Chapter 19

19

I 've been here for days now. The snow has let up some and I have no doubt the flights resumed less than twenty-four hours after the heavy snow descended, but I've not checked to see if the roads are clear yet.

For reasons I don't want to examine too closely.

Last night was the first time I didn't sit in the dining room for my evening meal. Pennington's holed up in the study, declaring his book at a crucial stage of development. I've taken that to mean he hasn't even started writing it yet, but he never joins us for dinner, opting to eat in his room or the study instead. Ellis, being ever accommodating, complies with a smile and a kind word. As for myself, rather than have me eat in the deserted dining room, Ellis invited me to eat with him, Rosie, Aggie, and John the Maid in the kitchen.

I'd enjoyed myself. It had come as a bit of a surprise—I'm not known for being that social unless I have to, which is usually at business meetings masquerading as social functions. But sitting in the warm, cosy kitchen that smelled divine, I'd devoured a pork roast with all the trimmings, followed by warm apple pie and custard. If I'm not careful, I'm going to go home twenty pounds heavier.

It had been comfortable and easy, even though they are all relative strangers.

Dilys is rarely anywhere to be seen unless you need a drink and then she suddenly pops up from nowhere, shuffling along in her pink carpet slippers with a pocket full of little thank you for your custom cards. It's like she has a never-ending supply. She never speaks and honestly I'm now wondering if she's closer to a hundred years old. I'm beginning to suspect she's some kind of supernatural creature who only appears when summoned and spends the rest of her time napping in her coffin or crypt.

John the Maid has at least stopped glowering at me after the wet-carpet incident. My memories of Aggie are still a bit vague, and she hovers somewhere between fondly indulgent and scarily reprimanding when she looks at me. Rosie has thawed a bit, at least enough when we're around the others that I can see she's loyal and funny, with an edge of quick wit and sarcasm.

Then there's sweet, kind Ellis. It's not hard to see he's the glue that holds this place together. They all dote on him. Sitting at a table with them, watching the way they interact, it's easy to see that they are a family. The inside jokes, the way they tease each other and finish each other's sentences—it's a tight-knit group. I couldn't remember the last time I had anything close to this. Maybe when I was younger, when it was my mom, Royce, me, and Warren.

Royce was all about family, but he's gone now. Mom is always off travelling or shopping on different continents, although she does check in every few weeks. Warren and I call each other constantly and try and squeeze in lunches, but he spends most of his down time on a bear hunt and then getting dicked down by his latest conquest.

Me, I work. That's it. That's my entire existence summed up in one short sentence. Warren's words keep ringing in my head. Had I spent years unconsciously trying to prove myself? Prove that I deserved a place in their family? And why did I always think of it as their family not mine? Mom, Warren, and I are all related by blood, and Royce legally adopted me not long after he married Mom. He chose me. So why then did I always feel like I didn't quite belong? That a part of me was missing.

Now, I wander down the corridor on the fourth floor where my room is located, studying the paintings and photographs mounted haphazardly on the wall. Some look to be hundreds of years old and some only a few decades. It should have looked unsightly, a mismatched gallery of clashing styles and significance, but somehow it works. Just like the rest of the hotel. It shouldn't, but it does. These pictures tell the story of this place. Ellis is right—it's the stories and experiences of the people who pass through its doors that makes this hotel so compelling.

After the night with the bathroom incident, which I still can't think about without dying of embarrassment, things changed between Ellis and me. It was inevitable, I suppose. If I'm honest with myself, we'd been heading in this direction since the moment he fell off a ladder and into my arms. We've been intimate—some insanely hot frotting and a couple of soapy hand jobs in the shower—but we haven't gone any further.

Not that I don't want to though. I'm desperate to bury myself inside him, to have him under me making those sweet sounds when I make him come, but every time we get close, I pull away. I see the disappointment in those pretty blue eyes, but also an understanding. He doesn't push for anything more than I'm willing to give, which is more than I've ever had from any of the other men who temporarily ran through my life in the past. They'd all wanted something from me: money, connections, favours, you name it. But Ellis doesn't ask for anything at all, not even my help trying to figure out how to save his beloved hotel.

He's everything I never knew I needed and the one thing I can't keep. I can't take him to bed knowing that I'll be leaving him. And I will leave him. I have a whole life and a company to help run back in New York. I can't dump everything on Warren; in fact, I don't even want to think about the pile of problems that will be waiting for me when I return.

The thought of returning has my belly churning uncomfortably. Pushing the thought from my mind, I return to my fascinated perusal of the pictures lining the walls. Ellis had spent the first few days showing me the whole hotel from top to bottom, then he'd returned to his duties, leaving me to explore on my own. According to him, this entire floor housed the family apartments before it was renovated as a hotel. Most of the family rooms were converted to guest rooms with the exception of my grandfather's suite, which is at the other end of the east wing and far away from the guest rooms where I'm staying, but it doesn't stop me wandering the floor curiously.

I turn down an unfamiliar corridor and pause. This isn't one of the places Ellis showed me, I'm sure of it. Even though all the corridors and rooms look the same, they're not. It's like my subconscious knows every corner of this building, and it's trying to direct where I go next. Everywhere I look, I have this feeling of déjà vu, but I can't seem to access the memories to match.

I'm about to turn around and go back the way I came when I hear a creaking. When I look up, there's a door swinging slowly open.

" Ghosts aren't real ," I mutter to myself. Yet I still walk tentatively towards the open door. Jesus, I'm like one of the dumb teenagers in every horror movie ever, going down into the basement or walking into the abandoned shack in the middle of the woods.

As I reach the door, I press my hand against the wood and push it open further. I'm not sure what I expect, but it's certainly not the sight that greets me. It's a child's room, but what immediately has me drawing in a sharp breath is the name painted in brightly coloured letters above the small twin bed.

Morgan .

This was my room. I drop my hand to my side and step into the room. Beside the bed is a nightstand holding a night light in the shape of a small blue train. Thomas, I think with a smile, the memory floating to the surface. Thomas the Tank Engine. I loved trains. How could I have forgotten?

I turn to look at the walls that are covered with pictures of trains, steam engines, and various others, including the Flying Scotsman. Then there are posters of the rest of the characters from the Thomas the Tank Engine children's series, and a bookcase pushed up against one wall is filled with books from the series too.

I also see dozens of other children's books, including what looks to be a series for much younger children about a white bunny named Miffy. On higher shelves are classics: the Narnia books, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan.

I turn away from my perusal of the books and towards the armoire. The doors are open, revealing empty wire hangers. I glance down and see a small heap of light-coloured material. Picking it up, I shake the thick layer of dust from it, then pull it out of the piece of furniture. It's a child's T-shirt, one of mine. I release a breath I didn't know I was holding and a strange, unsettled feeling rises in my belly when I hold it up to look at the illustration on the front. My gaze takes in the old-fashioned green steam engine and the little red Welsh dragon sitting on its funnel. Iver the Engine, I remember, and the dragon's name is Idris.

Like the information was just waiting in some long-forgotten corner of my mind.

I lay the T-shirt carefully on the bed. The dresser drawers are open too, and empty except for several mismatched socks with holes in them and a pair of pyjamas. Toy boxes filled with balls and stuffed animals line the walls, and a bow and arrow set leans next to one of them. Tucked into one corner is an old-fashioned rocking horse with a cowboy hat hooked over one ear and on the floor in front of it is a huge train track set up with stations and tunnels, and several engines with burgundy and cream-coloured passenger carriages.

I came here on a train… a really big one. It had lots of steam coming out of it and there were loads of other kids on board. They said they was takin' us somewhere safe where the doodlebugs couldn't get us.

I'm really glad you're here. You're my best friend, Artie.

I stumble back at the vivid memory of me lying on this very floor, watching the little electric trains running along the track, my friend lying beside me. Dropping heavily onto the bed, I stare at the train set for I'm not sure how long.

Finally, I reach into my pocket and retrieve my phone. It only takes me a moment to scroll through to the right number and for it to start ringing at the other end of the line.

"Morgan, darling! How lovely to hear from you. This is unexpected. How's Chicago? Cold, I bet. I don't envy you at all. Your Aunt Sylvie and I are sipping mai tais by the edge of the ocean." She sighs happily. "I do love the Bahamas. You and Warren should fly out and join us. I can't remember the last time the three of us spent any time together."

I can. It was my stepfather's funeral, but I don't remind her of that.

"Mom, I'm not in Chicago."

"Oh, are you back in New York, then? Warren didn't mention it. Or are you off to one of the other hotels? You've always been like that. Itchy feet, my mother used to call it. You never could settle in one place for long. It's like you have a restless soul."

"No, I'm not in New York either." I take a deep breath, not sure how she's going to take the next words out of my mouth. "Mom, I'm in England. I'm in Yorkshire."

There's nothing but silence on the other end of the line. If I couldn't hear my Aunt Sylvie's voice chatting away to someone faintly in the background, I'd have thought the call had disconnected.

"Mom?"

"What are you doing there?" she says quietly.

I breathe out slowly. "You know what I'm doing here."

"You're at Ashton House," she says, and there's a note of sadness in her voice.

"We've never talked about our life here, never talked about…" I brace myself. "We've never talked about my dad. You never brought it up, and I didn't want to make you sad by asking questions, but maybe I should have. I'm only just starting to understand that the reason I could never settle anywhere, the reason I was always trying to prove myself, is because there's a big part of me missing. I lived here for the first six years of my early life, the most formative, and I have no memory of it, of my dad, of my grandfather. Do you have any idea what it's like to be surrounded by things and people who seem so familiar, yet I don't remember them? It's like there's this black hole in my memories, and you're the only one who can fill in the blanks for me."

"What about your grandfather? Where is he?"

"He's kinda not talking to me," I admit with a sigh. "Ellis says that Grandad told him it's because I look so much like my dad that it was a shock, even though he knows I'm an adult now. In his mind he still thought of me as a little kid."

"Who's Ellis?" she asks and I can hear the curiosity in her voice.

"He's… he works here," I say softly. "But he's lived here since he was a kid. His mom used to be one of the housemaids. When she moved on, he loved the place so much he stayed."

She gives a small chuckle. "That doesn't surprise me. Both your grandparents were always taking in waifs and strays, just like they did with me when I landed up on the doorstep of Ashton House. In fact, that was how I met your father."

"What?"

Mom sighs heavily. "That's a story for another day. You're right, I never should have kept the memory of your father from you."

"Then why did you?"

She goes quiet again. "Give me a moment to move. I have a private cabana, and I need privacy for this conversation."

I wait patiently before she finally comes back on the line. "He's right, you know. Your grandfather. You are the image of your father. There are days when it hurts to look at you, but it's a good hurt because…" She pauses and I can hear the tremor in her voice when she starts up again. "Because even after he was gone, it's like I got to carry a little piece of him with me."

"What happened, Mom?" I ask the one question that's been burning inside me since I was fifteen years old and have always been too afraid to ask.

"Your father died from an aneurysm, that much you know. One moment he was there, and in the next breath he was gone. Instantaneous. There's nothing anyone could have done to save him. They tell me he wouldn't have felt a thing, he wouldn't have even known anything was wrong." She blows out a long breath as if trying to organise her thoughts. "I never settled well in Yorkshire. I was a city girl and never quite got used to the country. That life was so foreign to me, so far removed from everything I knew. I know there was a lot of talk, especially from the local village gossips. They thought I was a pretty American gold digger, a nobody from New Jersey. That I married your dad for his money."

She huffs. "Little did they know that every generation of Ashton-Drakes struggled with debt. None of the men in that family seemed to have any clue how to manage money, and a fair few of them had gambling problems. When I knew them, your grandfather Cedric was still trying to dig the family out of the abyss of gambling debts his older brother Clifford had gifted them with before his untimely death."

I snort. "Seems about right from what I've heard about the rest of my ancestors."

"The truth is, Morgan," she says quietly, "I loved your father with every single fibre of my being. He was the love of my life."

"He was?" I'd always hoped that she'd loved him, that they'd loved each other, and that I wasn't just the product of a marriage that didn't work out and would've ended early anyway if there hadn't been a tragedy. It helps to hear her admit how she felt. It soothes something deep inside me that I didn't know needed soothing.

"He was so handsome and charismatic." She sighs happily like a teenage girl with her first crush. "But he was also sweet and kind, had a smile for everyone. He was always the first to offer to help, put the needs of others before his. He was the best man I've ever known. When he died…" She swallows tightly, the hurt obvious even after all this time. "After he died, I needed to get away. I needed to go somewhere where I wasn't surrounded by memories of Elliott. I was drowning in my own grief, in so much pain I couldn't see your grandfather's. When I first took you back to New York, I hadn't intended it to be permanent, no matter what people thought. I just needed to be with my own family, needed time to heal. So I brought you to my mom's place in New Jersey."

"I don't remember that. The earliest memories I have are of living in the penthouse at The Hamilton Manhattan."

"I'm not surprised," she says. "For the first six months after your father's death, you wouldn't speak. Not one single word. I know it sounds cliché, but I took a job as a maid at The Hamilton—that's how I met Royce—to pay for you to see a therapist. She said that you being nonverbal was a trauma response to your father's death. I pushed my own grief aside to concentrate on helping you."

"I remember that," I say quietly. "I wanted to speak, but the words wouldn't come."

"When you did gradually begin to speak, it became clear you'd locked up all your memories of home, of your father and of Ashton House. I know there must be a small part of you that thinks I didn't take you back to England because I met Royce, got married, and had Warren. That I replaced our family with a new one, but, Morgan, that couldn't be further from the truth. I never took you back because I was so afraid it would push you back into that awful grief and that I would lose you. Gradually, you started moving forward, and in order to keep doing that, you had to leave what was behind you in the past. I made the choice not to take you back before I started seeing Royce and certainly before he asked me to marry him."

"You married Royce barely a year after Dad died."

"Yes, I did," she replies contemplatively. "I hadn't planned to. Meeting Royce was a surprise. He became my friend first. He ended up paying for all your therapy so you could have the best help. I wasn't looking for another relationship at all, especially so soon after Elliott, but I was so sad and lonely, I didn't know how to cope with my own grief and was trying to focus on helping my child through his struggle with something I didn't understand."

"That must have been hard," I murmur. I always knew it couldn't have been easy, but hearing it in her own words hurts me somewhere deep inside.

"I fell into a relationship with Royce because it was all about comfort. He wanted to take care of both of us. I never lied to him, and that was why our relationship worked. Royce went into it knowing I was in love with another man, one I was also grieving. But he loved me and he loved you too, and in the end we grew to love him too. He was a good man. Falling pregnant with Warren was a surprise and a gift. When he came along, you came out of that dark grief and began to really talk, and smile. I will never forget the first time you held him after he was born. You smiled, a real smile for the first time since Elliott died, and I knew then we'd turned a corner. Having your little brother to shower with your love was when you truly began to heal. Warren saved you in a way I couldn't."

"Mom," I choke out, my eyes burning with tears.

"We became this unassailable little unit, you, me, Warren, and Royce, and we loved each other. Losing your father taught me one very important lesson that I have never forgotten, and that's to treasure every single moment because you never know how many you have left."

I scrub my free hand over my eyes, brushing away the moisture, and sniff loudly.

"I made my choices in life," Mom continues. "And I stand by them. But the one regret I have is your grandfather. He'd lost his wife only the year before, and it had devastated him. Elliott played a large part in getting him through his grief even though he'd lost his mom too. Then Elliott died and Cedric fell apart. I tried in those early days. I tried to help him, but I couldn't. It was too much. I couldn't take on his grief as well as my own and my child's. So I made a choice. I figured that we'd come back at some point, but the longer we were away and with you finally coming out of it, it was harder to overcome my fear of rocking the boat. But I should've checked on him."

"I understand why you didn't, Mom." I swallow past the burning sensation at the back of my throat. "Nothing about any of this was easy. You made the best choice you could, and I'm grateful for the life I've had and for the family you gave me. I do love you."

"I love you too," she whispers.

"You're not the only one at fault here," I admit slowly. "When I was younger, I knew I had a grandad in England, but I'd convinced myself he didn't want anything to do with me because I never heard from him. At any point in my adult life, I could have gotten on a plane and come over here to meet him, but I didn't."

"You're there now," she reminds me. "Be gentle with him. If he's as cantankerous as I remember, you'll have your work cut out, but underneath it all, he's a good man." She gives a small laugh. "You're a lot like him, actually."

"How so?"

"It's like your father got all the sweetness and sunshine in your family. You and your grandfather are two peas in a pod. Grumpy and as prickly as a porcupine, but when you love, you love with everything in you. So go, get to know your grandfather, and I'm here anytime you need to talk."

"Actually, there was something I wanted to ask."

"What's that?"

"When we lived here at Ashton House, did I have a friend who came to play? He would have been a little older than me, maybe eight or nine? His name was Artie."

"Artie?" She sounds surprised. "Wow, that's a name I haven't heard in over thirty years."

"Was he a friend of mine, then? Did he live locally? I was just wondering if he still lived around here."

"Morgan," she says gently. "Artie wasn't real. He was your imaginary friend."

"What?"

"It started as soon as you were able to talk. You were always going on about your friend, Artie. Your father and I would watch you have entire conversations with him in front of us, but there was no one there. I was a bit worried about it when you hadn't grown out of it by the time you started school, but Elliott…" She trails off.

"What?" I ask curiously.

"Whenever you talked about Artie, Elliott would have this little smile on his face, like it was a secret only the two of you were in on. He said to just leave you and that eventually you'd grow out of it. I guess you did because you never mentioned him once we moved to New York. It was like you left him behind with all of your other memories."

"I guess," I mutter.

"So," Mom says, and I smile because I know that tone. "Tell me all about this Ellis."