Page 44 of Oz (Finding Home #1)

This is my kind of perfect.

FIVE YEARS LATER

Oz

I sit back on the sand, feeling the breeze hit me in the face, and listen to the roar of the surf.

It’s been a sticky, muggy day, but here in our cove it’s cool and fresh.

I inhale the scent of pine and salt and smile.

Chewwy, who’s been sitting hovering near me, suddenly jumps to his feet with a whine and I grin.

I know who it is even before I feel his large warm hands come down on my shoulders as he lowers himself behind me, cuddling me back against his bigger frame and burying his face in my neck for a second. The greeting he always gives me is as familiar as my own face in a mirror.

I turn to face him, raising my lips for a kiss. He obliges, and I lift my hand and card my fingers through his still-messy waves that are now touched with a few threads of silver. He’s forty-three and grimaces when I mention it, but he’s the sexiest forty-three-year-old I know.

“How was your day, dear?” I ask, and he chuckles.

“Long and boring and I spent far too long with my hand up a horse’s vajajay.”

I snort. “What a daring and scandalous life you lead.”

“How’s it been here?”

I smile. “I spent the morning in my office trying to go through some figures.” I point in front of me at the small figure on the beach watched over by the inquisitive form of Boris. “But I’ll give you two guesses how that went.”

He laughs and gives a short fluting whistle, and I jerk and poke him in the side. “How many times have I told you not to summon her by whistling? She’s not Boris or Chewwy.”

“She loves it,” he laughs and gets to his feet, waiting for the running figure to reach him. When she does he falls to his knees and grabs her into a tight hug, kissing every millimetre of her tiny face and laughing loudly as she squeals.

Boris barks and jumps around them, and I smile widely at the sight of my husband and daughter laughing. Yes, you heard me. Husband and daughter. I told you before. Time moves quickly in Oz land.

Silas asked me to marry him a few months after I said I’d stay.

He’d planned an elaborate proposal, but as things always go in our house it had degenerated into chaos with a fire engine, an ambulance, and a near miss with public indecency.

We were sitting in the glow from the lights of the fire engine when he asked me.

I think he’d planned to go down on one knee, but events of the evening prevented it, so he’d actually proposed sitting in the ambulance. But that’s another story.

I’d always known he harboured a desire to have children.

In my eyes he’s the perfect person to be a father.

Kind and funny, clever and grounded. It had been me who’d worried.

I’m not exactly father material. I’m too spiky, too mouthy.

I’d gone through my twenties happily avoiding commitments and I couldn’t see how that would change.

We’d talked about it, then talked about it some more and then some more before we’d made the decision, but it had still seemed like an impossible dream.

Adoption isn’t easy, let alone when you’re gay, so we’d resigned ourselves to a long wait, which contrarily had meant that I’d immediately decided I was all in and ready for it there and then.

Then one night, Ivo rang us. He’d still got a lot of contacts abroad and one of his interpreters had rung him with a story of a baby girl in Colombia left orphaned with no family.

He wanted to know if Ivo knew of anyone in England who would consider taking her because he feared for her if she ended up in an orphanage.

I’d taken a deep breath, looked at Silas and knew from his impassioned, eager face that we were going to do it.

Sometimes I don’t think I’ve ever exhaled that breath.

We’d spent a frantic and angsty few months jumping through government hoops and signing any paperwork put in front of us, but one afternoon we got the call that she was ours and we packed and went to bring her home.

I’d worried but I needn’t have bothered because when Silas put her in my arms, I fell in love. I’d looked at her tiny, scrunched-up face and the sweet bow of her mouth and known that I would happily die for her. Nothing has changed that, and nothing ever will.

We’d come back to Chi an Mor a family and that has never altered, only grown stronger.

I look up to see her running towards me.

She’s gap-toothed and soaking wet. Her dark silky hair is in wild salt-kissed curls, her face is dirty, and she’s tanned from the sun like a little baked hazelnut.

No matter how often I wash her face and put her in clean clothes she always ends up like this – half wild and full of life.

“Da,” she shouts and hurls herself into my arms.

I hug her tight, reaching for the towel and wrapping it round her sturdy little body and rubbing her dry.

She nestles into me, resting her little feet on my calf as I brush the sand off her.

I don’t know why I bother. She’ll be mucky within seconds.

She’s a creature of this place and us, my Cora.

Fierce and wild and occasionally sharp like me, but also with Silas’s kindness and wide-open heart.

To me she’s like the sky – vast and sometimes unfathomable.

Silas comes towards us, smiling. “Ready for tea?” he asks. Boris barks and Cora giggles.

“Daddy, can we have cake?”

“If there’s anything left,” he says, looking at me, and I shrug.

“Not sure. It’s been a busy day.”

We opened the house three years ago and it’s gone from strength to strength.

Visitors always comment on the warmth of the welcome, the feel of the house, and how accessible the family are.

We have old people from the village who come most mornings and sit in the tea rooms eating homemade teacakes, drinking countless cups of tea, and chatting to Cora who sits happily with everyone biting into her biscuit with sharp white teeth.

I introduced a weekly book club for them a few years ago.

It’s lively and raucous and I was stunned to see the risqué book choices they’d decided on.

However, we’re coming up to autumn now. The days are getting cooler and there’s an occasional bite to the air.

Soon the house will close for the autumn and winter and become ours again.

The stairways and paths will fall silent and the house will nestle around us like a benevolent entity sheltering us.

Our daughter will run free again and the rooms will smell of wood smoke and pine and echo to the sound of Cora’s running footsteps.

Silas had worried that I would hate the cold and desolate months but instead I love the dramatic and wild beauty of the Cornish coast in these months when it feels like it’s ours.

Cora unravels herself from the towel like a little butterfly from its chrysalis and dances to Silas, who promptly puts her on his shoulders with a lot of shrieking, and the three of us walk back to the house.

My house may be called Chi an Mor, but my home is walking next to me.

The big man with the gentle spirit and warm eyes who made me fall in love with him despite all my misgivings, and the tiny girl who holds my heart with him.

My family.

Time in Oz’s world can now stop as far as I’m concerned, because this is my kind of perfect.

Silas

Cora’s snores start halfway through the millionth rendition of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and I slow my voice before stopping. I pull the cheerful duvet cover with the embroidered daisies on it over her and look around the room.

When Henry and I were little, we slept in the children’s wing, which was as far away from my parent’s bedroom as the motorway service station in Plymouth.

Our rooms were full of old furniture that nobody wanted and made colourful by posters and an enormous mountain of Blu Tack which drove my father fucking mad.

Cora’s room is so different. One wall is painted a warm clear turquoise and the others are sunny yellow, so it looks like she’s trapped sunshine in here. Her white painted cast iron bed is so soft it’s like sinking into a cloud and her toys and books are everywhere.

She’s also near our room rather than being miles away.

We live in the family apartments that I’d racketed around in on my own for so long, but they’re drastically different now.

Oz has completely overhauled the rooms and he has a genius for finding old bits of furniture in the attics, restoring them and putting them in rooms that look fresh and modern.

Rather than being dark and dingy, the family rooms are now light and airy, echoing the colours from outside.

Our parenting styles are so different from what I grew up with.

I smile as I remember Oz’s face when I’d earnestly explained that if Cora had a nightmare she was to come and get in with us rather than toughing it out.

His expression had been soft and almost sad, and he’d agreed instantly, rather than pointing out that this is normal behaviour in families not headed by my father.

Sometimes at night I’ll wake to hear tiny footsteps padding across the floor in our room and in she’ll get, sliding between us like a queen who knows her land.

The next morning will always find Oz and me contorted into strange positions and clinging to the sides of the bed while she sleeps horizontally with her feet in our ribs.