Keep My Secrets by Elena Wilkes (large ebook reader .txt) 📗

boardroom meetings talking policy nonsense and analysing tick-box data.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s the thing.’ Frankie tries to sound light-hearted. ‘I’m not really a policy-and-tick-box-data kind of person, am I? We both know that.’ She grins and takes another sip. All this half-truth and pretence. Oh, how wonderful it would be to come clean.

‘But you can’t carry on doing these things, you know that, Frankie. You’ll come unstuck sooner or later.’

If only he realised how close to the truth that was.

‘Yep, I know. But these kids are individuals, Alex. Keeley isn’t a “case” or a name on a file to me. She’s a real person. I know what she’s going through. I know what that life is like.’ She looks into his eyes.

‘That was then, this is now.’

‘Thanks to you.’

‘But not anymore, we both know that.’

She knows what he’s referring to. The failing business feels acutely personal.

‘It will get better. All things pass.’

‘As long as you don’t pass on me.’ He smiles but there’s real pain there.

At that moment she doesn’t care about the snooping and the prying. She only cares that his terrible gnawing, checking, compulsion comes to an end. She can see what it’s doing to him and it’s awful to watch.

How easy it would be right now to tell him what’s going on. How easy – And how totally selfish.

‘So that’s why I thought I’d cook something special. I want us to relax over some food and good wine and chat about it all.’

‘Yes, let’s make a plan; let’s take back some control. Let’s make some decisions about the future – our future.’

She smiles but feels a twitch of uncertainty as he suddenly stands.

‘Hold that thought, I’ll be back in a sec, I just have to stir the casserole.’ He makes a move to the door but then pauses. ‘I’m very proud of you, Frankie. You do know that, don’t you?’

She goes to speak but he interrupts her.

‘Hold that thought, too,’ he lifts a finger.

He’s excited, but it feels brittle. ‘I want dinner to be perfect tonight… I’ve got so many ideas to talk to you about.’

He dips and plants a kiss on her wet forehead. ‘I’ve made your favourite pudding.’

‘I know. I peeked. You’re seriously lovely.’

He winks. ‘Yeah. I have my moments.’ And he pulls the door closed behind him.

The tap plinks into the sudden quiet. A gust of wind sends a scutter of rain and leaves across the Velux window on the landing. She sinks back into the heat of the water and nestles the wineglass against her cheek. She takes a deep breath.

The business will go under completely; it’s gut-wrenchingly obvious. Every which way he’s turned, the doors have closed in his face. The orders dwindled away, and his self-esteem went with them. She was pleased when he said he’d do voluntary work, but it’s only served to make it ten times worse. Now he’s there every day with the ex-offenders, the homeless, and the dispossessed. She lets the air out slowly. The whole bloody framework of his life has crumbled. He feels the loss as keenly as a razor cut.

‘You can’t imagine what it’s like,’ he keeps telling her. ‘It’s the loss of the family name that really gets to me. We go back generations. My father is an MP, my grandfather was massively successful as a landowner and businessman. There are baronets and peers right the way through my ancestry. We’re practically feudal… We’re not just a name, we’re a clan.’

She does understand but she sees the millstone of it too. This whole torturous lead weight of ‘McKenzie,’ synonymous with handcrafted furniture. It’s the enormous guilt that he, grandson of the great Dafydd McKenzie and of all those Scottish and Welsh ‘B’ list McKenzie aristocrats, he, Alex McKenzie, will be the one who’ll have caused the family firm to fail. His two sisters do nothing. They’re more than happy to stand back and watch his downward spiral with pursed lips and folded arms and an appalling kind of glee that their big brother is turning out to be what their father had always suspected: a soft-hearted incompetent nerd, devoid of manly backbone, a weak-charactered sop who had married far beneath him just to bolster his failing ego. Frankie had hated them on sight.

‘Oh my goodness! Where on earth did you find her?’ His sister Marianne had smirked. That just about summed Marianne up.

Alex had ‘found’ her crying on a park bench. He’d tried to cheer her up by buying them both a cup of tea and piece of chocolate cake from Starbucks and had sat chatting to her about the squirrels. He’d told her how they deceive other squirrels by pretending to bury their food in one place while the real stash was put somewhere safe.

She smiles at the memory.

‘That’s what going to school gives you.’ She’d tried to wipe her eyes with the heel of her hand.

‘Actually…’ He’d handed her a tissue, tapping his foot amongst the litter at their feet. ‘That’s what reading “Fabulous Facts” on the back of crisp packets gives you.’

And she’d stopped crying and burst out laughing. No one in his family ever understood that about him: Alex didn’t care where people came from, they were just people who sometimes just needed a bit of kindness. She listens to him now in the hallway, and she closes her eyes. How she’d love to reach back through the years and find that boy he used to be: that almost shy self-belief he had, that he would prove his family wrong, that he would never be the failure they all said he’d be. But she doesn’t know where the boy has gone. His replacement is a man who is fragile, watchful, and wired tight.

‘This came.’

She leaps up, sloshing her wine. ‘Jesus, Alex!’ She puts her fist on her thumping heart.

‘Sorry.’

Something in his voice makes her look up at his face. He’s standing there trying to look unconcerned and holding a parcel. It’s a crumpled looking jiffy bag with her name in