The Extraordinary Hope of Dawn Brightside by Jessica Ryn

Author:Jessica Ryn [Ryn, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Dawn notices the faint, metallic taste of blood and realises she’s been chewing too hard on her lip. She busies herself with logging out and changing accounts again.

Hi Mum!

Yes, I’m wearing plenty of factor 30 – I always do, it’s like I can hear your voice every time I’m on the beach lol. And yes, I’m eating well, but missing all your home-cooked meals. Work is going well, I’m so thankful you always taught me to follow my dreams.

Miss you too and love you very much,

Your Rosie.

Xxx

Dawn’s own account welcomes her back with a message alert. She clicks onto the icon through misty eyes and feels her shoulders heaving as she reads the whole message three times, each time as if it’s the first.

It’s almost getting light and the seagulls have begun their morning chatter by the time she prints out the photo she’s chosen for Rosie’s profile.

She’d better get back to bed soon, they are kicking off their fundraising with a Dover-wide roaming bake sale tomorrow and Grace would be up and about making preparations in an hour or so.

The hostel is silent as she creeps back into her room and Shaun stirs only slightly as Dawn rummages in the drawer of the bedside table until she finds what she’s looking for.

It’s such a beautiful book, despite the years of being packed up and unpacked, squashed into bag after bag, the corners dog-eared and creased. Dawn holds it with reverence and flicks through till she finds the next blank entry. Slipping the latest image of Rosie between the pages, she sets a mental reminder to borrow some Pritt Stick from the office tomorrow.

As the day’s sunshine begins to bleed between the gaps in the curtains, Dawn flicks carefully backwards through the pictures already glued in. The photo of Rosie graduating from Oxford. Rosie’s first and last days of secondary and primary school. One of them even shows the price of her school skirt, £4.99 from Woolworths, so it shows how long ago that was. Dawn used to love her piles of Woolworth’s catalogues, even before Rob started working there, and the back-to-school issues were always the best.

She continues to look back through the book, admiring the toddler pictures of Rosie taking her first steps and sitting up on a shiny new potty, one shaped like a real-life miniature toilet, £18.99 from Mothercare. She can’t think why she’d have spent so much on a potty, but it must have been worth it. Anything for her Rosie.

Then she gets to the first page. The one of Rosie only hours after Dawn had given birth to her on the bathroom floor. It’s the proudest she’d ever been of anything in her life, and as she’d held her in her arms, she knew she’d never felt love like it.

Dawn closes her eyes and in an instant she’s back there, in the flat above the British Heart Foundation, cradling her baby. She runs her finger over the photograph in front of her and gives into the sobs that remind her this photo is the only one that matters.

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