Be My Baby: Her Parenthood Assignment / Three Weddings and a Baby

He stopped to watch them. They were deep in conversation, sharing girl-type secrets, no doubt. His heart squeezed a little. Gaby had made such a difference to their home in the last three weeks. He still had to duck when Heather was in a foul mood, but more and more she was laughing and smiling, and he’d even caught her singing to herself.

He could see glimpses of the happy little girl she’d once been. That same cheeky smile she’d had, aged three, when she knew she’d said something funny or cute. The way she stroked a strand of her own hair when she was tired.

And it was all down to Gaby. He couldn’t take credit for the tiniest bit of it. All he managed was to stretch his mouth into a smile when it was required, and to say the right things—as if he were reading from a script—and watch his daughter blossom.

Gaby was getting closer and closer to Heather and, miracle of miracles, Heather was letting her.

And, all the while, he stayed on the fringes and watched. He was just as much on the outside of his daughter’s life as he’d been all those years behind bars. Why he couldn’t work his way into the centre—where all the laughter and warmth was—was more than he could fathom.

He watched as Gaby and Heather broke into a run and chased each other along the edge of the surf. The wind was cold and it blew their scarves in front of their faces, which only made them laugh all the more.

How did she do it?

The woman he’d thought at first seemed ordinary, nothing special, had the ability to reach out to a heart and see it respond. A very rare thing indeed. He caught himself studying her, trying to work out what her secret was, where all that warmth and courage came from.

He alternated between admiring her and hating her for it.

He tore his gaze away and returned it to the kite lying a short distance away on the small round pebbles. It seemed injured, lying there fluttering half-heartedly. He walked over and surveyed it with dismay.

The two figures walking along the shore hadn’t even seen it crash.

It was all in a tangle and he didn’t know what to do with it.

Heather sat in the passenger seat of Gaby’s car and fiddled with the catch on the glove compartment.

‘Come on, Heather. You’re going to be late if you don’t actually get out of the car and walk through the gates.’

Heather grimaced and opened and shut the glove compartment a few more times. ‘Twenty’ she said, casting Gaby a weary look.

Okay. Heather was taking a cryptic tack again. Gaby was getting used to this. Heather had problems expressing her fears. Rather than blurting out how she felt, she would leave a trail of crumbs, making her interrogator work for answers she was actually desperate to give. But they didn’t have time for this; the school bell was going to ring in less than a minute.

‘Twenty what, Heather?’ Twenty more slams of the glove box and the whole car would fall apart? She took hold of Heather’s hand gently and removed it from the glove box catch. Heather pulled her hand away and tucked it under the school bag on her lap.

‘Twenty school days until the Easter break.’

Gaby’s heart went out to her, it really did, but she could see where Heather was going with this, and there was no way she was going to let the girl manipulate her. She was going to school today, and that was that.

‘It won’t be as bad as you think, sweetheart.’

‘How would you know? It was probably at least a hundred years since you were at school! You don’t know anything about it. Nobody does.’

Heather was giving her what Gaby always referred to as a laser vision stare—thanks to Luke’s apt description. She refused to take the bait, especially now she’d worked out that Heather created conflict when she didn’t get her own way. So she leaned across, pulled the handle and opened the door for her.

‘Come on, miss. Out. One foot in front of the other, walk through the door, sit your bottom on a chair and stay there. It’s not hard. And then, when you come out again, it’ll be nineteen days and counting.’

Heather flounced from the car, as only a disgruntled pre-teen could, dragging her bag behind her.

‘I’ll see you after netball practice,’ Gaby yelled after her. But Heather was too busy ploughing a path though her schoolmates to hear.

She pulled the door closed and started the car. Heather was making progress, but there was still a long way to go. She and Luke were enjoying a turbulent truce. They still didn’t know how to resolve their differences when a spat erupted, but at least in the in-between times she could see they were both trying.

Although she was very fond of Heather, she was determined to keep a professional distance. There were so many reasons why she couldn’t afford to lose her heart to this needy little girl and her silently aching father.

Distance. That was what they all needed. Luke certainly needed time and space to sort himself out. At least, that was the reason she gave herself for keeping out of his way in the evenings, and always, always leaving the dinner plates on the table for him to clear away.

Back at the Old Boathouse, she parked her car near the back door and let herself in. Seven and a half hours until she had to pick Heather up. It seemed an awfully long time. But she had a shopping list to write and she might as well check whether Heather had put her school uniform from last week in the laundry basket, rather than stuffing it under her bed.

By noon her shopping list was written in a small neat hand and every last sock of Heather’s had been accounted for and deposited in the washing machine. The beds were made, a pot of home-made soup sat bubbling on the hob and she had organised the contents of the freezer.

She sat at the spotlessly clean kitchen table and stared out of the window. It was a typically grey March day. Even so, the colours on the river here were wonderful. Steel greys, mossy greens and slate blues. And the light!

There was inspiration everywhere you looked, no matter the time of day or the weather. When she was younger, she’d have been out there on the beach, brush in hand, like a shot.

Gaby sat up a little straighter.

Why not? What was there to stop her? She’d missed the watercolour classes she’d taken while married to David. Since the divorce she’d had neither the time nor the money to lavish on things like that. But with Heather in school most of the week, she’d have plenty of time to unearth a talent she thought she’d buried for good, and still get all her work done. She jumped up, grabbed her keys and drove into town grinning all the way.

Down a cobbled street she found a shop selling art supplies. She emerged with a carrier bag full of paint tubes, brushes, paper and her head full of ideas for her first project.

She wandered through the town without really paying attention to where she was going and found herself in Bayard’s Cove, a little dead end street near the ferry. One side was open to the river, and a squat, ruined turret of an old fort built to guard the estuary sat where the road ended.

She dipped down and entered the fort through its low doorway. A row of arched windows framed the view up to Dartmouth Castle on the rolling headland.

She would just fit nicely in one of those arches, she decided. Soon her legs were dangling over the ledge, the water lapping below. She pulled a sketch pad and pencil out of her shopping bag and set to work capturing what she saw: bulbous clouds pushing across the sky like an armada, sail boats criss-crossing the water and the higgledy-piggledy houses of Kingswear on the other side of the river.

This was heaven. It had been so long since she’d done something just for her own pleasure. What started out as a quick sketch, rapidly grew in scale and detail. It was only when she glanced up and noticed the light was starting to fade that she checked her watch. Four o’clock. She had time to head home, drop off her bags, then run up to collect Heather from netball practice.

She took a second to consider her sketch, then flipped the pad closed, praying the traffic warden hadn’t slapped a ticket on her windscreen while she’d been sketching.

When she returned to the Old Boathouse, she was surprised to see Luke’s car parked at an angle in the lane. He wasn’t due home until at least seven o’clock. She wanted to show him what she’d been up to, so she fished the pad out of her bag as she walked up to the back door. Once in the mud room, she called out, ‘Hi there! What are you doing back so—?’

The look on Luke’s face as she entered the lounge brought her up short.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

CHAPTER FIVE

WAS he yelling at her?

Gaby took a quick look over her shoulder, just to double-check no one had walked in behind her, but they were alone in the room.

‘Well? Where have you been?’

Her fingers twitched as she waited for her voice to work. She waved the pad a fraction of an inch. ‘I’ve been sketching…’

Her voice trailed off. He’d lost his rag with Heather over the last few weeks, but never had she seen this kind of raw fury in his eyes. A familiar feeling crept over her. She’d experienced it many times when David had lost his temper with her, but she’d never expected to get it from Luke.

‘You know Heather gets out of school at three-thirty! You’d better have a bloody good reason for leaving her standing in the playground with her teacher, while you were out messing around with crayons!’ Luke took the pad from her, gave it a cursory look and tossed it behind him on to the sofa. It bounced and skittered across the floor.