This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
AVON
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Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2009
Trisha Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007329052
Version: 2018-04-23
When Josie awoke in hospital, unscathed except for concussion and an impressive array of bruises, she had no recollection of the crash. Granny, red-eyed but stoical, had to break the news to her.
Somehow she managed to blank out most of the weeks immediately following the accident too, so that when she looked back later it seemed to her that one day she was living in St Albans with a full set of parents and several good friends, leavened with the usual teenage-years angst and a heartfelt, if destined to be forever unrequited, passion for Sting, and the next she was being whisked off alone to Granny’s cottage in Lancashire, to start a new life.
‘It’s just thee and me now, flower,’ Granny was all too often to remark, though with the best of intentions. But it wasn’t likely that Josie would forget that fact, even if amnesia and anger were her current first lines of defence. For she was totally and illogically furious, both with her parents for so selfishly getting themselves killed, and with poor, grieving, gentle Granny for being truly ancient, so that Josie was convinced that she would also soon be snatched away, leaving her totally bereft.
It would be better to love no one, to feel nothing at all—much safer.
All that summer, she silently and sullenly followed Granny around the garden while she hoed, dug, planted and harvested, or helped Uncle Harry (who lived next door and was not a real uncle, only having married Granny’s cousin) to tend the poultry. And slowly Josie began to gain some comfort from the cycle of cultivation, the clucking hens and the drowsy, contented humming of bees; while across the Green, the ancient church bells repeatedly rang a joyful wedding peal, a signal that hope and happiness still existed and might one day be hers again.
Only in the evenings, lying in her narrow bed among the transplanted possessions of her former life, the mournful screams of the peacocks next door in the gardens of Blessings would pierce right to her heart with unbearable sadness, and she would put a pillow over her head and weep.
She didn’t take the bus to her new school on the first day. Instead, Uncle Harry drove her there in the yellow Vauxhall Cavalier that was his pride and joy. And then, embarrassingly, he and Granny both stood at the gates like the oldest parents in the world while Josie went on alone. She turned once, and they waved at her, as she had known they would: it was comforting but deeply uncool.
Catching sight of her, a passing youth—tall and broad-shouldered, with floppy, light brown hair—stopped dead and gave her a big, drop-dead-gorgeous smile. Suddenly breathless, she gazed into his warm hazel eyes, and it was as though she already knew she’d found a kindred spirit, a soul mate—recognised that fate, having taken love away with one sweep of the dice, had then, fickle, tossed her a perfect six.