Page 83 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

CHAPTER NINE

C ASSIE HAD NEVER seen her mother so lively, at least not since her dad had died and even before then—weeks, months and years before then—Mary Farraday had gradually withdrawn into herself, constantly living on the edge with a disease that seemed to come and go at will.

Right now she was laughing at something Leo had said.

Her head was flung back; there was colour in her cheeks and a sparkle in her green eyes.

She was tall and willowy, as blonde as her daughter was dark, with sleepy green eyes that gave her a lazy, mesmerising appeal.

Nevertheless, she was a muted copy of the woman she had once been, hollowed out and with lines of stress ageing her.

‘Mum…’ Cassie interrupted the flow of conversation. ‘I think we should be going now. Leo has…er…a lot of work to get through—business deals; high-level, important stuff. He’s already taken way too much time out recently, haven’t you, Leo?’

They’d had lunch in the dining room and were now in the sitting room, one of the more frequented rooms in the house, and therefore still reasonably comfortable and well maintained.

Most of the other rooms in the massive, rambling house had quietly been closed off as money problems had become more acute.

A lot of the valuable paintings and artifacts had been auctioned, so there was an air of abandonment everywhere.

When they had arrived several hours earlier, Cassie had looked around her and seen it through Leo’s eyes.

It was a once-grand manor now reduced to shabbiness.

She could only imagine how he must have inwardly gloated at the comparison between himself, the boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and her, the girl who had once had it all in a small community where her father had had his finger in a couple of very large pies.

Oh, well; in fairness, she had seen nothing in his expression to validate that train of thought.

He had certainly taken everything in his stride the minute he’d walked through the front door and he hadn’t really stopped.

If this was his idea of not laying it on thick, then she couldn’t begin to imagine what it would have been like if he had.

She stood up and began clearing away the coffee tray that Leo had carried in earlier after they’d finished eating.

‘Leo, dear…remember all that work you mentioned that you had to do?’

She looked at Leo as he glanced across to where she was perched with raised eyebrows and a wry grin.

‘It’s been lovely catching up with you, Mary.’ On cue, he stood up, even though Mary was already protesting, urging them both to stay a bit longer; reminding them that her visitors were few and far between, although now she felt so much stronger with all their money worries behind them.

There were tears in her eyes when she told them how happy she was that Cassie had found love, how regretful she’d felt over the years at the love affair she and Clive had ruined.

‘We were selfish,’ she admitted sadly. ‘I was scared, so scared, so desperate not to lose Cassie when it felt like I was losing so much else at the time—all my security, my health, the very foundation of my life. We never knew just how serious you both were about one another. It was only after time, a long time, when Cassie never really seemed to recover, that I could see how hurt she’d been. ’

She laughed then, lightening the atmosphere, while Cassie silently begged for the ground to swallow her up.

‘But I’ll see you before you disappear, won’t I, Leo?

Your engagement took me by surprise but, now that I’ve got my head round it, I want to sit you both down and discuss some of the nitty-gritty. ’

‘Oh, time enough for that, Mum!’ Cassie waved aside that suggestion, that just wasn’t going to happen.

Come hell or high water, she was determined to avoid crossing that bridge for as long as possible so that the inevitable demise of their so-called relationship wouldn’t need much by way of unravelling of arrangements.

Or too much unravelling of hope on her mother’s side, for that matter.

She and Leo would have to agree on a timeline, just as they had done on Mustique for their devastating, short-lived affair.

‘We’ll head off now, but you stay put. Leo and I will take care of the kitchen, and we’ll pop in before we leave. If we don’t get going now, the snow…well…look at it out there. It’s not stopping any time soon.’

‘We once had help,’ Mary said sadly. ‘Those times are long gone.’ She looked at Leo with shining sincerity.

‘But these times now are wonderful.’ She smiled.

‘Looking forward to something…you have no idea what it means for me, because it feels as though I haven’t had anything to look forward to for a very long time. ’

‘Okay!’ Cassie said hurriedly.

She was lightly perspiring with prickly guilt and tension by the time she and Leo were in the kitchen, with her mum safely ensconced upstairs in the little sitting room that adjoined the master suite.

Darkness was already falling outside, and a glance at the window told her that, if they didn’t leave soon, they wouldn’t be going anywhere, which would leave Leo in a predicament.

‘Dear?’ It was the first thing he said when the kitchen door shut and they were looking at a kitchen in need of tidying.

‘Since when does a twenty-something use the term dear when referring to the love of her life, the man who’s swept her off her feet, the old flame she’d never forgotten, whose ring she’s now going to be wearing on her finger?

Have we time-travelled back fifty years? ’

‘This is just awful,’ Cassie said, sweeping stuff off the table without looking at him and ignoring what he’d just said.

When she did finally stand still and caught his eye, it was to find him staring at her with an inscrutable expression.

‘I had no idea Mum would throw herself into this whole engagement thing with such…such… gusto. ’

‘How did you think it would play out, Cass?’

‘Not like this! Why did you have to be so convincing ?’ she said accusingly. ‘We both agreed that you would keep the charm on the down-low, but it felt like the second you walked through the door your mission was to bowl her over!’

Leo flushed darkly and scowled.

‘It doesn’t come as second nature to be a bore.’

But Leo could see where she was going with this; she could see she was upset and was temporarily at a loss to explain how moved he had been to see a woman who, eight years on, was a shadow of her former self.

He had judged Cassie years ago, and had been quick to rush to the assumption that the class differences between them had been the root of the problem.

Why else would she have gone from excitement at the life ahead of them both to sudden retreat?

A change of heart like that didn’t spring from nowhere.

He had blamed them for manoeuvring Cassie because he came from the wrong side of the tracks, just as he had blamed Cassie for allowing herself to be so massively influenced by them.

He had speculated, drawn conclusions and had felt powerless, and had subconsciously allied that powerlessness with the same helplessness he had felt knowing that his mother had walked out on the family unit—had chosen to abandon him.

His heart had sealed over and he had cut Cassie loose, along with everything associated with that painful slice of his past.

He had had no idea of the circumstances at the time.

Now he had met Mary Farraday, and the one-dimensional picture of her he had constructed in his head had shifted into something more nuanced, because he was finally in full possession of all the facts.

He understood the fear she must have felt in the face of a creeping disease that could sink its teeth into her without warning, or else meander along for years, only revealing itself now and again.

He saw how she might want to cling to her only daughter, because the alternative had been losing her at a time when life must have felt very uncertain and frightening.

He understood how Clive Farraday must have felt: like a rabbit suddenly caught in the headlights, distraught and out of his depth, so eaten up with unhappiness and confusion that he had allowed everything he had worked for to slip away.

Hadn’t his own father bolted from real life, unable to cope, bereft and helpless, when his wife had abandoned him?

And desertion had surely been a lot more manageable than the prospect of slowly losing the person you loved to an illness that would only get worse over time?

And he understood how Cassie had been put in the position of having no choice in the matter, because sometimes difficult decisions had to be made, and she had made an incredibly difficult decision.

Still… He knew that he should have been more conscious of the role he had to play this evening, the role of a fiancé with just a hint of unreliability.

He knew that they both had to play roles so that the ending of their fictitious relationship didn’t come as a complete shock to Mary.

There was no alternative because, whatever were his thoughts on the past and the way he now viewed it differently, he couldn’t change it, and neither could he change the steel that had formed inside him when he and Cassie had walked away from one another.

‘That’s not the point, Leo,’ Cassie snapped, driving him out of his introspection. ‘We could have established the groundwork for us breaking up at a later date…which reminds me that we need to set a timeline for this charade of ours.’

‘I suppose that makes sense. What do you have in mind?’