Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Praise for A Season for Second Chances
- Also by Jenny Bayliss
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Discussion Guide
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
Back at the flat, Nory packed the last of her clothes for the house party/wedding at Robinwood Castle. Nory was no stranger to Robinwood or the grounds surrounding it. It had been a part of her life in one way or another for as long as she could remember. Her parents couldn’t afford holiday clubs when she was little, so Nory would shadow them while they worked through the school holidays.
She had fond memories of helping with the weeding and watering in the polytunnels at the nursery and handing long-stemmed flowers to her mum for floral displays up at Robinwood Castle. Sometimes she played in the castle gardens or read books while sitting on the big window ledges in the library. The marquis—also known as Lord Abercrombie—was very kind to her. He’d lived in the castle proper in those days; she understood he lived mostly in the east wing now.
Then, of course, she had attended the private school on the other side of Robins Wood, when the adjoining castle grounds became a place in which to hide out and bunk off. If they were caught by the head gardener, they’d been sent packing.
There had been a long-standing private war between her friends and the head gardener’s kid, Isaac; mud flinging usually, occasionally moldy windfall apples, sometimes manure. He’d started it by chucking a clod of manure at the back of Nory’s head one day when she and her friends were truanting in the castle grounds. It had sailed right over the wall from the gardener’s cottage and smacked into her ponytail. The prefects in her dorm had called her shithead for months, and the ensuing aggressions between the gardener’s kid and her gang had been named “Turd Wars.”
She wondered if the old head gardener was still there; he was always nice to her when he’d visited the nursery and he’d never let on to her parents about the things she got up to at school, for which she was eternally grateful. Her mind drifted back to the gardener’s son. Issac had been a gangly, scowling sort of youth—on whom she’d had a top-secret crush. He had dark skin like his father and the potential to be handsome, if he’d ever decided to cut the hair that fell in thick, greasy curtains across his face and stopped dressing like a Nirvana reject. He was older than her, the same age as her brother. Had he said his goodbyes to the castle and disappeared off to some far-flung destination, or was he, like her, bound by invisible threads that kept pulling him back into its orbit?