Christmas Magic In Heatherdale. Abigail Gordon

during the day. With those thoughts in mind she drifted into an uneasy sleep.

      The sound of children’s voices on the landing mingling with her host’s deeper tones brought Melissa into instant wakefulness in the darkness of a winter morning. She dressed quickly in yesterday’s clothes and prepared to go down to where she could hear the sounds of breakfast-time coming from the kitchen.

      Pausing in the doorway, she saw that Ryan was at the grill, keeping an eye on sizzling bacon, and two little girls were seated at the table with bowls of cereal in front of them, observing her with wide eyes of surprise as she said, ‘Thank you so much for last night. I feel a different person this morning after the meal and the rest. I’m off to find out what happened to the cleaners and the electricity services.’

      He smiled across at her. ‘Not before you’ve eaten. You have no facilities for preparing food next door, so take a seat.’

      Rhianna, at seven years old and the elder of his two young daughters, was not a shy child, and burst out, ‘Who is this lady, Daddy? She wasn’t here when we went to bed.’

      ‘No, she wasn’t,’ Martha, two years younger, chirped beside her. At that point Ryan took charge of the conversation.

      ‘Her name is Melissa and she’s going to live next door to us,’ he explained. ‘Melissa, these are my daughters, Rhianna and Martha.’

      ‘She can’t!’ Rhianna protested.

      ‘Why not?’ he asked.

      ‘It’s haunted!’

      ‘No way,’ he said laughingly as he pulled out a chair for Melissa to be seated, as if there had been no hesitation in joining them on her part. ‘There aren’t any ghosts in Heatherdale, I promise you that, Rhianna. Now, who would like a bacon roll?’

      ‘Me!’ the children both cried.

      With the day ahead momentarily forgotten, Melissa smiled as the memory surfaced of how, when she’d been at junior school, she and her friends used to pass a creepy-looking empty house on the way there. They had been convinced that there was a human hand on the inside window ledge. It had only been when one of their fathers had gone to investigate that it had been discovered that the ‘hand’ had been a pink plastic glove. There had been much disappointment amongst the children.

      She had done as Ryan requested and seated herself opposite him. As she smiled across at his children she saw that they both had the same golden fairness as their father, but their eyes were different—big and brown and fixed on her.

      Making her second contribution to the occasion, Martha asked, ‘Are you some children’s mummy? We haven’t got one any more. Ours was hurt by a tree.’

      Ryan had just put cereal and a bacon sandwich in front of Melissa and was about to join them at the table. He stilled, and she saw dismay in his expression.

      ‘Just get on with your breakfast, Martha,’ he said gravely, ‘and no more questions.’

      ‘It’s all right,’ Melissa told him. ‘I don’t mind. They are delightful.’ She turned to his small daughter.

      ‘No, Martha, I’m not a mummy, but I do love children. My job is all about making them well when they are sick.’

      Their interest was waning to find that she didn’t fit their requirements, but not their father’s. The stranger at their table was full of surprises. What kind of a job was it that she’d referred to?

      Bringing his mind back to their morning routine on school days, when the children had finished eating he told them to go and put their school uniforms on and have their satchels ready for when Mollie came to take them to school.

      ‘Will Melissa be here when we come home?’ Rhianna asked.

      She answered for Ryan. ‘I’m afraid not, Rhianna. My house needs cleaning and sorting. But once that’s done everything will be fine and you can come to see me whenever you like.’

      Rhianna seemed happy with that answer and she and Martha hopped off to get ready for school.

      ‘Your daughters are adorable, Ryan,’ she said with a warm smile.

      ‘They’re the light of my life. A life that would not be easy if Mollie wasn’t around,’ Ryan replied. ‘She’s a good friend as well as my housekeeper. I have a very demanding job but it’s totally rewarding and somehow I manage to give it my best, while organising things at this end to make sure that Rhianna and Martha are happy, though the result is not always how I want it to be. Still, I mustn’t delay you. We both have busy days ahead of us.’

      She couldn’t have agreed more. As she looked around her at his delightful home, the gloom of yesterday came back. Dreading what the day would hold for her, she wished Ryan a stilted goodbye and went to ring the cleaning firm and the electricity company.

      As Melissa waited for the cleaners to arrive, her mind drifted back over her recent past. She recalled how only yesterday, stony-faced behind the wheel of her car, she had driven away from the house that had always been her home in a select area of a Cheshire green belt without looking back.

      The doors had been locked, the windows shut fast, and as a last knife thrust she’d put flowers in the hallway, a huge bunch of them that would be the first thing that the new owners saw when they arrived to take over their recently acquired property.

      The purchase had been completed early that morning, the money was already in her bank account, but the thought of it brought no joy. It would be a matter of here today and gone tomorrow.

      ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart,’ her father had said as the last few moments of his life had ebbed away. ‘So sorry to be going like this before I’d sorted things.’

      ‘You have nothing to be sorry for,’ she’d told him gently, thinking that he must be delirious. ‘You have always been there for me, making me laugh, indulging me, keeping me safe, and David will do the same. I know he will.’

      He’d tried to speak again but the mists had been closing in and the nurse at the other side of the bed had said a few seconds later, ‘He’s gone, Melissa. His injuries were too severe for him to overcome. There will be no more pain for your father.’

      Max Redmond had been a charmer, and a wealthy one at that. Melissa had lost her mother to heart failure when she had been eleven and Max had given her everything she could possibly have wanted to make up for the loss. He’d taken her on fantastic holidays, bought her the kind of car that most young people could only dream of when she had been old enough to drive, and had given her a generous allowance that had been more than some families had had to feed their children and pay the mortgage.

      The two of them had lived in a smart detached house amongst the rich and famous, not far from the city, and when she’d gone to fulfil a dream and enrolled as a medical student, it had been at a university in nearby Manchester so that her father wouldn’t be lonely, although it hadn’t seemed likely.

      Max had never remarried, but he’d made lots of women friends in the circles in which he’d moved, where wining and dining was the order of the day. However, he had always cancelled any arrangements he’d made if his daughter had been free to socialise with him.

      That had been until she’d got engaged to David Lowson, the son of one of her father’s women friends. After that, he’d watched benignly as most of Melissa’s time away from her career had been taken up with the delights of being in love.

      She’d qualified as a doctor in paediatrics in the summer, and on receiving her degree had been employed at a nearby hospital. Life had been good in every way, with all of it centred around the big city that she knew so well and would never have wanted to leave, until her father had walked in front of a speeding car on a road not far from where they lived after a lively lunch in a nearby hotel, and had died from his injuries.

      Since then Melissa had experienced all of life’s worst emotions: grief at the sudden tragic loss of the man who had loved her so much; sick horror to discover that his last