A Winter's Wish by Tracy Corbett

Author:Tracy Corbett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Saturday, 1st December

The day of the donation drive had arrived. It was chilly, but the sun was shining and the rain had held off. Social media advertising for the event had gone well, promising a good turnout, and the local paper had published a full-page spread supporting the event. All was good.

But as much as Sam tried to focus on the positives of her situation and not allow her mind to venture into more humiliating territory, the only word that sprang to mind as she took in the sight ahead of her was chaos. Utter chaos.

It had started yesterday when the twenty-foot blue shipping container had been delivered to the shelter. The delivery truck had barely been able to squeeze into the car park and unload the thirty-ton monstrosity onto the forecourt, taking out huge clumps of overhanging branches as they eased it into position behind the main building, where it now took up half the outside space.

This had been followed by another delivery early this morning. Stacks of boxes containing one hundred wash kits, one hundred sleeping bags, and one hundred waterproof one-man tents that had been unloaded onto the forecourt.

Before she’d had the chance to move the boxes into the shipping container, people had begun turning up with donations – despite the event not officially starting for another hour. Thankfully, her trusty volunteers had arrived early and were helping her to move the boxes and try to regain some sense of order.

Well, except for Jamie. He’d yet to arrive. Something she was incredibly grateful for.

She picked up another box and carried it over to Norah, who in turn carried it over to Emily, who concluded their human chain by handing it to Fraser for loading into the shipping container. It was a lot better than her original plan of lugging each box into the container herself.

As long as she kept busy, she didn’t care. It was when she stopped being active that her mind tumbled back to the events of last Saturday.

The memories threatened to surface again and she forced them away. She was stressed enough as it was.

Somehow she’d managed to avoid seeing Jamie since the night of her mother’s soiree. A miracle in itself. He hadn’t been at the shelter for the two days following the party, and the rest of the week their paths hadn’t crossed. Mostly down to her efforts to avoid him. When he’d been working from home dealing with preparations for today’s donation drive and the social media advertising, she’d been covering shifts at the shelter. Likewise, when he’d come into the shelter to volunteer in the evenings, she’d disappeared under the guise of needing to deal with ‘urgent tasks’.

Not that she’d been skiving off. Far from it. She’d got a lot done this week. Humiliation proved to be a good motivator.

On Tuesday, she’d visited the local GP surgery and managed to persuade a few of the doctors to run monthly health checks at the shelter. Some of the kids hadn’t seen a doctor for years, so it was a vital service.

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