Christmas Magic In Heatherdale

Ryan had just put cereal and a bacon sandwich in front of Melissa and was about to join them at the table. He stilled, and she saw dismay in his expression.

‘Just get on with your breakfast, Martha,’ he said gravely, ‘and no more questions.’

‘It’s all right,’ Melissa told him. ‘I don’t mind. They are delightful.’ She turned to his small daughter.

‘No, Martha, I’m not a mummy, but I do love children. My job is all about making them well when they are sick.’

Their interest was waning to find that she didn’t fit their requirements, but not their father’s. The stranger at their table was full of surprises. What kind of a job was it that she’d referred to?

Bringing his mind back to their morning routine on school days, when the children had finished eating he told them to go and put their school uniforms on and have their satchels ready for when Mollie came to take them to school.

‘Will Melissa be here when we come home?’ Rhianna asked.

She answered for Ryan. ‘I’m afraid not, Rhianna. My house needs cleaning and sorting. But once that’s done everything will be fine and you can come to see me whenever you like.’

Rhianna seemed happy with that answer and she and Martha hopped off to get ready for school.

‘Your daughters are adorable, Ryan,’ she said with a warm smile.

‘They’re the light of my life. A life that would not be easy if Mollie wasn’t around,’ Ryan replied. ‘She’s a good friend as well as my housekeeper. I have a very demanding job but it’s totally rewarding and somehow I manage to give it my best, while organising things at this end to make sure that Rhianna and Martha are happy, though the result is not always how I want it to be. Still, I mustn’t delay you. We both have busy days ahead of us.’

She couldn’t have agreed more. As she looked around her at his delightful home, the gloom of yesterday came back. Dreading what the day would hold for her, she wished Ryan a stilted goodbye and went to ring the cleaning firm and the electricity company.

As Melissa waited for the cleaners to arrive, her mind drifted back over her recent past. She recalled how only yesterday, stony-faced behind the wheel of her car, she had driven away from the house that had always been her home in a select area of a Cheshire green belt without looking back.

The doors had been locked, the windows shut fast, and as a last knife thrust she’d put flowers in the hallway, a huge bunch of them that would be the first thing that the new owners saw when they arrived to take over their recently acquired property.

The purchase had been completed early that morning, the money was already in her bank account, but the thought of it brought no joy. It would be a matter of here today and gone tomorrow.

‘I’m sorry, sweetheart,’ her father had said as the last few moments of his life had ebbed away. ‘So sorry to be going like this before I’d sorted things.’

‘You have nothing to be sorry for,’ she’d told him gently, thinking that he must be delirious. ‘You have always been there for me, making me laugh, indulging me, keeping me safe, and David will do the same. I know he will.’

He’d tried to speak again but the mists had been closing in and the nurse at the other side of the bed had said a few seconds later, ‘He’s gone, Melissa. His injuries were too severe for him to overcome. There will be no more pain for your father.’

Max Redmond had been a charmer, and a wealthy one at that. Melissa had lost her mother to heart failure when she had been eleven and Max had given her everything she could possibly have wanted to make up for the loss. He’d taken her on fantastic holidays, bought her the kind of car that most young people could only dream of when she had been old enough to drive, and had given her a generous allowance that had been more than some families had had to feed their children and pay the mortgage.

The two of them had lived in a smart detached house amongst the rich and famous, not far from the city, and when she’d gone to fulfil a dream and enrolled as a medical student, it had been at a university in nearby Manchester so that her father wouldn’t be lonely, although it hadn’t seemed likely.

Max had never remarried, but he’d made lots of women friends in the circles in which he’d moved, where wining and dining was the order of the day. However, he had always cancelled any arrangements he’d made if his daughter had been free to socialise with him.

That had been until she’d got engaged to David Lowson, the son of one of her father’s women friends. After that, he’d watched benignly as most of Melissa’s time away from her career had been taken up with the delights of being in love.

She’d qualified as a doctor in paediatrics in the summer, and on receiving her degree had been employed at a nearby hospital. Life had been good in every way, with all of it centred around the big city that she knew so well and would never have wanted to leave, until her father had walked in front of a speeding car on a road not far from where they lived after a lively lunch in a nearby hotel, and had died from his injuries.

Since then Melissa had experienced all of life’s worst emotions: grief at the sudden tragic loss of the man who had loved her so much; sick horror to discover that his last words to her had been referring to a huge mountain of gambling debts that he had accumulated.

There had also been the aching hurt of betrayal from an engagement that had fizzled out when her fiancé had discovered that she was no longer the wealthy heiress that his mother had urged him to propose to, and was going to be poorer than a church mouse by the time she’d sorted out Max’s frightening legacy.

Everything Melissa could lay her hands on had been sold, and most of her salary each month had gone into the bottomless pit, with the sale of the house as the final heartbreaking humiliation.

During the time that the sale had been going through, those who knew her had seen little of her. Grief stricken and panicked about the future, Melissa had chosen to hide away from her friends.

Her father had given no inkling that he’d had money problems. Always a man about town, as generous host to all his friends, he hadn’t been able to admit to his failings, and she now understood fully his weak apology as he’d lain dying.

Incredibly, there’d been no life insurance to fall back on, or other safeguards that were usually in place regarding the death of a person, but thankfully the money from the sale of the house would clear the last of the debts.

She supposed it would have been sensible to rent herself a small apartment in Manchester and bring the shattered remnants of her life together again somehow. But with her father now resting with her mother in a nearby cemetery, and an ex-fiancé who had cast her aside living not far away, she had been intent on moving to some place where she wasn’t known.

Having left the hospital where she’d been employed, she’d headed for the small market town of Heatherdale, where her paternal grandmother had lived and where her house, which had been empty for a long time, was there for her if she wanted it.

The old lady had willed it to her and, though grateful for the thought, it was the last place she would ever have contemplated moving to in the past, but the present was proving to be a different matter. Alone and lost, she’d needed somewhere to hide from the pitying looks she’d received from her father’s friends and acquaintances when the news had got around that she was penniless. She’d wanted somewhere to avoid the mocking smiles of those who had witnessed the plight of the ‘golden girl’ and thought it would do her good to see how the other half lived. But the thing that had hurt most had been the speed with which her ex had found another woman to replace her.

She had found the keys to her grandmother’s house in a chest of drawers in her father’s bedroom, and as she’d gazed down at the heavy ornate bunch of them it had been as if a means of escape was being offered to her.

There had been receipts with them for payments that her father had made to the local authorities on her behalf over the years to comply with the law regarding the ownership of unoccupied housing, and she’d decided that the paperwork and the keys were heaven sent.

She’d felt as if she never wanted to see the city that she’d loved so much, with its familiar shops, smart restaurants and green parks, ever again. She’d decided to make a fresh start in a place that she’d never cared for much on the rare occasions she’d been there.

With no job, no money, and no family, she had to hope that she could find a future for herself in Heatherdale. First she had to get the house straight. Next on her agenda was finding a job. The obvious choice would be its famous hospital, but if there were no vacancies there for a newly qualified paediatrician then she’d simply have to find something to tide her over.

The internet had come up with the name and address of a firm of domestic cleaners in the Heatherdale area and she’d hired them to give the house a thorough cleaning from top to bottom before she arrived.

Apart from ordering a bed to be delivered later in the day, when she would be there to accept it, the rest of her belongings would arrive the following afternoon, when she was satisfied that the house was ready to take delivery of them.

It wasn’t the best time of year to be moving into a strange house in a strange place, she’d thought achingly as the miles had flashed past. The last leaves of autumn had been scattered at the roadside or hanging limply on trees, and a cold wind had been nipping at her while she’d been taking a last walk around the gardens of what had been her home.

During her early childhood she and her parents had visited her grandmother occasionally, but there hadn’t been any real closeness between them because the old lady had disapproved of her son’s attitude to life in general. She hadn’t liked the way he’d been such a spendthrift, although at that time he hadn’t reached retirement and had been making big money in the stock markets.

‘When I die I’m leaving the house to the child,’ she’d told him. ‘There might come a day when she’ll need a roof over her head.’ As the lights of Heatherdale had appeared on the horizon, Melissa had reflected that the grandmother she’d rarely seen had turned out to be her only friend.

Martha’s innocent question about the stranger who had joined them for breakfast was uppermost in Ryan’s mind as he drove the short distance to the hospital. It had brought painful memories with it that he only allowed himself to think about when he was alone, but in that moment in the kitchen they had been starkly clear and he’d been extra-loving with the children while they’d waited for Mollie to arrive.

His youngest daughter had described them as being without a mother because theirs had been hurt by a tree. It wouldn’t have been the easiest description of her death for Melissa Redmond to understand, but did that matter? She was just a stranger who had joined them for breakfast.

He and Beth had attended the same school in Heatherdale, had both chosen medicine as a career, he in paediatrics and she in midwifery. It had always been there, the love that had blossomed in their late teens and taken them to the altar of a church in the small market town where they lived.

Heatherdale boasted a famous spa that people came from far and wide to take advantage of, and beautiful Victorian architecture built from local stone that he never wearied of. There were spacious parks and elegant shops and restaurants. Everything that he loved was here except for the wife he had adored.

When she’d died he had wanted to die too as life had lost its meaning, but there had been two small children, unhappy and confused because their mother hadn’t been there any more, so he’d pulled himself together for their sakes. In the last three years his life had been entirely taken up with his children and the health problems of those belonging to others.

If it meant that he never had time to do his own thing, at least there was the comfort of knowing that his young daughters were safe and happy, and that he was serving a vital purpose in the Heatherdale Children’s Hospital where he was a senior paediatric consultant.

He knew that folks found him irritating at times because he never socialised, was always too busy when asked out to dine, even though he had Mollie, who would always take on the role of childminder if needed and who checked out every available woman she met as a possible new wife for him, without actually saying so openly.

As Melissa looked around her house in the cold light of day she was hoping that today would not be quite as horrendous as yesterday. However, every day since she’d lost her father and discovered what he had been involved in had been dreadful.

For the past few weeks she’d felt lost and alone, like some sort of outcast. Ryan’s kindness had been a brief relief from what had been a nightmare for her, but at the same time getting involved with anyone at the moment was the last thing she wanted to do. Especially with the man who lived next door.