Epilogue

~ To dust venetian blinds, put an old sock on your hand and wipe along the slats until they're clean.

I t's surprising what property developers can lay their hands on at short notice when they're feeling legally vulnerable.

I got a phone call at exactly five o'clock that afternoon from Mitch, in which he offered me a deal: he had no spare cash, but he would sell me a renovation property he'd bought at auction earlier in the month for a quid. I said I'd get my solicitor to have a look at the paperwork and – in return for a deep clean of her kitchen – she scanned it and told me to bite his hand off. Wanda also got him to return some money, I don't know how, so I had (just) enough to stop the roof leaking.

And that is how I came to own Pear Tree Cottage, a two-bed Victorian farmhouse on the edge of the perry orchards five miles outside town. It needs a lot of work, but there's an outbuilding and a garden with an old quince in the corner, and when the breeze blows through the pear blossom on a spring afternoon, it smells like heaven. As you'll know from watching property programmes, such things are much more valuable than space for a second dishwasher. If you can find a builder to teach you how to insulate your outbuilding, and then use it to store your plastic containers full of house-staging equipment for the side hustle you've set up with your mother, then that helps pay for the first dishwasher.

(Anna was a big fan of mine and Mum's house-staging venture, especially since it had such an impact on my sales. I'd shifted three ‘challenging' properties after Mum had gone in, painted some walls and moved the furniture around. One client even bought and framed the sketches Mum had thrown together to illustrate her ideas. Mum didn't think she'd done anything particularly special, until I transferred her share of the cash. Then she did.)

That week changed me forever. Not just dealing with Mitch – that was confidence boosting – or telling Jim how I felt – that was … well, that was great. It was the realisation that the past was important but it didn't have to dictate the rest of my life. Evolving didn't mean rejecting what had gone before. I just had to be honest, with myself and with everyone else, and push forward with my life.

I made a pact to try something new every month. I did some silly acting workshops for Orson's scout group, and some singing therapy at the wellness centre in town. It wasn't easy but now I was getting treatment for my adult ADHD, stress didn't control me the way it used to. Instead of being under a dark duvet I was forever trying to fight my way out of, it slowly became something I found I could negotiate with. Baby steps.

The big changes had to start with my family, obviously. Mum took me and Cleo on a road trip back to the places where she'd grown up, so she could share her memories with us. We huddled in the biting wind on the beaches where she and Kirsty had built sandcastles, paddling in the same chilly grey waves they'd paddled in, and walked around the town they'd trailed around as teens, the loop of Top Shop, Woolworths, Dorothy Perkins that were no longer there. We tried to imprint the landscape of Mum and Kirsty's childhood somewhere in our own subconscious. It was a bittersweet visit. I won't pretend it was all sweetness and light – Cleo's moodiness hadn't just vanished overnight – but we saw flashes of a different Mum as the week went on. She'd started sketching us, I noticed. Recounting stories she said she'd forgotten, she seemed lighter, less anxious, as if she was no longer smuggling a secret through life.

Cleo and I wanted to do something symbolic to say goodbye to Kirsty and the grandmother we'd never met, so Mum gave us a pair of plastic daisy earrings that had belonged to her mother and another diamante Top Shop pair that she'd ‘borrowed' from Kirsty and never returned. We said we'd drop them in the sea but we didn't. We each took one, and fastened them together to make a pair.

‘One day some poor grandchild will find these in a drawer when they're clearing out my stuff, and they'll wonder what the hell they are,' observed Cleo.

‘I'll make sure they know the story,' I said. Stories slipped beneath the waves too easily. I wrote an explanation on a brown luggage tag, tied them to the earrings and hid them at the bottom of a box I'd bought to keep my valuable documents in. (No more pre-flight passport panic for me!) On the back, I wrote where the other half of the pairs could be found, in case someone wanted to reunite them.

Dad and I scattered Grandpa. Quickly, and without much joy, in the drizzly memorial garden of the crematorium. As Mum said, you can only refuse to go to something if it actually happens, so Dad and I went so Mum and Cleo could snub the event. What can I say? That's our family mentality in a nutshell. I bought Dad a Greggs sausage roll on the way back, and we ate them together in the car with the windscreen wipers shunting the pouring rain from one side to another.

What a hero that man had been. He deserved all the sausage rolls in the world.

It's ironic, isn't it, that the disasters that you think will blow your family apart often end up bringing you closer. Rhiannon's chemo forced Cleo and Elliot to spend time together as they shuttled backwards and forwards with meals and lifts, talking honestly about how they could help Alfie, Orson and Wes understand what was happening to Auntie Rhi.

As Cleo said, it was easier to talk about how they felt about their relationship, what had gone wrong and what could be fixed. I didn't need to know the gory details of their marital MOT but, in her new spirit of openness, Mum told me everything Cleo had told her, who had shared in her new spirit of openness. I'll be honest, we went through a corrective period of collective overshare, which sent poor Dad into the kitchen for days on end to avoid being urged to stand in his, or someone else's, truth. For a while the Kenwood was rarely off.

The only condition Elliot insisted on before he and Cleo relaunched their relationship was that she moved the offices of Taylor Maid out of their garage and into an empty shop on the high street. He'd got a new job managing a deli in town and had become evangelical about protecting family time (I wondered if he'd been talking to Jim, but didn't like to ask, in case he had).

‘Fine by me,' said Cleo, and immediately secured a prime spot between the homewares store and the florist. I was helping her move in over the weekend so Taylor Maid could start the week in a brand-new place.

She'd summoned her best cleaners to give the place a thorough scrub, and then once she was satisfied that not a trace of the old chemist's shop remained, she and I had painted everything a bright, fresh white, from the original pine floors up to the ceiling. It reminded me of the time we'd painted our room at home as teenagers: the music was up loud, we got paint in our hair, had a squabble about who'd splashed who. Just as we had all those years ago, we ended the day on the bandstand eating chips with salty fingers, knackered and happy.

Now, first thing on Monday morning before the shops opened, I stood outside and took a moment to appreciate our hard work. It looked less like a cleaning agency and more like a life-coaching centre. In some ways, I thought, maybe that's what it was. I'd made a shelf for Cleo's pink Taylor Maid brand products which ran around the high shelves, and she'd bought two vintage wall decorations in the shape of stars, which refracted rainbows of light around the reception area. Trailing pothos and tradescantia hung from hooks in the beams, and hidden away in the back was her arsenal of equipment, potions, scrubbers, jumpsuits and tins of biscuits.

There was just one thing left to go in the window. My final job as a Taylor Maid.

‘Oi!'

I turned round. Jim was standing by the van, pointing at the open doors. ‘Are you going to stand there admiring the shop, or are you going to give me a hand?'

‘You don't have to keep chivvying me along,' I reminded him. ‘Neither of us work here any more.'

‘Old habits,' he said as he slid the doll's house slowly out of the back so I could take one end. Very, very carefully we carried it up the steps and into the shop, positioning it on the sturdy table I'd bought to display it, centre stage, in the shop window.

I opened up the front doors so passers-by could enjoy the domestic scene within. The red tape Cleo had stuck down the middle was still there, separating her order from my chaos, although at the moment, the rooms were stark and empty, only the painted floral carpets there to break up the magnolia.

‘Cleo!' I shouted through to the back of the shop. ‘We're ready for you!'

Cleo appeared, looking frustrated. ‘Jim, I can't make that stupid coffee machine work. It resents me for moving it. Can you have a look? I need a coffee before we open up.'

He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Did I put my overalls on?' he asked me mildly.

We were both in our flight wear (me, harems and T-shirt; Jim, chinos and a polo shirt, and, if I let him, a straw hat); this was our last stop before a week's intensive Greek cookery course, a choice designed to shove us both out of our comfort zones.

‘Please?' Cleo flapped her hand at him, and he dutifully went to see what he could do.

I passed her an ancient Tupperware box. ‘Go for it.'

‘My side?'

‘No.' I smiled. ‘You do my side, I'll do yours.'

She prised off the lid and looked for a moment at the miniature wooden beds, tables, chairs, grandfather clocks, ladles, plastic aspidistras, cots, hatstands, plates and tiny dogs. She took a deep breath.

‘I've already started,' I pointed out. I'd set up one bedroom. Metal-framed bed, wardrobe, dressing table, towel rail. I had to concentrate to get the clothes basket exactly level with the dressing table. What else? Cheval mirror. I shoved it in and immediately took it out and lined it up with the bed. Then I put a dog basket with a tiny corgi in the corner. ‘There. Like the finest hotel bedroom.'

‘What do I do?' wailed Cleo. ‘I can't make it messy.'

‘Yes, you can.' I pressed my lips together, concentrating on matching the right bathroom set. Avocado bath, avocado sink … where was the avocado loo? It was actually easier to do it neatly, I realised. You didn't have to think.

Meanwhile Cleo was struggling to create a chaotic sitting room.

‘Try putting the bath in there,' I suggested. ‘I always thought that was funny as a kid. Who knew people would be putting baths in bedrooms and calling it luxury hotel living by the time we were grown-ups, eh?'

Cleo grunted and tried ramming an ironing board into the attic.

The idea, as we'd discussed it, was that the doll's house in the shop window would showcase the practical magic a Taylor Maid service could offer your house: two red-jumpsuited house doctors could turn your home from this chaotic nightmare of a shambles on one side of the red line, to this soothing haven of tranquillity and order on the other.

I couldn't believe I'd finished my tidy side before Cleo even had a bedroom done. What a turnaround.

‘That's me,' I said, putting the lid back on the box and placing it neatly under the table. ‘All done. You can fiddle with the rest to your heart's content. I have a holiday to go on.'

Cleo abandoned the miniature television set in the bath and held out her arms. ‘Thank you for everything,' she said, hugging me. ‘Not just here. Everywhere. All the time.' Her hug intensified.

I waited for Cleo to say something – ‘I'm pregnant' or ‘I've won the Lottery' or ‘we're moving to the Isle of Wight' – but nothing came. Just the hug. Then I realised that when a hug can be so eloquent, you don't need words. It was a hug that said ‘don't speak, stinker'.

I hugged her back, and sent a thank you up in the ether that this particular combination of DNA and genes and whatever else human souls were made of had ended up being my sister. I couldn't imagine a better one.

‘We have to go,' said Jim, behind us. ‘Phones are working, Wi-Fi's working, coffee's on. We're leaving you to it.'

‘Have a wonderful holiday,' she chirped, waving as Jim headed out to his car. Then she dropped her voice, and added, ‘I always said you two would either make or break each other.'

What did she mean by that?

‘Did you …?' I dropped my voice to a whisper. ‘ Set us up ?'

‘Not as such. But Jim was so uptight, you have no idea. Insisting on working on his own, driving everyone mad with his standards. I was running out of people to pair him with. But I'm happy to say you worked your miracle and between you …' She did an annoying chef's kiss gesture.

‘Stop doing that,' I said. ‘It's very two years ago.'

‘Whatever,' said Cleo, and the phone ringing saved us both from a light pre-holiday squabble.

In the car, Jim was checking the satnav and arranging the cold drinks in the back seat cooler.

‘Robyn, I've been thinking,' he said when I got in. ‘You know that aspidistra? It's still alive, right?'

‘Astrid? Yes, she is.'

‘And that rubber plant Cleo and Elliot gave you as a moving-in present to Pear Tree Cottage, that's still going?'

‘Yes. I mean, it's lost a leaf or two but I've checked and that's normal.'

I no longer got quite so panicky about my plants. The lady in the plant shop had given me some life-changing advice when I'd gone in to buy another monstera.

‘If a plant's not happy in your house, give it to a friend whose house might suit it better,' she'd told me. ‘Life's too short to feel sad looking at wilting plants. It might be happier somewhere else. And if it's dead, throw it out.'

I left with two monsteras and the sense that this advice might apply to more than just plants.

Jim gazed at me, as if he was taking a long run up to a big question, and I wondered where this was going.

Jim and I had discussed him moving in when his tenancy agreement ran out in a few months (he'd decided against Singapore. A job had come up in Birmingham). I was enjoying pottering in the cottage on my own; it made the anticipation even sweeter, counting down the days until he arrived like a sort of super-tidy Father Christmas.

‘Well, I was thinking, maybe it's time …' He paused. ‘Do you think you might be ready to keep that dog alive now? I'll help, obviously. Just something to look into, maybe we could take a trip up to the rescue when—'

But I was already stopping his words with a kiss, running my hand around his strong shoulders and pulling him closer, so my whole soul sank into the smell of his polo shirt and the warmth of his skin and the taste of his lips. So what if Cleo had set us up? The thought of never having met Jim otherwise made me quite anxious.

‘Let's go!' I said, breaking away. ‘Before Cleo finds us another job to do.'

He checked his mirrors, signalled and started to pull out; Cleo was rapping on the window and pointing triumphantly at the doll's house with her perfect red nail.

‘OK, so she's got her messy side done,' I said, peering to see what she was pointing at. ‘Oh, look!'

Mum and Kirsty's two dolls, Cleo and Suzi, had been returned to their home and were right there in the thick of the action. I'd assumed Cleo would have Cleo demurely hoovering the tidy sitting room while Suzi was upside down in the bath.

But Cleo was swinging from the chandeliers (safe on a cotton harness), and Suzi was sliding down the bannisters, little legs flying (carefully secured with a pipe cleaner). Both of them were having a wild old time.

Two sisters, having fun together, and not caring too much about the mess.

Cleo blew me a kiss and waved.

I blew her a kiss back.

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