Page 22 of I’ll Be Home for Christmas

“Yes, love. Just tired. I’ll finish up this box and call it a night.”

While Fred waited for the tea to brew, she flicked to the Hallow-Hart Crackers Instagram page. “Mum, the last post on Insta was the twenty-third of September.”

“Are you sure? I could have sworn I put something up a few weeks ago.”

Fred tsked. “Social media is important for keeping the business in people’s minds. Ideally, you need to be adding content every few days. Do you post stories?”

“Ummm…sometimes?”

“Reels?”

“Never.”

“Are you on TikTok?”

“No. I can’t keep up with it all, Fred. There’s so much to do, especially now the aunts have taken a back seat. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day. I try to keep on top of the website.”

Fred pressed the link to the website and noted the last update was the middle of October. As a business they were missing a trick here. Her marketing know-how was pinging alerts all over her brain. “I can’t see a newsletter.”

“I don’t have one. I never know what I’m supposed to write about. There’s only so many times I can talk about crackers.”

“It isn’t only about the crackers, Mum. It’s about you as a person, engaging with your customers on a level that makes them feel invested in you.”

“Right. Still, I’m not sure it’s for me. I’m not that interesting.”

“You live in the Scottish Highlands, on a cliff, where you design your own cracker papers and grow your own vegetables; you are an influencer’s wet dream.”

“That’s nice, I’m not sure I’ve been anyone’s wet dream for years.”

Fred snorted. “Listen, why don’t you make me an administrator on these platforms, I’ll sort this out for you, make a few changes, start scheduling regular posts. What do you think?”

“Would you?” Bella turned, a cracker clutched to her chest. “Would you really?”

“Of course. Might as well earn my keep.”

“Oh, Fred, thank you!” The relief in her voice was genuine and the breath she let out seemed to have been held for a while.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were struggling with stuff?”

Her mum only shrugged in response.

“Well, I’m here for the foreseeable, so you might as well utilize my strengths.

I may not know the ins and outs of the business, but I know how to create visuals and taglines to sell a brand.

Hallow-Hart Crackers has a rich history, and we aren’t making nearly enough of it.

” She was suddenly and most unexpectedly excited by the things she could do with the business.

Ideas began to ricochet around her brain, and her fingers itched to put pen to paper.

She crossed to the filing cabinet and pulled one of the sketchbooks off the top.

“Can I use this?” she asked. She needed to get things out of her head and down on paper before they disappeared.

“Of course, what—?”

But Fred wasn’t listening. She grabbed a fineliner pen from the bench, opened the sketchbook, and began to create a mind map.

Forty minutes later, the tea was stewed, Bella had poured them each a glass of Baileys from her not-so-secret stash in the bottom drawer, and Fred had three double-page spreads of spidery lines linking haphazardly drawn circles, sketches and scribbled notes.

She puffed out a long breath, and they clinked glasses.

“I haven’t seen you this frenetic in years,” said Bella as she cast her eye over the pages filled with squirls and text.

“I don’t think I have been. Not for a long time. Phew!” She laughed, and it felt joyful. “I honestly thought I’d lost it. I thought maybe it fizzled out a bit when you got into your thirties or something. Shit! That felt good. I feel wired.”

Now her mum laughed. “Oh, goodness me no, your thirties are when your spark starts to get going properly. You wait till you’re fifty!

Then you’re really cooking on gas; menopause might be a shit show but, creatively speaking, it’s a fucking gold mine.

Surely you can see from the aunts that women just get better and better with age.

” Bella leaned over the side of the armchair and took Fred’s face in her hands.

“My darling girl, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see your fire burning again. ”

In that moment she felt something else that she hadn’t felt in a long time: truly grateful for a mother who had never given up on her, no matter how far Fred had tried to push her away.

Practicing gratitude and mindfulness—alongside setting intentions—had been a part of daily life growing up at Hallow House.

On full moons the four of them—six, if Ryan and Martha joined in—would sit outside in the garden with the moon reflecting off the water below, and they would take turns to describe every good thing that had happened that day, no matter how small: catching the scent of spring hyacinth on the breeze, or finding a smooth newly fallen conker on the path.

It was her family’s equivalent of saying grace; to acknowledge that, even on the very worst day, there were still things to be thankful for.

To be able to feel gratitude was its own kind of medicine.

She wondered now if those practices also acted as a kind of emotional insulation and if, in disregarding them when she had distanced herself from her family, she had left herself open to erosion.

Her gratitude in this moment loosened something inside her, and she found herself able to admit the one thing that pride, and shame, had made her conceal for far too long.

“He was cruel, Mum; Tim, I mean. He was all the things you saw, but he was so much worse than that. I can’t put it into words that make any sense, but…

he’s not a good person. People see him and think that he is, but he’s not. ”

She saw the fire burn in her mum’s eyes. Watched her swallow her wrath. After a moment, she said simply, “I know. I know what he is.”

Fred knew that she didn’t need to say more.

She could see from her mum’s expression that there had been no wool over her eyes.

She wondered how she must have felt, watching helplessly as her daughter drifted further and further from her.

How would she have felt if the roles had been reversed?

The flash of rage at the mere thought of it answered her question.

“I wish I’d listened to you. I didn’t want to hear it and then, when I did, it was too late, I couldn’t find my way out.”

Bella picked up the sketchbook and turned it to face Fred. “You’re back now, sweetheart. You found the way.”

In the end, despite their tiredness earlier in the evening, they stayed up until after 2 a.m. talking about the past and planning for the future.

Fred hadn’t realized just how detrimental her self-imposed exile from her family had been to her emotional well-being.

Though Tim had undoubtedly widened the gap between them and undermined her confidence to bridge it, she couldn’t blame him alone.

In truth, she had begun to disengage herself, years earlier, via a skewed lens of childish peeves that when left unchecked had hardened into resentment.

The idea of coming back to Pine Bluff had felt like closing the book on a life she’d worked so hard to make real.

But now she wondered if perhaps what she’d left behind in London was merely a chapter within a much larger book.

And far from being at the end of it, she had plenty more to write.