d met Jacob in a London bar one Christmas Eve. Then, all too quickly, really, she’d found love and friendship and family and marriage and for ever...and suddenly she was twenty-one, a wife, and still had no idea what she wanted for herself beyond that.
She hadn’t found herself until she’d left him, Clara realised. How sad.
Now she didn’t need his approval, his attention. Not just because she had Ivy and Merry in her life, but because she knew who she was, what she wanted—and she believed she could achieve it all. Realising how she’d changed over the past five years made her want to weep for the girl she’d been.
Turning away, Clara stared out of the window at the passing countryside and wondered what else spending twenty-four hours preparing the perfect Foster family Christmas would teach her about her marriage.
* * *
Clara hadn’t thought she’d actually be capable of sleeping, not with Jacob in the car next to her, and certainly not the whole way to Scotland. But she’d figured it would at least curb the disturbing conversations if she pretended to be asleep, so she’d kept her head turned away, her breathing even, and hadn’t even stirred when they stopped for petrol fifteen minutes later. But somehow when she next opened her eyes the scenery around her was decidedly more Highland-like in appearance.
‘Sorry about the bends,’ Jacob said, his eyes never moving from the road, and Clara realised what had woken her up. ‘The satnav seems certain it’s this way.’