The Chocolate Collection. Trisha Ashley

on, Chloe! Look, it’s been several weeks now, and I think, however hard it is, you’ll have to accept that she had too much to drink – which you know was one of her failings – and went over the side in the small hours without anyone noticing. This time she isn’t going to reappear as if nothing has happened. Which brings us back to what to do about Jake.’

      ‘Nothing, because you’re wrong. I expect she’ll be back in time for our wedding, but if she isn’t, then Jake can come and live with us, can’t he? I mean, you always realised he would have to do that whenever Mum was away, didn’t you?’

      David was slow to answer, probably imagining the chaos one very lively boy could cause to his immaculately ordered life and minimalist white flat. I had already unintentionally caused enough of that while cooking chicken with a dark cacao mole sauce in his kitchen: chocolate does seem to get everywhere…And evidently he hadn’t understood the strength of the bond between Jake and me.

      ‘I’d like it to be just the two of us, for a while at least, darling,’ he said eventually. ‘You have to accept she’s not coming back and that other, permanent arrangements need to be made. I mean, your grandfather’s got a private income, hasn’t he? He could send Jake to boarding school.’

      ‘I don’t think his private income would stretch that far and anyway, Jake would hate it. He’s always seen me as more of a mother figure than Mum. I’m the security in his life, and so it would simply be another betrayal. And his friends are all here in Merchester.’

      ‘Then he’d hate being transposed to a city flat, wouldn’t he?’ David said quickly.

      ‘Yes, but we did say we’d find a house in the country, one you could commute from. That could be somewhere round here, couldn’t it?’

      ‘I meant much later, when we want a family. I’d like to have you to myself for a bit. Anyway,’ he added with a wry smile on his handsome face, ‘I’m starting to think I’m allergic to the country because I come out in this damned rash every time I visit Merchester.’

      ‘You can’t really call Merchester country,’ I objected, but it was true about the mysterious rash, because even now an angry redness was creeping up from the collar of his shirt.

      I reminded myself to speak to Grumps about that…He and David had not really taken to each other, mainly because David spoke to him like an adult humouring a child: big mistake. He tended to take that tone with Jake too, and according to most of the locals, he’d never been any kind of child at all, but an imp of Satan.

      ‘Look, Chloe, I really can’t live with your brother. It isn’t fair to ask me.’ He ran his fingers through his ordered dark chestnut locks in a distracted way that showed me just how perturbed he was. He even loosened his silk tie – good grief!

      ‘You’ll have to find some other solution,’ he announced with finality.

      ‘I keep telling you Mum isn’t dead!’ I snapped, losing patience. ‘She bolts all the time, but she’ll be back eventually: I’ve read the cards and I know I’m right. What’s more, so has Zillah.’

      But although they had told us that Mum was alive, they couldn’t, of course, show us where she was or how long she would be gone.

      ‘It’s Jake or me,’ he said quietly.

      ‘But, David—’

      ‘Do you love me?’

      ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, which I did, even if not with the searing passion of my first love. ‘But—’

      ‘Me, or Jake,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t want to be hard-hearted, but it simply won’t work having him to live with us – and I’m certainly not moving here, which I’m sure you were about to suggest next.’

      ‘Well, yes, but it would be only until Mum comes back.’

      He sighed long-sufferingly. ‘Which she isn’t going to do.’

      He put on his jacket, which had been hanging neatly over the back of a chair in the chaotic kitchen area of the flat, where the paraphernalia of my budding Chocolate Wishes business covered every surface. In fact, there was a glossy smear of tempered couverture down one immaculate sleeve, which I decided not to point out.

      ‘The wedding’s in less than a fortnight, so you had better make your mind up fast, Chloe, hadn’t you?’

      ‘You can’t really mean you’d end it all over this, David?’

      ‘Yes, I do. Make other arrangements for Jake or you can call off the wedding.’

      I still didn’t really think he meant it and I might have tried to soften him up a little, but I was distracted at that moment by catching sight of the imp of Satan himself through the window. He seemed to be closing the bonnet of David’s car…But no, David was always careful to lock it, so how could Jake…?

      The door slammed behind David and he strode across the gravel and got into his sports car without, so far as I could see, a word or look at Jake, who was standing innocently by with his hands behind his back.

      The engine roared into life and then coughed a bit, before the car sputtered off down the lane. It sounded pretty ropey; I’d be surprised if it got him home without breaking down.

      It hadn’t, either. He’d phoned me when he finally got back, incandescent with rage. ‘That child did it – and that’s the last straw, Chloe, I mean it. Make other arrangements for him, or this is the last you’ll ever hear from me.’

      So that was it, and though I was heartbroken, I was also relieved that I had discovered how jealous he was of my love for Jake before we got married. I’d already known he resented my closeness to my old friends Felix and Poppy, but thought he would get over that. Funny how you can be so blind, isn’t it?

      I called off the wedding, which was both expensive and difficult at that late stage, and, resigning myself to perpetual spinsterhood, settled back into my life as before.

      Except that this time, Mum didn’t come back. And the awful thing was, none of us missed her.

       Chapter Three: Chocolate Wishes

      I was jarred back to the present by the realisation that Radio Four was now traitorously playing ‘Darker Past Mid night’, yet another damn song of Raffy’s! Is there no escape from him?

      You hear it everywhere since it was used as the theme song for a film. And it’s still running as the soundtrack to that hugely popular car advert – the one in which a man is driving through the night alone, when suddenly a girl appears, sitting next to him, and you’re never quite sure if he’s imagining her or if she’s a ghost…

      This time it was the introductory music to a supernatural story, so clearly no radio channel is safe any more. But still, at least the hated sound of it brought me back to the present, because sitting about in a murky swamp of unwanted memories, feeling like one of love’s rejects, was not going to get me anywhere.

      My first impulse (apart from switching off the radio) was to phone up my best friend, Poppy, who together with her mother runs a riding stables called Stirrups just outside Sticklepond, and tell her the news about the move. But she was probably taking a lesson, or was out with a hack, and, even if she wasn’t, half the time she forgets to take her mobile phone with her, or it isn’t working because she’s dropped it in a bucket of water.

      Felix, my other best friend, was going to an auction that day to buy more books he didn’t have room for: Marked Pages was bursting at the seams.

      So in the end I just did what I always did at that time: typed up Grumps’ letters on the computer and put them into envelopes ready to post, then started on the latest instalment of Satan’s Child.

      The