The local radio station, the only one we could get decent reception for in the car, was playing Driving Home For Christmas. Outside, tiny flakes of snow were just starting to flutter down from the stone-grey clouds, coating the bare branches of the trees that lined the country road. It was one of those quintessential, perfect Christmas Eve moments.

Except we weren’tdriving home for Christmas. We were driving to Rosewood House, and that made everything feel different. All I could think about was how different this Christmas would be to all the others – all the familiar little traditions and rituals that wouldn’t happen, and the strange new ones we’d have to adopt. Not to mention the people who wouldn’t be there to share it.

Christmas always made me a little nostalgic, wistful for the better years gone by – which probably weren’t as brilliant as I remembered them anyway, really. But this year it was hitting me harder than ever. All I really wanted to do this December twenty-fifth was curl up in a cocoon of blankets with a bottle of fizz and It’s a Wonderful Life on the telly. Mostly because it hadn’t been, lately – a wonderful life, that is.

Oh, I had faith that it would be again – whatever my mother said. But still, I wasn’t much in the mood for socialising with strangers – let alone strangers who were apparently my little brother’s new family.

Edward and his girlfriend, Saskia, had invited us to Saskia’s family home for Christmas three months ago, and it wasn’t really the sort of invitation I was in a position to say no to. Mum was so excited to see Edward happy again, and the cocoon plan would probably have meant sending Max to his dad’s for the festivities, and that wasn’t an option, either. If a man walks out on his family in September, you don’t reward him in December with the company of his only son for the big day itself. That’s a basic rule, right?

Next year, maybe. If, by some freak chance, next year brought with it calm and order and less of the constant buzz of what happens next, what do I do now?

Maybe by then my mother would have stopped going on about how important it was for a boy to have his father around, and mumsplaining why my marriage had failed and how she thought I should win it back. That would be nice.

Anyway, the point was, even with all the family drama I had going on, nobody turned down an invitation to Rosewood. Especially now.

So that’s how I found myself indicating to turn onto yet another long and winding country road that apparently led to Rosewood House, Mum in the passenger seat beside me and Max in the back seat.

Mum’s phone rang in her hand, and she pressed the end call button without even answering. Instead, she reached out to fiddle with the radio dial, losing us Chris Rea in the hope of getting a decent reception for Radio 4. ‘Sales call,’ she said when I gave her a questioning look.

Right. The third one she’d ignored since we left London.

‘You should change your number,’ I suggested, but she ignored me, still adjusting the static.

‘Anyway. All I’m saying, Freya, is that it’s never too late,’ Mum said, talking over the buzz.

I glanced up at the rear-view mirror. Max sat in the back, eyes glued to his tablet the way they had been since we left London. But I knew from past experience that he had ears like a bat when adults were talking about things he wasn’t supposed to hear.

‘Not now, Mum.’ I gave the mirror another meaningful look, and she rolled her eyes.

‘Fine. But I just can’t bear to see you giving up on happiness so easily.’ Mum folded her arms over her dark wool coat, and looked pointedly out of the passenger side window.

‘I’m not…’ I started, but then Max shifted in his seat and I gave up entirely. I didn’t want to have the conversation about everything I’d lost in my marriage, anyway. I was more than aware, thanks.

And, even if I couldn’t talk to Mum about it, I knew how much I’d gained, too. Mum wouldn’t understand – she’d loved one man her whole life, and never thought of looking for someone new after Dad died. But seeing Darren walk off into the sunset with his bit on the side… I’m not saying it didn’t make me furious. Of course it did. But it had also opened my eyes to the possibility of a different sort of future to the one I’d always imagined myself living.

But right now, that future was still years away, a worry for another day. Something to think about once Max was settled again, maybe when he left for university. Once everything was final and stable and we’d worked out this new way of existing, now our family lived in two separate houses and communicated almost exclusively by email, or through lawyers.

Right now, all I could worry about was getting through Christmas at Rosewood.

‘What do you think they’ll be like?’ I asked, hoping to change the subject from my broken family to Edward’s new one. In the eighteen months they’d been dating, we hadn’t even met Saskia – let alone her relations. It was understandable, I supposed, given that they’d spent the last year and a half working pretty much non-stop. But still, the idea of spending Christmas with strangers was odd.

As I checked my mirror again before turning into what I hoped was the driveway, I caught a glimpse of the presents stacked up on top of our suitcases in the boot – scarves, bubble bath sets, coffee table books – the sort of generic gifts you buy for people you don’t really know.

Except – and this was the weirdest part by far – it felt like we did know them. Not because Edward had talked about Saskia’s family a lot, although he had. But because Mum and I – along with the half of the country who weren’t waiting to receive it as a Christmas present – had already read The Rosewood Journals. The Journalswere what had brought Edward and Saskia together – a detailed memoir of the life and times of Nathaniel Drury, literary genius and Saskia’s grandfather. Nathaniel had hired my brother, a noted biographer, to help him put together the book from his old journals, notebooks and papers. But when he’d died halfway through the project, he’d left the notebooks for Saskia and Edward to work on together. They’d fallen in love, published the book, and were already hitting the literary charts with the hardcover edition. The resulting international book tour had been Edward’s excuse for not visiting for the last six months.

Nathaniel Drury and his wife Isabelle had been notorious for over fifty years. I guess everyone wanted to find out their secrets.

But it did mean that Mum and I were now in the rather uncomfortable position of meeting for the first time people whose lives and histories we’d already read – not to mention their most intimate secrets. What were we supposed to do? Pretend we didn’t know? Except that would mean ignoring all of Edward and Saskia’s hard work…

‘I’m sure they’ll be lovely,’ Mum said, diplomatically.

‘Right.’ I’m sure they were very nice people, really. ‘And should we… do you think we should tell them we’ve read the book? I mean, in the interests of full disclosure?’ It felt almost cruel not to, like we had an unfair advantage over them.

Of course, I had no idea how much Edward had told them about us. Maybe they all knew my secrets already, too. At least, the ones that Edward knew. Which, given that he was three years younger than me, was thankfully not all that many of them.

‘Maybe we just don’t mention it until they do,’ Mum suggested, after a thoughtful pause. ‘I mean, really, Freya. What are the chances that they’ll really want to discuss it at all anyway?’

‘Good point.’ If I were them, I would be hoping that no one would mention the damn book. In fact, I’d never have let it be written or published in the first place.

But then, Edward said that Rosewood had a way of drawing secrets out of you.

I hoped that the three days we were staying wouldn’t be long enough for the house – or its inhabitants – to steal any of mine.

Three days. The most important three days of the year, and we were spending them away from home, away from our family and everything that was familiar. How was I going to make this Christmas – his first without his dad – special for my son? Since Darren had walked out, I’d felt the overwhelming pressure to be more than just Mum and Dad to Max – I felt like I had to be some sort of magician who took away all worries and made everything perfect all the time.

Something I was failing at miserably, incidentally.

Outside, the snow was growing almost imperceptibly heavier. The fields and paths around us were covered now, too. Well, if it could keep it up overnight, maybe there was one tradition Max and I could still enact – our First Snow tradition.

I mentally crossed my fingers and hoped for a properly white Christmas. Maybe I’d see if Bing Crosby was on the radio anywhere…

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ Max asked, looking up from his tablet for the first time since we went through the McDonald’s drive-through, an hour and a half earlier.

‘We are,’ I said, as the ridiculously long driveway twisted again and the house itself appeared from behind the trees.

It was even more beautiful than on the cover of the Journals. Golden brick in the Georgian style with lights glowing from every window even in the winter gloom. The smattering of bright white snow on the roof lifted it from extraordinary to magical. It made me want to explore – to identify all the rooms I’d read about, to find the Rose Garden and maybe see its resident ghost, even to walk in the woods that Nathaniel had written about in so many of his books.

Okay, I admit it. I’m a Drury fan. But really, who isn’t?

The front door opened as I pulled on the handbrake, and Edward appeared at the top of the steps, his arm around a pretty brunette, looking totally at home. Maybe he was. For the longest time, we’d worried that Edward would never find the place he belonged and manage to settle down. Now, here he was, at home in one of England’s most famous houses, in love and happy – just as my own life seemed to be falling apart.

I couldn’t be bitter though. Edward deserved this happiness.

I just hoped that I would find it again one day, too. Eventually.

‘You’re here!’ he called, as I clambered out of the car, Max following behind me tablet still in hand. Edward rushed around to help Mum out the other side, as I slammed my door after me and looked up at Rosewood.

Somehow, it was even more imposing without the windscreen between us. Suddenly I could understand how a house could find out secrets. This house, I sensed, could do anything.

‘Freya! It’s so lovely to meet you.’ Saskia stepped forward to give me a cautious hug – the sort you give family who you’ve never met before. The same sort of hug Darren and I exchanged for the last year or two of our marriage. She had tiny snowflakes on her eyelashes, and she blinked them away as she moved away again. ‘Edward’s told me so much about you.’

Like how my husband walked out on me after thirteen years of marriage, I supposed. And how my mother was scared I was going to fall apart without him and be unhappy forever. Maybe even how Max was getting into trouble at school for the first time, and everyone knew it was because of the divorce. That it was my fault for letting my husband go. For not trying harder to keep him. For not giving him a second chance when he asked for it, two weeks after he left.

‘You too,’ I said, trying to smile. It was only fair, I guess. I knew all her secrets, after all.

‘Come on inside, it’s freezing out here – and this snow isn’t getting any lighter!’ Saskia put an arm around my shoulder and led me towards the door, Mum and Max following behind with Edward, crunching over snow and gravel. Uncle Edward had always been a big favourite with Max. Maybe he’d be able to get through to him.

I figured I was due a Christmas miracle.

‘We held off decorating the tree until you got here,’ Saskia went on, as we approached the steps. ‘Isabelle and Therese have been inventing Christmas cocktails in the drawing room this afternoon. They claim they got them from an old book from the good old days, but they look bloody lethal. Feel free to turn them down. Oh, and Ellie’s been making mince pies, and Dad’s cooking something spectacular for Christmas Eve dinner. So basically, all the fun starts now you’re here!’

I paused, just for a second, at the threshold to Rosewood House. I couldn’t shake the feeling that once I stepped through that doorway, and the heavy wooden door closed behind me, I’d be trapped. Caught in a world that would pull every last secret from my heart, and leave me a different person.

Which was crazy, of course. I knew I shouldn’t have stayed up re-reading Biding Time the night before.

‘Hurry up!’ Edward called from behind us. ‘We’re turning into snowmen out here, aren’t we Max?’

I took a breath and stepped inside, then stopped again, almost immediately.

The hallway was impressive, I was sure. The empty tree huge and imposing. But right then, I didn’t notice any of that.

I could only see one thing. One person.

There, at the top of the wide, curving staircase, stood Aiden Waites. I might not have seen the man in fourteen years – at which point he was barely eighteen, and only just scraping into the ‘man’ category in the first place – but I’d have known him anywhere. Even if his photo hadn’t been plastered on tube adverts beside the cover of whatever his latest book was for the last three years.

His dark hair curled a little longer than in his author photo, covering the tips of his ears and almost falling into those bright blue eyes. He looked not just older than I remembered, but more worldly too. Which I suppose made sense.

When I’d met him, he’d been a virgin. When I’d left him two weeks later, he really, really wasn’t. And given his aptitude for it, I couldn’t imagine he’d given up sex for very long after our fortnight together.

‘Freya.’ He smiled, moving down the stairs without pointing out that I was staring, which was unexpectedly polite of him. Especially given the way he was glowering at me. ‘It’s good to see you again.’ The words didn’t match his expression.

‘You too.’ The words came out too fast, a reflex lie. ‘I didn’t know you were going to be here.’ A follow-up shot of honesty to explain my staring. And the way my heart was hammering against my ribcage. What the hell was he doing here at Rosewood?

‘Seriously, Mum. Can we come in now? It’s freezing.’ Max’s voice shocked me into movement, and I took a few quick steps into the hall, towards Aiden, to let the others in behind me.

Saskia, I realised belatedly, was looking between us with far too much interest. Edward, thank God, didn’t seem to have noticed anything.

‘I forgot you two had met,’ he said, grinning. ‘Your mum and Aiden went to the same university up in Lancaster, Max.’

‘Three years apart,’ I added quickly.

‘I asked her to take him under her wing, but by the time she finally found time to answer my email he’d already been there a full term,’ Edward went on, and I realised that given all the ways I’d embarrassed him over the years, he was very capable of using this whole Christmas break to show me up in front of my son and Saskia’s family. With Aiden there, he wouldn’t even have to try that hard.

Had Aiden told him? As far as I knew, he never had, honouring my request that we keep our fling a secret. But if Aiden was here, that might have changed…

No, really, what the hellwas he doing here? I needed to get an answer to that pretty damn quick.

‘But since we were both stuck in town over that Christmas, we caught up eventually,’ Aiden said, his gaze never breaking away from mine. His eyes blazed with a deeply buried fury, simmering under his smile. I wondered if the others could see it. ‘We kept each other company – watching Christmas movies when we weren’t working, that sort of thing.’ He’d been avoiding going home to a stepfather who hated him, and I’d been stuck working an internship that I hoped would make my career, but didn’t. With everyone else I knew gone home for the holidays, it felt like we were the only two people on campus, just for those two weeks. Alone in our snow-covered world. I shivered, remembering it.

‘Until her boyfriend came back, anyway,’ Aiden said, and broke the spell of my memory. ‘Then she forgot all about me, and left me to pine alone for what might have been…’

I forced myself to roll my eyes. ‘I see fame hasn’t beaten that sense of the overdramatic out of you, then?’ A tight, uncomfortable feeling swelled up inside me. He wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling the whole truth either. And if anyone asked too many questions…

I’d never told Edward that I’d seduced his best friend. That we’d had a brief, but intense, fling that Christmas – or that I’d avoided him until I’d graduated and moved away the next summer. He didn’t even know that Darren and I had broken up that December, or that we’d only made up in the January when he proposed.

As far as Edward knew, Aiden and I had kept each other company watching The Muppet Christmas Carol and eating turkey pasties on Christmas Day.

Which was only a tiny fragment of the real story.

‘I make things up for a living,’ Aiden pointed out. ‘Being overdramatic is kind of compulsory. Besides, I didn’t say it was a bad thing. It let me know what to expect from the big bad world.’

Had he ever told anyonewhat really happened that Christmas? I studied his face – his burning, knowing eyes, his sharp smile, but I couldn’t read anything into them. The Aiden I’d known, however briefly, was fourteen years away. This was a new man altogether.

At least, that was what I was telling myself.

‘And what about deepest Cheshire?’ I asked, keen to bring the conversation back to the present. The past was too hard to deal with. ‘What should we expect from Rosewood?’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t be the one to answer that,’ Aiden said. ‘I’ve only been here six months.’ Six months? What could have happened to drag him away from his illustrious career as the face of British crime fiction in London for so long? Usually, he was on the telly every few weeks, or pictured at the premiere of one of his film adaptions, or escorting some model or pop star to some hot new restaurant. But, now that I thought about it, the tube posters were all I’d seen of him since the summer.

Not that I’d been looking. Obviously.

Okay, maybe a bit. Aiden was a popular figure, and someone I’d once known. Of course I’d followed his career over the years – but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how it would have brought him to Rosewood for six months. 

‘An outsider’s perspective, then,’ Saskia put in. ‘You probably see the place more clearly than the rest of us, anyway.’

Aiden looked from her to me. ‘Okay, then. How about this. Rosewood is a place of stories, of merriment and of celebration.’ Well, that didn’t sound too bad. I could live with that.

Then he caught my gaze. ‘And secrets, of course. Always secrets.’

Our secret. I knew then that he hadn’t told a soul until he came here. Because that had been the deal. No person in the world but the two of us knew what had passed between us that Christmas. But now, I had a feeling the secret was out.

And seeing him again, I knew that despite the years, those two weeks we’d spent together had never left me. From the way he was looking at me, Aiden hadn’t forgotten them either. Not one bit.  

‘Oh, come on,’ Edward said, laughing. ‘I don’t think any of us can have any secrets left, do you? Not after publishing the Journals.’

Aiden smiled back at him, easy and open. So, Edward didn’t know then. That was something. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe there are no more secrets here at Rosewood. But there is definitely liquor, and I was promised a Christmas cocktail by Saskia’s grandmother, and I intend to claim it. Anyone joining me?’

‘Let me get Mum and Freya and Max settled first,’ Edward said. ‘Then we’ll see. Come on, everyone. Let me show you to your rooms.’

We trailed dutifully up the stairs after Edward and Saskia, our bags shared out between us all. But I couldn’t help but pause at the top of the stairs and look back down into the hallway.

Aiden still stood in the doorway, watching me go. I looked away fast.

Edward had always said that Rosewood was home to ghosts. I just hadn’t realised it would be my past, my secrets, that were haunting me.

 

• Text Copyright © 2016 by Sophie Pembroke
• Cover Art Copyright © 2016 by HQ Digital
• Permission to reproduce text granted by HQ Digital. Cover art used by arrangement with HQ Digital. All rights reserved.