The Christmas Collection by Victoria Connelly

Author:Victoria Connelly [Connelly, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Notting Hill Press
Published: 2016-10-27T21:00:00+00:00

*

Catriona found Iain in the living room which had been given to his family for their exclusive use during their stay. He’d lit the fire and was sitting nursing a cup of strong-looking tea.

‘How is she?’ he asked as soon as Catriona walked into the room.

‘Where’s Chrissa?’ she asked.

‘In her room.’

Catriona nodded and sat down on the sofa opposite him and Bagpipe lay on the floor by her feet.

‘She’s upset,’ she told him.

‘She’s been nothing but upset for the last three years,’ he said. ‘Upset and angry and resentful. I don’t know what to do or say. Everything I try seems to be shot down by her. God, I’m doing a bad job!’ His hair had flopped over his face and his cheeks were blazing red in frustration. Or maybe it was his proximity to the fire, Catriona thought. She couldn’t be sure.

‘You’re not doing a bad job,’ she told him.

‘How can you say that? I’m not even coping on a basic level because I can’t communicate with her.’

‘She needs you to be patient with her,’ Catriona said gently. ‘She’s almost a woman now and she’s hasn’t got the person she was closest to in the whole world near her. It’s obvious that she idolises her mother.’

‘You can see that?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Catriona said. ‘She showed me a photo of her. She was holding it as if it was the most precious thing in the world to her.’

‘The Christmas photo? She brought it with her?’ Iain ran a hand through his hair which didn’t exactly straighten it out, only pushed it in a different direction. ‘She really misses her, doesn’t she?’

‘Were they close?’ Catriona asked.

‘Dawn adored her girls. Spoilt them rotten too. They were her world. Well, until they stopped being her world.’ Iain gazed into the flames of the fire and Catriona was just wondering what was going through his mind when he started up again. ‘I think she’d been unhappy with me for some time. I know I didn’t spend enough time with her and she’s the kind of woman who needs to have somebody around her all the time. I was at work day and night and the girls were at school. I think she just got jaded and bored. I tried to talk to her so many times, but she’d made her mind up. I could feel this coldness settling between us for months before she finally left.’

‘And the girls stayed with you?’

Iain nodded. ‘Their school and friends – everything’s in Edinburgh and Dawn didn’t want to disrupt that. But there was more to it than that. She wanted some time to herself. It was as if she’d given all she had to her children and had simply run out.’

Catriona didn’t want to pass judgement on a woman she’d never met but she couldn’t understand how any mother could leave her children.

‘I know what you’re thinking. How could she leave her girls?’

‘Well, I–’

‘It’s the question I simply can’t answer,’ Iain said. ‘When she was settled in the

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