A Vicarage Homecoming by Kate Hewitt

Author:Kate Hewitt
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Romance
ISBN: 9781950510313
Publisher: The Tule Publishing Group, LLC
Published: 2019-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

With Christmas and the wedding out of the way, Miriam’s due date loomed large and close, with no events to precede it. Her giving birth was the Holley family’s Next Big Thing, and it galvanised her into action, half-excited, half-terrified out of her mind.

While Simon and Anna were still on their honeymoon, she, Ruth, Rachel, and Esther all spent a day painting her spare bedroom mint green, because she decided, like Abigail Cribbs, she wasn’t crazy about pink. Ruth insisted she be allowed to go on a shopping spree, and so on one sunny day in early January, they drove to a baby superstore in Manchester and Ruth bought all sorts of things—a changing table, a cot, a mobile to hang above the cot, a glider.

“Mum, you really don’t need to buy all those things,” Miriam said, alarmed at how freely her normally parsimonious mother was waving her credit card.

“Oh, but I want to,” Ruth cried. “It’s such fun.”

“Yes, but…” Miriam thought of how much she’d been fighting feeling like a charity case. Insisting on standing on her own two feet, alone. Yet it was hard to do that when she had so many people surrounding her, helping her to stand because they wanted to. To deprive them of that felt mean and even selfish, and pointless besides.

So she let her mum kit out the nursery, and she accepted the donations that continued to trickle in from parishioners—packs of nappies, bags of second-hand baby clothes, soft toys and board books. Everyone had something to give, and Miriam accepted it all, because how could she not? Why would she not want to?

This was her village. Her family. She’d even started going to church again, albeit a bit reluctantly. It felt mean not to, with her parents back home and her father taking services in Simon’s absence, but she felt self-conscious sitting in the front pew, where her mother had always sat; she felt like a fraud. Still she went, and she let the words and music wash over her, and remembered how much she enjoyed her father’s affable yet focused style of preaching, and it was all pretty much okay.

She and Dan had managed to get back on an even keel, after the debacle of his wedding date, although she doubted Dan saw it that way. Miriam was the only one inwardly cringing as she remembered tracking Jane and Dan’s movements from across the room. She told herself she was going to simmer down, but then, one afternoon in early January, when she was filing the last of Dan’s invoices—finally—and he offered to put the kettle on, she turned to him with a too-bright smile, and said in a too-loud voice, “So. Jane.”

Dan looked startled, and Miriam wondered why on earth she’d felt this was a good moment to broach the topic, when in fact she hadn’t wanted to discuss Jane Godfrey in the first place. Ever.

“What about Jane?” he asked cautiously, and Miriam tried desperately to sound casual, which of course didn’t work.

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