Her jittery smile met his more cautious one, and in a heartbeat she knew now was the time she had to summon all her courage and tell him what she had decided.

Chapter Twenty-Five

‘Martha,’ Tom called out, ‘it’s your mother on the phone!’

Carrying the ringing mobile with Naomi’s name clearly showing on the screen, he went in search of Martha. The last he’d seen of her she was back from a run and heading upstairs for a shower.

She had started going out for a run the moment she returned home from work. This had begun three weeks ago, the day after they’d learned that Willow was pregnant. Tom had suggested that they run together, but Martha had said she wanted the time to be alone so she could clear her head of work. Despite feeling the sting of her rejection, and knowing it wasn’t just work she needed to clear from her head, he hadn’t pushed it any further. In fact, it was probably what they both needed, an hour in the day when they could catch their breath and not think about work. Or their attempts to conceive.

Upstairs, and hearing the shower running in the bathroom, Tom wondered about answering the ringing mobile himself. The thing was, they had an understanding, just as they didn’t open one another’s emails or post, or read each other’s texts, nor did they answer one another’s mobiles. But ever since his mother’s death and before that, Colin’s, always at the back of Tom’s mind was the concern that the insistent ringing of a telephone signalled bad news, or some kind of emergency. Was this an emergency? Was Naomi in trouble and in need of their help?

As numerous scenes flitted through his mind, the mobile went quiet. If it was something important, he told himself, Naomi would ring again. More than likely it was a far more prosaic reason for her call, just the usual kind of family catch-up chat.

Although for the last month there had not really been any proper Miller family catch-up chats, which was in direct contrast to his own regular FaceTime calls with his sister and father. It seemed that for differing reasons, the Miller Girls – as Colin had often referred to his wife and daughters – were keeping their distance from each other. It was, Tom supposed, the combination of Willow’s pregnancy which she wasn’t telling anyone about and Naomi’s relationship with Ellis that was putting a strain on family communications.

Tom felt sorry for Naomi. Privately he was of the opinion that if Ellis filled the void left by Colin’s death and made her happy, good luck to her.

Martha didn’t see it that way, of course. In her eyes, nobody was ever going to be good enough to replace her father. Which was understandable. It was anybody’s guess what Willow really thought about Ellis; she was always so vague about things and could easily swap and change her views for no apparent reason. Having said that, there was nothing ambiguous about her change of heart regarding Martha’s suggestion that Naomi sell Anchor House to move nearer them.