The Wish: The most heart-warming feel-good read you need in 2018. Alex Brown

Holly wrote down their names and underlined them. They’re bound to help me. Dad is her grandson, after all. And Aunty Jude, not that she’s my real aunty, but she’s Mum’s best friend and was a bridesmaid at their wedding, so the last thing she will want is for them to split up properly. I know that for a fact as I heard Mum telling her on the phone about Dad coming home, but staying at Granny Dolly’s house instead of coming here, and Aunty Jude had said it was such a shame. Mum had the phone on hands-free in the kitchen cos she was making some jam and it had just reached the ‘crucial bit’, she had said, where she daren’t leave the saucepan unattended or it would boil over.

      Holly numbered the lines one to ten down the left-hand side of the page, figuring if she could come up with ten things that she could do to get her parents back together in time for her birthday, then that would be a brilliant start.

       Send Mum a bunch of flowers. BUT write on the card that they are from Dad!

       Send Dad some flowers. BUT write on the card that they are from Mum!

      Holly wasn’t sure about number two. Dad wasn’t really the ‘getting flowers delivered’ to him type of man. No, she had better come up with something else. Beer. Or brandy – Dad likes ‘three fingers full’, as Granny Dolly always says on special occasions when she pours from the decanter on the sideboard into a tumbler. But Holly knew that would be hard to get. Even if she tried the supermarket on the industrial estate, they were bound to see she was too young to buy alcohol. She tried really hard to think of more ideas. A bag of wine gums … hmm, not much of a present. Socks … boring. Phone case. A good leather one would cost a lot. And it had to look like it had come from Mum. But she wouldn’t buy Dad a new phone case after the way she just was with him.

      A few seconds later, Holly had it. Chocolates! Yes, Dad seemed to love those sea-salt truffles from the sweet shop in town, the one in the square in the centre of Market Briar. She remembered how he had eaten nearly all of them in the box he bought for Mum on Valentine’s Day about two years ago, the last time he had been properly home. Mum had teased him about it and they had laughed together, saying that he really wanted the chocolates for himself and that’s why he had bought them for her. But that was when Mum was still being nice to him. Yes, it was the perfect present. And Dad might even think that Mum was thinking about that Valentine’s Day and wanted to get back with him, so it would be a romantic thing too. Brilliant. Holly would buy some on Saturday when she went there on the bus with her best friend, Katie Ferguson. She could wrap them up and take them to Granny Dolly’s house to give to Dad and pretend that Mum had sent them. To say sorry for being so horrible earlier on and sending him away. How evil is that?

      And then Holly wondered if she should bother sending flowers to Mum from Dad. She wasn’t sure Mum deserved them, after the way she had carried on … And she must have said something really nasty to Dad before he left to make him nearly run down the path to get away from her. Holly wished she hadn’t been watching a Zoella make-up tutorial on YouTube with her headphones on, because she’d been so angry with Mum. Maybe, if she’d been paying attention, listening on the landing or something, then she would have heard what had happened and could have done something to stop it all.

      But it wasn’t too late, she was convinced of that. And first thing tomorrow she was going to put her ‘Get Mum and Dad Back Together in Time for My Birthday’ plan into action. Obviously she’d have to come up with some more ideas, too, because just sending flowers and chocolates was a bit of a rubbish plan. But Aunty Jude was bound to have some really cool ideas … she used to live in LA. And everyone knows that LA is the coolest place on earth. Apart from Disneyland, that’s super-cool too. Holly hadn’t been to either place; in fact, apart from visiting her dad in Singapore and Malaysia last year, there were so many places she still hadn’t been to. But she’d Google-Earthed loads of towns all over the world and none of them was as nice as Singapore … in fact, if Mum didn’t stop being so angry at her all the time, then that could be her back-up plan. Go and live in Singapore with Dad. It had to be better than being here on her own with Mum in a rubbish mood all the time.

      Holly looked at the page again and underlined the words ‘Get Mum and Dad Back Together in Time for My Birthday’. That was her wish! Even though she was thirteen years old now and knew deep down that wishes probably weren’t actually a real thing … she still believed in them sometimes. Surely, if you wished hard enough, anything was possible? She had already wished for ages that Dad would come back home, and here he was! So, it could happen. It was just positive thinking and all that. They had a lesson about it at school. In Personal, Social and Health Education. Or PSHE as everyone said. All about mindfulness and the power of thought and focus. And Pinocchio was still one of her favourite Disney films. Especially the bit at the end with the ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ song … she loved singing along to it. She remembered the first time she saw the film, on the sofa snuggled up in between Mum and Dad. They had watched it and sung along together with a big bowl of popcorn, which Mum used to make in the microwave, and then let her tip sprinkles all over it. This was before the diabetes, of course. And before Dad worked away all the time. Now Mum never wanted to watch Disney films. Perhaps if she did, then she’d chill out a bit and feel a whole lot happier, Holly surmised.

      She thought of the Pinocchio song, going through the lyrics in her head. Pausing on the part about ‘anything your heart desires will come to you’. And she knew this was what her heart desired … to get Mum and Dad back together! And it was her birthday soon … and you were never too old to blow candles out and make a wish. She wondered if she could have the wish early and use it right now.

      Holly looked down at the words and double-underlined them one more time. The Wish … Get Mum and Dad Back Together in Time for My Birthday.

       Chapter Five

      ‘You make me feel so young, you make me feel as though spring has sprung …’ Jude twirled her auburn curls up into a big bun and secured it with a hairband as she sang along heartily with Frank Sinatra on her Spotify playlist. She really was happy to be back in lovely Tindledale with Dad and her friends, relishing the earthiness and realness here, but she’d be lying if she said it hadn’t also come as a bit of a shock. Back down to earth with a bump after all the fakery and full-on fast lane of her life in LA … And she really missed her mum’s cousin, Maggie. They had spoken on the phone last night and she could tell that Maggie was putting on a brave face, being stoic and selfless in telling her she slept well at night knowing Tony was happy having his daughter back. Dad had called Maggie shortly after she’d got home, to thank her for everything she had done for Jude, and especially for bringing Mum’s memory alive. Also for the keepsake box that Maggie had entrusted Jude to give to him. The box had been her mum’s, and inside were notes and cards that Dad had given her when they’d first started courting. A pressed rose secreted between the pages of a pamphlet advertising the first dance he took her to in the old ballroom in Market Briar. Even a faded old photograph of them both cuddled together under a tree on the village green. It had near taken his breath away, he had said, when he saw it all.

      Jude wandered across the shop and rearranged the scented candle display for the trillionth time. Business had been slow for the first week since she’d opened and she had spent most of her time either knitting yet another square to add to the pile waiting to be stitched together to make a blanket, as that was the extent of her knitting skills. Or moving cushions and candles from one side of the shop to the other. But, in contrast to the last few days’ weather, the sun was shining today, bathing the narrow, cobbled lanes and surrounding fields full of springy white lambs in a warm, golden glow. So the lovely villagers of Tindledale were either supping ice-cold beer in the Duck & Puddle pub garden, or on the village green paddling in the pond and not bothering themselves with shopping of any kind.

      Just as Jude wondered if she’d made a mistake in opening the shop here, and maybe should have focused on selling antiques online, as that part of the business was thriving as it always had done, the phone rang.

      ‘Darling Antiques and Interiors,’ she answered cheerfully, practically falling on the phone, such was the novelty of it actually ringing