Page 82 of Not Just for Christmas

I’d been so happy, I couldn’t wait to celebrate with him. But he’d wanted to clear his head, get some fresh air. He was driving on the coast road and said the waves looked too good to resist. Half an hour surfing, that was all he needed, he said. His surfboard was on the roof of the Land Rover, his wetsuit and stuff already in the back.

If I’d known how blustery it was, I’d have begged him not to go. An hour went by. I called him, he didn’t pick up. I left messages which he didn’t return. He’d been surfing a million times and a million times he’d lived to tell the tale. He was always a bad timekeeper; I was more annoyed than worried.

For the first time since I’d been at the farm, I could imagine it being a place where my dreams could come true as well as his. I wanted him home so we could start planning properly. Another half an hour went by. By now my impatience had turned to fear. What could have held him up so long? I thought about driving to the beach to check on him, but it was getting dark and I didn’t want to have to take Sam with me. Then a police car crept silently up the drive.

And my life imploded.

Dylan held out his arms, and I tumbled into them. My tears mixed with his as he rocked me gently, rubbing circles on my back. We stayed like that until my tears ran dry.

‘It’s OK,’ Dylan murmured, over and over.

I rested my head on his shoulder. ‘Now do you see why it was my fault?’

‘Not at all.’ He kissed the top of my head. ‘I didn’t hear any possible reason for you to blame yourself for his accident. He got into trouble while he was surfing. Not your fault.’

‘But if it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have gone to the bank, so he wouldn’t have been near the beach—’

‘He lived near the beach,’ Dylan argued. ‘He could just have easily decided to go surfing if he’d spent the day on the farm. He chose to go surfing in December when there was no lifeguard on duty. He knew the risks. He loved the risks. Jack went surfing because he wanted to, you had nothing to do with it.’

There was an element of truth in that. The weekend prior to that he’d been down to the beach without incident. Hence the surfboard still being strapped to the roof rack.

‘But if that was the case, I’d have to be angry with him for being reckless and leaving me to cope with the farm all by myself. And I’d be angry with him for not thinking about his little boy when he paddled a surfboard into strong waves.’

‘Maybe you need to let yourself be angry for a while,’ said Dylan softly. ‘Let yourself feel whatever you feel. That’s gotta be better than keeping everything locked up and pretending the problems are not there. Am I right?’

I let that sink in before speaking. He was right, of course he was. But I’d chosen to gloss over Jack’s part in his death, finding it easier to blame myself than him.

‘OK.’ Finally I conceded a small smile. ‘I am cross that I’ve been left running a dairy farm singlehandedly. And that I won’t get to have the holiday cottages after all.’

‘Good.’ He smiled back, looking pleased with me. ‘So now we’re getting somewhere, what can you do about that?’

I looked at him as if he was bonkers. ‘There’s nothing I can do. This is a family farm, I can’t walk away, and there aren’t any other relatives I can hand it over to. I don’t have the right to take Sam’s inheritance away from him. Besides, Jack would want his son to have the choice to run it if he wants to. Which means I’m trapped here until Sam is old enough to make that decision.’

He opened his mouth to say something and then hesitated. ‘Have you ever seen the experiment with the ant and the pen?’

I smiled faintly. ‘No, enlighten me.’

Dylan took my hand in his and turned it over so that my palm was facing up.

‘So this guy gets an ant on a piece of paper and draws a circle around the ant with a pen.’ He illustrates this by tracing his finger around my palm. ‘The ant runs to the edge of the circle but when it reaches the line it won’t cross it. Because it thinks it’s trapped. There isn’t a physical barrier there, there is no reason why the ant can’t escape.’ He ran a finger across my skin. ‘And yet it doesn’t.’

‘So the moral of the story is, all you need to imprison an ant is a piece of paper and a pen?’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘Right.’

‘I’m teaching you something here, Oakley.’ He grinned. ‘You’ve put the same walls up as that ant. You’ve told yourself you have no choice other than to run the farm the way it has been run for years.’

‘Hear that?’ I cupped a hand to my ear and pretended to listen. ‘That’s the sound of seventy cows all saying goodnight to each other. And tomorrow morning they’ll wake up and want breakfast and clean beds. So I am running a B&B, but for very large guests who don’t leave and make a hell of a mess.’

‘So Sam gets the choice whether to take over the farm when he grows up.’

I nodded. ‘I won’t force him either way.’

‘But you won’t allow yourself the same right to choose?’

I didn’t have an answer to that. I folded my arms and pressed my lips together in frustration.

‘The last thing Jack said to you was that he wanted you to be happy, right?’ Dylan pushed on. ‘That you were more important to him than the farm.’

I nodded. He had said that. Later I’d been grateful that our last conversation had been one full of love. A single tear rolled down my cheek. Dylan wiped it away tenderly.