Too Close to Home
Too Close to Home is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Susan Lewis Ltd.
Reading group guide copyright © 2015 by Penguin Random House LLC
Excerpt from The Girl Who Came Back by Susan Lewis copyright © 2015 by Susan Lewis Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE & Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Century, an imprint of The Random House Group Limited, in 2015.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Company for permission to reprint an excerpt from UNDER MILK WOOD by Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Company.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Girl Who Came Back by Susan Lewis. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lewis, Susan.
Too close to home : a novel / Susan Lewis.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-0-345-54953-2 (paperback) — ISBN 978-0-345-54954-9 (ebook)
1. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR6062.E9546T66 2015
823'.914—dc23
2015028694
eBook ISBN 9780345549549
randomhousebooks.com
randomhousereaderscircle.com
Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for eBook
Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos and Susan Schultz
Cover images: © Nadia Isakova/Plain Picture (landscape), © Stephen Carroll/Getty (woman)
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Acknowledgments
By Susan Lewis
About the Author
Reading Group Guide
Excerpt from The Girl Who Came Back
Nothing was happening.
Everything was completely still, motionless, not a single rustle in the atmosphere, no stirrings within.
The only sounds, muted by closed windows, were the cries of white-bellied gulls as they soared around the neutral sky.
Jenna Moore, petite, dark-haired, and emerald-eyed, was sitting at the cluttered dining room table staring out at the winter-bleak garden. Looking at her, no one would have guessed she was the mother of four, the eldest being fifteen. Her smooth, playfully freckled features and girlish frame made her appear far closer to thirty than the forty she actually was.
It was Sunday afternoon and she was supposed to be making the most of some rare hours alone. The younger children—Josh, age eight, and the five-year-old twins, Flora and Wills—were on playdates down in the village, while Paige, fifteen last birthday, was somewhere with her stepfather on this sprawling misty peninsula, though Jenna wasn’t for the moment entirely sure where. All she knew was that it never failed to warm her to think of how close Paige and Jack were. He was the only father Paige had ever known, since her own had abandoned them when Paige was barely a year old. They’d never heard from him again, though Jenna had felt genuinely sorry when she’d heard how he’d lost his life in a rock-climbing accident at the age of thirty. By then Paige was seven years old and Jenna was married to Jack, who’d accompanied them to the funeral and had sat with Paige for a long time afterward explaining how losing her real father wasn’t going to make any difference to them.
“So you’re my real daddy, really?” Paige had insisted.
“That’s right. I’ll always be here for you, and no one will ever be prouder of you than me.”
“But why didn’t my other daddy live with us?”
“He did for a while, when you were a tiny baby, but he wasn’t really ready to be a daddy. He wanted to do other things.”
“You don’t want to do other things, do you?”
Jack had shaken his head gravely. “All I want to do is be your daddy, and Mummy’s husband—and maybe a daddy to a brother or sister for you too. Would you like that?”
Paige had nodded eagerly, which had twisted Jenna’s heart with longing. After two miscarriages she was starting to worry that she’d never give Jack a child of his own.
Blinking as an unexpected breakthrough of sunlight bathed the garden in a rich golden glow, Jenna began picturing Jack’s and Paige’s faces as they probably were now: intent, laughing, curious, and excited as they went about their task. This was the fourth Sunday in a row they’d been out capturing this special place in the world on film, and so far there had been no fallings-out that she knew of. In fact, between them they had gathered some impressive footage of surfers riding the waves over at Rhossili Bay; the flighty dance of marram grass as the wind gusted over the dunes; entrancing close-ups of old and young faces singing their hearts out in chapel; wild ponies roaming the vast open moors; golden plover, sanderlings, and little stints pecking and flitting about the wetlands; starfish, cockleshells, and feathers littering the shores…There was so much material now that Jenna could hardly remember it all. Today’s mission was all about local folklore, Viking raiders, the Arthurian legend, smugglers, dragons, and damsels in distress. If there was fog clinging to the rocks of the Worm’s Head, Jenna knew, Paige intended to whisper lines from Herbert New’s sonnet to accompany the haunting scene. Patient, folded wings; with lifted head, / Watchful, outlooking seawards sits the Form / Which, dragon-like, defies the approaching storm…
The project was for Paige’s ICT course—Information and Communications Technology: Using your mobile phones, make a tourist video of the region to include everything you feel to be worthwhile.
Jack was a big one for projects, sometimes seizing them as if they were his own until Paige—or whichever child he was supposed to be assisting—patiently, or occasionally hotly, reminded him that she was in charge.
Jenna couldn’t help but smile at the way Jack tried to hide his hurt, or frustration, at being brought up short by his children, quickly covering it with pride that they were so gifted, or determined, or simply willing to learn from their own mistakes.
“Dad, I’m fifteen, for God’s sake,” Jenna had heard Paige grumbling as they’d returned last Sunday. “You’re treating me like a baby.”
“But you asked me to help,” he’d protested.
“Help, yes, not take over. I need someone who’ll do as they’re told and maybe make suggestions if they’re relevant. Not someone who thinks they know everything.”
“But I do.”
Paige hadn’t been able to stop herself smiling at that. “But I’m the student,” she’d reminded him. “I have to learn, and sometimes that
means getting it wrong, or finding my own way to the solution.”
This kind of response invariably brought Jack’s eyes to Jenna’s—such clarity and wisdom in one so young.
Paige had always loved to work things out for herself, whether a jigsaw puzzle as a toddler, new words in her storybooks as she started to read, or the complex challenges of the chemistry lab or maths class in school. These were the only two subjects at which she didn’t do quite so well. Even so, her eagerness to grasp what was eluding her made Jenna worry at times for how hard she drove herself.
Still, she seemed well balanced, and had continued to thrive in spite of the life-changing move Jenna and Jack had decided on just over a year ago. It had been one of their biggest worries at the time, how it would affect their teenage daughter to be plucked from the heart of everything and everyone she knew to begin a completely new life in a country she’d only ever visited for a couple of weeks each summer.
Not such a very different country; after all, it was only Wales, where everyone, at least in their part, here on the Gower Peninsula, spoke English, and all the warnings of how insular and unwelcoming the Welsh could be to outsiders had proved total nonsense. Their neighbors could hardly be any friendlier, at least to them; the way they sometimes carried on with each other made Jenna wonder if she’d stumbled into the village of Llareggub, the infamous setting for Under Milk Wood.
This was a favorite book of hers, and recently of Paige’s since it had become a set piece for her subject achievement exams, the GCSEs. As it was Dylan Thomas’s centenary year, the whole region was celebrating his life and works in one way or another, and Paige had been chosen by her English teacher to take the part of First Voice in a school production to be staged at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea. Such an honor had never been bestowed upon a female student before, but Miss Kendrick was of the opinion that Paige’s understanding and enjoyment of the play made her such an obvious choice that she’d added Second Voice to the part as well. Since the casting Jenna and Paige had spent many hours listening to Richard Burton’s famous performance, taking it line by line, nuance by nuance, getting to the heart of why he’d spoken, whispered, or growled in a certain way, and what he might have been thinking when observing the many oddities of the characters in the piece.
To say Paige was excited about taking this part was an understatement indeed. Drama was her thing; she loved to act, and this role was her biggest challenge yet. And she was going to be playing it not only in Wales but in Dylan Thomas’s hometown.
As a family, they were loving being here, there was no doubt about that. In fact, in spite of not being Welsh—apart from through Jenna’s father—it felt as though they were exactly where they belonged. However, it hadn’t been their intention to move here after Jack had lost his job as the sales manager for a leading publisher. Their initial plan was for him to find another position in a similar field, but unfortunately it hadn’t worked out that way. The industry was suffering. Dozens if not hundreds of people had been laid off across the country, and competition for the few positions that did come up was fierce. After Jack had suffered through months of nothing but apologies and rejection, his notoriously volatile temper had collapsed into a horrible despair. He stopped attending interviews, found it hard to engage with the children, and even turned his back on the easy and passionate intimacy he and Jenna had always shared. Despite his tendency to overreact, it had unnerved her considerably to see how hard he was taking his failure to start again. When things were going his way he was ebullient, larger than life, ready to meet any challenge head on with a certainty that he’d win. Over that time she’d felt him slipping away, diminishing in spirit and hope, and it had scared her. The Jack she knew and loved was still in there, she’d remained convinced of that, but reaching him, bolstering him, and trying to make him believe in himself again had proved an almost impossible task.
Then one day, without warning, he’d suddenly announced that they should relocate to Wales.
Jenna remembered her jaw dropping.
“We need a completely fresh start,” he’d insisted, “with something of our own. We don’t want to be at any other bastard’s beck and call. We’ll be our own bosses, answer only to each other, and when we start to expand, which we will, we’ll do all the hiring and firing.”
Jenna hadn’t missed the way her highly successful, career-driven sister and brother-in-law had exchanged glances at this unexpected development. She didn’t blame them, as she was skeptical too, but loyalty to Jack, combined with the overwhelming relief that he seemed so determined on this new start, made her say, “I think it’s a very interesting idea, but what kind of business do you have in mind?”
“Publishing, of course,” he’d replied, as if there could be no other. “Given my own employment history, and yours as a published writer and respected freelance editor, it’s all we know, so we need to capitalize. And now, with the Internet, it’s never been easier. We can base ourselves anywhere, have a website as big as we like, and sell whatever we choose. No, wait,” he ran on as Hanna made to interrupt, “I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I reckon Wales is definitely the place to be. It’s a land full of poets, playwrights, novelists, you name it, and almost none are getting the recognition they deserve.”
“Would there be a market for them?” his brother-in-law had asked dubiously.
“Of course, if we present them in the right way. We won’t be like all these other Web-based cowboys who make you pay to be published, then do nothing to promote the work. We’ll have a totally different approach that deals with only high-quality product—that’s where you come in, Jen. You’ll be responsible for vetting the submissions and knocking the best ones into shape, and I’ll sort out the website and business plan. It shouldn’t be expensive to get off the ground, just the cost of designing the site and a few well-placed ads…Local media interest is a given, and chances are we won’t even need to go to the bank for finance, which we probably wouldn’t get anyway given how tight they are these days. We can manage everything ourselves, provided we sell this house. OK, I know that sounds radical, but the market’s gone so crazy in London that it’s got to be worth at least three times what we paid for it by now, and it’s complete madness having it sitting there doing nothing when we could be making it work for us.”
“But what about Paige?” Hanna asked, glancing worriedly at her niece.
“I’m cool with it,” Paige assured her, apparently as carried away by the idea as her father was. “It’ll be an adventure.”
Jenna simply watched as Jack pressed a kiss to their elder daughter’s forehead. “That’s my girl,” he laughed. “Never afraid to take a risk, and the younger ones will be fine. They’ll settle in no time at all.”
“What about you, Jenna?” Hanna ventured.
Deciding this wasn’t the time to argue, Jenna had simply said, “I might need a while to get my head round it, but in principle…” She shrugged. “Why not?”
That was all it had taken for Jack to spring into action. In no time at all the house was on the market, a new business management team—recommended by Hanna—had assessed the project and helped to obtain funding from the Welsh Arts Council, and ads had gone into the local papers announcing the creation of a new e-publishing venture, Celticulture.
A little over a year later they were ensconced at the southern end of the Gower Peninsula in a ten-year-old detached house designed to resemble a barn conversion, which had to be at least twice the size of the Victorian end-of-terrace they’d owned in London. Instead of a street full of stamp-sized gardens and tightly parked cars, they were at the top of a quaintly sprawled village, overlooking a wild grassy moor that stretched all the way out to Port Eynon Point, where the sea glittered and smudged into an ever-changing horizon.
It was idyllic; “God’s own country” was how Jack described it.
“You mean the back end of beyond,” Paige sometimes grumbled, but if either Jack or Jenna called her on it, she’d quick
ly assure them she was only kidding.
“It’s really cool,” she’d insist. “Different, and a bit weird in some ways, but I can do surfing and stuff here that I could never do in London, and I’m making loads of new friends.”
This was true; she’d taken to her new surroundings far better than they’d dared hope, and clearly enjoyed her new school, The Landings. Her new best friend, Charlotte Griffiths, lived barely a mile away, while her other new best friend, Hayley, was in Reynoldston, which wasn’t far either. There were many others in their set, as they liked to call it: Lucy, Courtenay, Cullum, Ryan, Owen—Jenna was losing track of them all now, but what mattered was how readily they had accepted Paige and how happy she seemed. She’d even started to develop a hint of a Welsh accent, which Jenna loved to hear. It was so musical and friendly, with playful little inflections that fluttered like tiny wings straight to the very core of her heart.
Her Welsh father had never lost his accent, even after four decades of living in England.
How badly she still missed him; she couldn’t imagine a time when she wouldn’t. If she concentrated hard enough, she was sure, she could hear him singing, telling stories, whispering comforting words when she needed them. She could see him working in the garden, dozing in his favorite armchair, delighting in his grandchildren, who absolutely adored him. One of the fondest, most moving memories she had of him was the way his face used to light up with surprise and joy when she’d drop in to visit without warning.
“Ah ha!” he’d cry, his arms going out to wrap her up in the warmest, most wonderful hug in the world.
Almost three years had passed since he’d been struck down with a heart attack. He hadn’t been ill, hadn’t even shown any signs of slowing up or mentioned he was feeling unwell. He’d simply collapsed one day at the office and had never come home. It was like a cruel magician’s trick: one minute he was there, the next he’d gone. She, Hanna, and their mother were still a long way from coming to terms with the loss.