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Boldwood Books - Beth Moran

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219 pages

English

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From No. 1 bestselling author Beth Moran comes a story about family, friends and facing your fears.

Thirty-three-year-old Ruth Henderson and her daughter Maggie have some hard choices to make. Following the tragic death of Maggie’s father, they are left with a mountain of debt and broken hearts. So, despite her vow never to return home after the fall-out from her teenage pregnancy, Ruth can’t see any option other than for the two of them to move back in with her parents.

Going home means many things – finally confronting her estranged father, navigating her mother’s desperate need to make everything ok despite the wobbles in her own marriage, not to mention helping a still-grieving Maggie to settle into a new school, find new friends, and stop expressing her emotions through her ever-changing hair colour.

What Ruth needs are friends, but she abandoned her childhood ones when she left all those years ago. Luckily for Ruth, they haven’t abandoned her. Slowly she lets herself be embraced by a group of women who have always had her back – even when she didn’t know it. And as the grief and shock recede, Ruth can even begin to imagine sharing her life with someone other than just Maggie – if Maggie will let her.

No. 1 bestselling author Beth Moran writes worlds you want to live in, characters you want as friends, and heart-warming stories it’s impossible not to fall in love with. Perfect for all fans of Jill Mansell, Julie Houston, and Jenny Colgan.

This novel was first published as I Hope You Dance.

'Beth Moran's heartwarming books never fail to leave me feeling uplifted' Jessica Redland

What readers say about Beth Moran:

‘This book basically has everything - I laughed a lot, I cried, I wanted the characters to be my actual friends! Not many authors have the power that Beth Moran seems to have for building a gorgeous community inside your head that feels so real that you want to pounce through your book and live in it.’

‘I absolutely adore Beth Moran novels and I sink into each one and devour it until every last word is digested.’

‘Beth Moran is a brilliant romcom writer with an ability to write really moving prose that has the power to reduce the reader to tears at times. This book is no exception. Top notch. Highly recommended.’

‘I really enjoyed reading this book and I highly recommend it, especially if you want a read that's cosy but with depth and emotion.’

‘If you’re a fan of characters that you can’t help but love and a feel good story, then this is definitely a book for you.’

Praise for Beth Moran:

'Let it Snow is so uplifting. It's cleverly written, witty and smart. A winner!' USA Today Bestseller, Judy Leigh

‘Life-affirming, joyful and tender.’ Zoe Folbigg
*
'Every day is a perfect day to read this.’ *Shari Low

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Informations

Publié par	Boldwood Books
Date de parution	15 juin 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781837513406
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0900€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

WE ARE FAMILY

BETH MORAN
For Ciara
CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Epilogue

More from Beth Moran

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Beth Moran

About Boldwood Books
1

My mother always told me I had lousy timing.
This afternoon, in front of my boss, my boss’s boss and a whole load of his most lucrative clients, I proved her right.
Of course, she was talking about the Viennese waltz, the Argentinian tango and the foxtrot.
‘Come on now, darling; you have to feel the beat. Embrace the rhythm of the music. Feel it. One, two, three. One, two, three. Da, dum, dum. No, feel it . FEEL IT!’
My current timing issue involved five Chinese businessmen and a psychological breakdown.
I had managed to quite successfully assume my usual role of note-taker, head-nodder and occasional bland comment-maker from the corner of the table. However, my delightful boss, Cramer Spence, then asked me a question.
‘What do you think, Ruth?’
I looked up from the sketch of a great crested newt I had been doodling onto my notepad. The newt clawed frantically at the sides of a compost bin, trying to scrabble its way out, its black tongue dangling out of one side of its mouth. Sliding against the bin, the newt slipped deeper into the mush of month-old carrot peelings and banana skins.
Cramer raised one plucked eyebrow at me. He did this a lot: the eyebrow raise. It was, according to Alice, his signature move. Alice was the twenty-one-year-old temp he had been sleeping with until he fired her, a month ago.
I lowered my eyes back to the pad. What I thought was this: I wanted to take the pencil waggling about in Cramer Spence’s grubby fingers and jab it into his eye. The one beneath the signature-move eyebrow. I am not a violent person. That this thought didn’t horrify me, horrified me.
Cramer Spence coughed. I could hear the impatience in his voice. ‘Ruth?’
I stared at the newt. At the way its tiny, webbed feet clung to the plastic surface in a desperate attempt to escape the decomposing mess it was drowning in. I remembered the feel of Cramer Spence’s fingers as they had slithered their way down my spine in the staff kitchen only two hours earlier. I felt again his hot, damp breath as he murmured how he really loved the way my chest looked in the top I was wearing, and how about popping a button undone to make the Chinese clients feel happy? My hand subconsciously pressed to the top of my high-necked blouse, sagging where my flesh had wittered and worried away until my collarbone poked out like a scrawny chicken carcass. Something inside my brain exploded into a million pieces.
The newt was me.
‘I think that when you groped my backside last week, your hand felt like a plastic bag full of sausages so old and rancid, they started squiggling about inside the bag.’
Cramer choked. His boss sat up straighter in his chair and for the first time looked interested.
‘And I think that when you whined at me to stop being so uptight, your breath smelt like you’d been eating slugs.’
The Chinese businessmen clients frowned. Their interpreter, a long-legged Asian woman with glossy lipstick and thick, swingy hair, snorted.
I stood up, carefully tucking my chair back under the conference table. How professional! Even in the middle of a personal breakdown, I attended to company policy on health and safety. ‘I also think that I no longer want to work for someone who spends more time managing his eyebrows than he does on his staff.’
I picked up my bottle of water, swung my £9.99 handbag over my shoulder and marched out of the room. I made it down all three flights of stairs to the lobby, and out onto the deserted street, before breaking down into the kind of hysterical, juddering sobs that sounded more as though they came from my fourteen-year-old daughter.
Slumped against the concrete wall of the adjacent building, out of sight of the office windows, I marvelled at the sheer awfulness of what I had just said and done. During the bus ride home to Woolton, the suburb in south Liverpool where I lived, I ignored the stares of the other bus passengers, tried to get a grip on myself and trawled through my current problems to find a bright side. No job. A pile of unopened bills. A teenage daughter who needed to dye her hair and wear Dr Martens. A dead partner who had left no will, no life insurance and no way to pay the upkeep on our four-bedroomed, detached house with ensuite bathroom, double garage and serious negative equity. No way out. Except one.
I was going to have to call my mother.
Fraser had been killed in a car accident eighteen months earlier. Having known great loss once before, I expected to feel the anger, shock, physical pain like a vice compressing my heart until I couldn’t breathe. I knew I would get through it, that there was another side to the thick, black swamp of grief. I knew our daughter, Maggie, would survive, although the scars would mark her heart and shape her spirit for the rest of her life. I fretted and at times panicked about how I would find the strength to put the bin out, deal with the car when it broke down, handle Fraser’s mother.
But it never crossed my mind to worry about coping financially. Maggie’s father had been rich. We had been rich. Then I started opening bank statements. And bills. And out of the secret shadows of Fraser’s man cave crawled a great, writhing debt monster that grew bigger and uglier with every menacing step.
My job, obsessive penny-counting and tactical delays with creditors kept the monster from eating us alive. Until Cramer Spence decided it would be fun to launch a campaign of seduction aimed at the tragic widow. I was out of control, out of my mind with worry and out of options.
Most of all, I was furious. Not at Fraser, or Cramer Spence. At myself.
I couldn’t fight it any more. We were going home.

* * *
Three weeks later, the van I had hired to ferry the remains of our stuff from Liverpool to Southwell, a small market town in Nottinghamshire, slunk around the corner into the cul-de-sac where I had been born and raised. Our house sat at the end of the row of five 1970s detached boxes lining one side of the street. On the opposite side, five nearly identical houses faced them. I hunched lower in the van, eyes sweeping both rows, searching for signs of life. It had been eight years. Nothing much seemed to have changed. Me included. This felt a long way from the victorious, I-showed-them, hero’s return I’d dreamt about. Quite the contrary. Everything the neighbours, old friends, school reports and postman had predicted would happen, had.
I didn’t look at the house at the end of the street, the only one to stand apart from the box sets, the one everyone called the Big House. Not yet.
Inching so reluctantly up the shallow slope of my parents’ driveway that the van stalled, I switched off the engine, took a moment to breathe. My eyes welling up for the squillionth time that day, the first sight my mother had of me as she yanked open the front door and marched down the path was her youngest daughter wiping a dribble of snot on her sleeve while keening like a baby.
Did I mention I was an emotional wreck? I thanked God, yet again, that Mum had the good sense to arrange for Maggie to spend a week with her paternal grandmother while I sorted things out in Southwell.
Mum stepped up into the van, handed me a neatly ironed handkerchief and gripped hold of my hand tightly. With her other hand she gently turned my face towards hers, boring deep into my eyes and, beyond that, to my splintered soul.
‘Welcome home, my darling girl! Now. I’m going to put the kettle on. Take a moment to remember this is not a step down, a step backwards or a step into a pit of deadly snakes. This is a stride onwards and upwards! Things have been tough. I have ground my teeth down to the bone in sympathy for the toughness of your tragedy. But now you are home. No more tears today. We are celebrating. Our girl is home!’
She skipped her lithe dancer’s frame back into the house to make tea, her white ponytail the only hint she carried a free bus pass. I knew Mum would have laid out one of the best china plates with home-made cookies and my favourite chocolate slices, dug out the green mug with blue spots that my eldest sister, Esther, gave me for my sixteenth birthday. The tablecloth would be ironed, and fresh flowers in colours that I loved – reds, purples and blues – arranged in a vase on the table. I did not doubt for one second that my mother had willed me home with the unbreakable force of her love for me. Even stronger than my many attempts to shut it out.
I sat in the hub of the van and took a moment. I looked at the garden, at the bright green baby fruit nesting in the Bramley apple trees. I pretended to be absorbed in the geraniums, the dahlias and palest pink clematis blooming on the fence. I examined carefully the front of the house, the large bay windows and Victorian lamp beside the door, slowly moving my eyes along to the gate dividing the front from the back garden. Then carried on, across to the left, an inch of view at a time. I forced myself to breathe slowly, to relax my hands on the steering wheel, to not make this a big deal. Prepared myself to find it gone, or changed, or dead. But there it was. In front of the Big House. In front of David’s house. The willow tree. From the driver’s seat of the van, I drank it in.
I had left the best chunk of my heart under the boughs of that willow tree, right beside where my initials were carved, RH, underneath D