Chapter One
I skipped through St. James Park without a care in the world. I had taken a well-earned day off from the shop. Selling the cakes that I baked each day. Baking was a genuine passion for me. Christmas was one of my busiest periods and I shouldn’t have closed the shop, but I just couldn’t resist the snow. It wasn’t too bad because Alice would be there within the hour. It was always quiet first thing in the morning, anyway. No one wanted to buy iced cakes for breakfast.
I spent so many snow days as a child with my parents, making snow angels and having snowball fights. They were some of my best memories from my childhood. Both my parents had died in a car accident when I was twelve and a social worker took me to live in a children’s home. I had no other family. It had just been me and my parents, and we had been inseparable. Dad used to call us the three musketeers, and I deeply regretted that the last year with them, I had considered the sentiment cringey. Each time he had uttered it, I groaned and rolled my eyes at him. I had no idea how much I would one day long to hear his silliness again.
I found their deaths so difficult, but the one thing that still helped me celebrate our time together instead of mourning their loss was snow days. I could never overstate their importance to me. Each time I lay in the snow and closed my eyes, I could sense them there with me just like they always had been, well before they weren’t. It hadn’t always been that way, but I was finally facing my demons and finding happiness in life again.
Christmas was always such a difficult time of year for me, being pretty much completely alone. I had my best friend TJ, and he always invited me to his parent’s for Christmas. It was his way of trying to make sure I wasn’t sitting by the fire alone, crying into my hot chocolate. It was sweet, and it did stop me from crying alone in my flat, but it never irradicated the sadness in my soul. If anything, being around him and his family made my heart ache even more than being on my own. TJ’s parents were fantastic. In the early days, I wondered if they thought we would become a couple despite our protests, but that had settled down.
His mother always welcomed me with open arms and she always made sure there was a little pile of gifts for me beneath the tree. Mrs Jakhar was fantastic, but watching her fuss around TJ just made me miss my mum all the more. TJ was the first generation of his family to be born in Britain and his mother happily told me every time that it would mean he could go further than they had. Both his parents had been born in Goa and they had struggled to scrape a living in the restaurant they had owned back in India. Instead, they had brought the business to London. That was how I had met TJ. I had been delivering a birthday cake for a party being hosted at his parents’ restaurant and they had sent him to help me get it set up. We had become fast friends and soon were inseparable.
For years, I had avoided the snow. It had been too painful to be among the snowflakes without my family. Since I had managed to overcome that, I made up for lost time. It was the one time I allowed myself to go wild. To be ridiculous and leap around like a carefree child. It helped make up for all those years in the children’s home when I had been forced to blend into the background and grow up beyond my years. I didn’t know if it was the same in all children’s homes, but in the one I had called home, it was best to not be seen or heard. There were some really nasty kids, and they took pleasure in torturing the rest of us.
Growing up and becoming responsible for myself the second I heard the news of my parent’s demise. I remembered the moment like it was never-ending. I was at school when it happened. My English teacher, Miss Kirk, had called me out of the classroom. She was a kindly old woman who had always been caring towards her students. I wished it had been her who had told me, but the job was left to my head teacher. Mrs Stuart was anything but kind and caring. She was a stern, bitter woman, and the evidence of her temperament had been etched on her lined face and weaved into her grey hair.
She had been all business as she had broken the news to me, with not an ounce of feeling or sympathy. I sat there in the chair opposite and never even shed a tear. I didn’t feel like I could. Feeling like I would be scolded if I wasn’t as emotionless as she was. The first time I had allowed myself to shed tears was when I got back to class and Miss Kirk was waiting outside for me. She had taken one look at my terrified face and rigid frame and swept me up into the biggest hug. I had almost melted into her as she whispered soothing words into my ear and her grip had been enough to convince me she would never let go. As a side effect of her kindness, I shed some tears; not many, but enough. They were nearly all for her benefit. A result of my new constant need to prove I was normal and could have an authentic reaction to something.
I shook my head as I approached the bridge, trying desperately to shake the negativity and focus on the memories of my parents instead. I tried to remember that the happy memories far exceeded the bad ones. Never would I let one day of disaster ruin the many years of happiness we had shared.
