“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. And this, right here, is nostalgia. We watched that film every Boxing Day when I was a kid. My dad even had an old car like that lying around for a while.”
“What happened to it?”
I shrugged. “Sold it to a furniture maker down south. He sent me a chair made with the wooden panelling from the old dash. It’s up at the main house.”
Rami absorbed that in the quiet way I’d seen him adopt with troubled inmates. Thatknowingway. Because he was perceptive enough to sense there was more going on than the words he heard. But he was wrong this time.
Probably.
Maybe.
“Can I ask you something?” he said after a while.
I glanced back at the kids. Addie was playing with the Rubik’s cube he’d brought with him. Mae was chattering poor Charlie’s ear off. “You can ask me anything any time you like.”
“Noted.” Rami shot me a filthy smirk before his expression turned serious again. “Why don’t you live in the main house where you grew up?”
“You’ve answered your own question there.”
“Have I?”
I took a tight right turn then nodded. “Igrew up. I stayed there for a bit when I first came back here, but even with the seasonal guys for company, I was too lonely there, and I heard and saw my parents around every corner, you know? It was like stepping back in time without the good bits.”
“That makes sense.”
“Good, because I’ve never said it out loud before. I’ve never told your sister that her habit of banging on my door every week kept me going when I wanted to drink myself to death either. Do you think I should?”
Rami’s eyes widened a touch. Clearly, he hadn’t expected me to be so transparent, and I didn’t like that. I wanted him to know he could talk to me and get something real.
I wanted to take his hand too, but as we approached Tassleton, the traffic thickened enough to require my full attention.
Thankfully, I had a trader ticket that allowed me to bypass the worst of it and park among the huge vans and trucks that had been in situ all week long. Addie and Mae didn’t bat an eye—I had bigger vehicles on the timber farm—but Charlie’s face was the cutest picture. I carried him to a tall red lorry with a teacup painted on the side. “You want to go on some rides?”
Excitement vibrated through his tiny limbs. He bounced in my arms as Rami looked on. “Yeah yeah!”
“Come on then.”
We took the kids around the fun fair. Rami didn’t care for being flung around on the teacups or the pirate ship only Addie was big enough to go on, so I bought him a bag of doughnuts while I rode the brightly coloured rides. It was fun. Heart-warming fun. The very best kind. And when we regrouped and I saw the sugar on Rami’s lips?
Yeah. That warmed me too.
I didn’t want to go to work. In that moment, there was nothing I cared less about than revenue and transport damage.
But…life wasn’t about getting what I wanted and screw everything else. People depended on me to pay their bills and support their families, so I left the man I was pretty close to falling in love with and inserted myself into the bustling trade my team had struck up around the fair.
Business was good. It was a far cry from the days when rabbits had eaten my father’s first young firs. I hauled trees, tied nets, and bought lunch for my team. Last year, I’d stayed with them for three days straight, but the truth was, they didn’t need my help, and there was somewhere else I wanted to be.
After a pit stop at the Wobbly Bottom Farm stall, I followed the call in my heart to the grotto where an old family friend was still playing Father Christmas thirty years after he’d lost an ale-driven bet with my dad that he didn’t have the balls.
Rami was in the queue with the standard expression of a bloke who’d spent a few hours alone with three kids. “I need more doughnuts.”
“Is that a euphemism?”
“If you like. Regardless, I’m gonna collect.”
Interesting. But first…Father Christmas. Rami took Charlie in while I waited outside with the other two who were too unruly to go in together. He came back for Addie, and then Mae. But she didn’t want to go.