Chapter 9

Ivy

My daughter has gone insane. She spent twenty minutes begging me to take her to see my grandma’s old house right across town, asked constantly about the boy I spent one Easter holiday obsessed with, said she wanted to see where my great love story should have started. And now? Now, she’s saying she’ll stay in the car while I go ‘take a look’. And I thought she was a relatively normal teenager. Maybe I was wrong.

“I’ll just drive us home if you don’t want to see it. I’ve been here before, have even driven by a few times since we’ve been back.”

“You should go take a walk past, you know, to remember stuff.”

“I can remember from the comfort of my own home. Gran passed away over a decade ago, there’s a young couple living there now, I saw them coming out the house last time I drove past. I’m all about making new memories. With you.”

She rolls her eyes at me. “Mum, just go see the damn house. Trust me, okay?”

I leave my strangely bossy teen in the car and head down the street to the house. It’s well kept, the lawn out front neatly cut, the beds well-tended, and the path lined with solar-powered lanterns that are just coming on in the fading dusk light.

It brings back so many memories. School holidays here with Laurel, looking after her while gran made cakes and biscuits in the huge kitchen to the rear of the house. Being told we were only allowed between the lamppost at number 4 and the one outside number 16, and never asking why or pushing our luck. Heading in once it got dark to wash up for dinner, always a lavish feast of our favourite foods, lovingly prepared by gran, and always some sweet treat for dessert. And then there was the boy from the BB.

I look over at it, still there, modernised somewhat now though, new name, new owners, all fresh, modern, and yet still retaining its charm. And then there’s the guy sitting on the steps.

“Dan?”

He smiles. I wish he wouldn’t smile at me, it’s hard to stop myself feeling things when he smiles at me like that.

“Hey.”

I’m confused as I cross the road, but also now very aware that Fallon’s insistence on getting me here was obviously for this very reason. Now all I need to work out is whether Dan is in on—

“So, I asked Fallon to get you here,” he says.

Okay, so that wasn’t hard to figure out. You’d think I’d ask why, but I don’t. Instead, I stand there at the bottom of the steps, him still seated at the top, smiling at me. What is it with him and the smiling? And he’s got a shirt on now too, not the polo he was wearing when he picked up Cass a short while ago, an actual shirt, white, cotton, couple of buttons at the top casually undone and the sleeves rolled up. The arm porn right there! Has he no regard for what he does to a woman with those arms out on show?

“I’m going to get straight to the point. I’ve joined the ranks of our meddling girls.”

Now I’m even more confused. “Huh?”

Yeah, I know, eloquent, aren’t I? But he’s making no sense. Last night he goes and makes me think he wants more, has changed his mind about not wanting to date, and then in the same evening, tells me he thinks I deserve to be happy, yet it seemed very clear he didn’t mean with him. And just when I’d started to think I could maybe take a chance.

Maybe I’ve imagined everything, maybe all this has just been two parents united by their girls, two people who got along well and forged a pretty amazing friendship. I just wish I knew what he wanted. Why can’t he just come out and say it?

“I’m fully on board with us dating, and I don’t want to spend the next few weeks or months skirting around it or having our girls trick us into spending time together. I just want to ask you out, want you to say yes, and then let me take you for dinner.”

Well, that was unexpected. But this asking for stuff in my head and then it happening might be a nice new superpower to have. “But…”

“Ivy, I don’t want to be friends. I want to be the one who helps you reach those high cupboards, who grosses out our kids together, who gets a clipboard waved at us by Clipboard Claire for acting like naughty schoolkids, and who spends forever making you realise just how special and beautiful you are and that your ex was a fucking idiot.”

I’m stunned. What happened overnight?

“But at dinner you said I deserved to find love, and it very much seemed implied that it wouldn’t be with you.”

He stands and takes a step down. “Because you asked what we were doing. Sounded like you didn’t want whatever we have here.”

“Dan, I asked what we were doing, as in neither of us date, so what is this? I didn’t say I didn’t want something to happen.”

He laughs and takes another step down. “Looks like we both got a little nervous maybe, heard things in the other’s words that weren’t actually there.”

“You said once that it was you and Cassie now. I didn’t think you—”

“I did say that. But you were already under my skin. That first day volunteering, I noticed you. And it bothered me you were the only one who didn’t talk to me. I didn’t know why at first. But once we started hanging out, it didn’t take me long to figure it out.”

“I want to say I know where you’re going with this, but I’ve been hurt so badly before, I’m still waiting for you to drop a punchline, reveal this is some awful joke.”

He looks momentarily hurt. “Back when we met, you told me about your ex. You said you didn’t know what you’d done wrong, what it was you did to make him leave. I can tell you now, it was nothing.”

“It must have been something. And the not knowing, it stings.”

Another step down. “No. It wasn’t anything you did. It was him. All him. He was an idiot. And of course it stings. It hurts like fuck, burns deep inside and almost breaks you. I know. I’ve been there. But same as my ex, they didn’t deserve us.”

I can’t breathe, the pain of the memories crushing me from outside, the raw emotion like a truck hitting me. But then there’s what’s inside right now. This beating, pounding, my heart waking up and wanting more than ever to rid myself of the man who didn’t even have the balls to break up with me to my face.

“And I’ve come to realise recently,” he continues, “that we can’t let it stop us being happy, from moving on. In fact, moving on is the biggest ‘fuck you’ we can give them. And we deserve to be happy.”

“Your wife didn’t deserve you. You’re an amazing man, a wonderful father. How could she ever leave you and Cassie?”

He shrugs, a sad smile passing across his face as he takes another step down. The eye contact is making me nervous, but in a good way, the kind of nervous you get before something good happens. Or at least I hope that’s what this is. But the silence is deafening now as he stares at me. And silences, I have to fill. Usually with daft or inappropriate humour.

“I mean, mainly Cassie. You’re kind of Marmite.”

He laughs as he takes yet another step down. “Thanks, I think. And where do you land on that whole debate? Love it or hate it?”

“Still on the fence,” I reply, knowing we’re not talking about the Marmite, and battling the nerves kicking up a storm in my stomach.

He watches me, no doubt sees my awkwardness. “I wonder if I can get you off … of the fence.”

He’s flirting now, back to the Dan I’ve come to know, the man I just can’t seem to get out of my head. Another step and he’s standing right in front of me now, body close, eyes never leaving me.

“I know you’ve been hurt, but hear me out. I haven’t felt like this for a really long time. Maybe I wasn’t ready, maybe I only thought I knew what I wanted. Or maybe things didn’t work out for me before because I was always waiting for you. Everything changed in me the day I first saw you. I started falling then and I’ve been falling ever since. My entire life pretty much. Because that’s how long it’s been.

I’m silent, trying to work out what he’s talking about, mind whirring with everything I know and still drawing a blank. Evidently my silence must stretch on longer than I realise.

“Ivy, you didn’t talk to me back then, so talk to me now.”

The frantic scrabbles reverberate around my mind as I try to grasp at something I know is important, yet am missing completely.

“Dan, what…”

I trail off as he hands me a photo. My photo.

“Where did you get this?”

“Cass. She asked Fallon if she could borrow it.”

Now I’m even more lost. “Why?”

“Because the boy in that photo, the one sitting on that step, the step right behind us now, the one I was just sitting on, recreating that moment, is me.”

I’m stunned. But as I look up at him, it all makes sense. The boy I could never forget. The enormity of the coincidence hits my body full force and I turn away, reeling. I’ve thought of him so many times over the years, even on my wedding day, as I stood at the altar, I wondered about him. I can feel the blood coursing through my veins, pumping around my body as the realisation sweeps over me that it was always meant to be him.

“Ivy, I’ve been in love with you for twenty-six years. You didn’t talk to me back then, will you talk to me now?”

I hear him but can’t answer, every moment of those two weeks I spent watching him from across the road is playing through my head. Watching it like an old movie, seeing it as if for the first time. And now, it’s so obvious it’s Dan.

He sighs. “Well, I guess you only regret the things you didn’t do. I’m at least glad I told you.”

It isn’t until his hand brushes mine as he walks away that present day whooshes back in and I realise what he just said.

“I’m in love with you too,” I say, panic erupting as I watch him stop, back to me, but not turn around. “But I am scared,” I admit.

The second his eyes meet mine, though, every scrap of doubt falls away. And when he returns to me and cups my face, I know I never have to be afraid again.

“I’m never going to hurt you, Ivy. This isn’t some March madness, some spring fling, not for me. This is real. Trust in it, in me.”

“I do, I really do,” I say as I step into his arms. “You know, Fallon and Cassie are going to be insufferable, going to claim they were behind this, that they always knew.”

“Oh, they’ve been far more meddlesome than you know,” he laughs. “We’ll just have to find a few ways to gross them out, you know, embarrass them in public, be really awful parents.”

“Sounds like hard work, you’ve met them right, they’re not grossed out by anything.”

“It can be done, I know it. What do you say, you want to spend a lifetime trying to disgust our kids?”

I can’t help but grin. “A lifetime?”

He leans down, kisses me gently on the cheek and whispers in my ear. “Well, if I’ve got you, I’m never letting you go.”

We pull apart as manic cheering starts from the other side of the street and we turn to see our girls whooping and dancing.

“Wanna start right now?” Dan asks with a wink as he picks me up.

I instantly wrap my legs around his waist, and seconds later his mouth crashes down on me, tongue dancing with mine, hands wandering, a kiss definitely not made for being out in public.

“We’ll leave you to it,” Fallon calls. “I’ll stay at Cassie’s tonight so you guys can have the house to yourselves. But please, not on the sofa, I sit on that.”

As they give us a cheeky wave, I bury my head into Dan’s chest. “Why am I the one that feels embarrassed right now?”

“I know, do they not know we’re the parents?” he chuckles. “But, on a brighter thought, we have a house to ourselves. Fancy getting take-out and an early night?”

“Sounds perfect,” I reply. And it does, and I know that the rest of my life is going to be just as perfect, because I finally have the love that should have blossomed all those years ago. Ivy and Dan, two kids that were meant to be.