Page 10 of The Unlikely Pair

It’s been nearly twenty years since she died, and some memories of her have started to slip away, like the shade of her lipstick or the exact taste of the milky Ovaltine she’d whip up for me after a cold football match.

But I will never forget my mother’s laugh. It was the soundtrack of my childhood.

“So, I just saw Oliver and Callum. You wouldn’t believe the change in Oliver if you saw him. I mean, you never met him, but I’ve told you about him, right? And honestly, he’s so different with Callum compared to how he was with Garrett. He’s just so…happy.”

“And we’ve passed the infrastructure legislation and are now working on legislation to incentivize landlords to better insulate their rental properties. Imagine if we’d had insulation in our flat.”

I still remember her standing on a chair, a roll of bubble wrap in her hands. She’d come home from work that day with a determined look. “I sweet-talked the shipping manager into giving me this. We’ll tape it over the windows, and it’ll act like a makeshift double glazing.”

When she’d finished bubble-wrapping the windows, she’d given me a triumphant grin. “When the going gets tough, the tough start improvising.”

It was part of an ongoing joke between my mother and me, how we’d twist profound sayings to amuse each other.

On my sixteenth birthday, when she caught me sneaking back into the house after a late-night party, she just shook her head and said, “Toby, my dear, you may be growing up, butyou’ve still got a lot to learn. The early bird catches the worm, and the night owl catches the hangover.”

When I was packing my things to move to university, she got misty-eyed. “I’m trying not to think of it as goodbye, just a long ‘be right back.’”

I put my arm around her shoulders and replied, “Don’t worry, Mum. I may be flying the coop, but I’ll always know where home is.”

Little did I know that she'd be gone in less than a year, and I’d be left with no nest to come home to.

Now, as I continue to tell her about what’s happening in Parliament, my gaze fixes on the picture on her headstone. It was taken a year before she died.

I always try to keep that image of my mother in my mind. The smiling, laughing one. Not the mother with red-rimmed eyes and tear-soaked cheeks. Not the mother who withered away so quickly as pancreatic cancer consumed her from the inside.

I first stood at this spot by her grave as a nineteen-year-old wracked with grief, feeling lost at the thought of navigating the world without my mother as my anchor.

If I’m being honest, the lost feeling inside me has never completely faded.

I know I need to leave now, or I will be late for my flight. But I find myself lingering as I remove the old decaying flowers from the water jar, giving it a good rinse before putting the new tulips in.

I place them in the center of the grave, a bright splash of color amongst the muted colors of the graveyard.

“Happy birthday, Mum,” I say quietly.

And then I turn and walk away so I can catch my flight.

Chapter Four

Harry

I’m running late.

Dolores’s litany of complaints turned into a half-hour monologue about her recent triumph in the strawberry jam category at the village fete. She insisted on recounting every detail, from the meticulous selection of the perfect berries to the precise sugar-to-fruit ratio that secured her victory. I hadn’t the heart to interrupt her.

So now I’m behind schedule, and to add insult to injury, I’ve been caught in a traffic jam that currently has all the traffic on the M25 reduced to a mere crawl. A geriatric snail could probably outpace us.

My driver, Nettie, frowns at her dashboard’s screen, which looks like a convention for equilateral triangles.

“I’m sorry. I don’t think we’re going to make it to the airport in time for your flight,” Nettie says apologetically.

My pulse quickens. I’m a planner by nature. I don’t like it when my day veers off course.

I take a deep breath to calm myself. Anger never helps anything.

“It’s all right. It’s my fault we were late leaving.” I glance over at Paul. “I’ll need to arrange an alternative flight.”

He nods, and I get out my phone.