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A Miracle on Hope Street: The most heartwarming Christmas romance of 2018!
Emma Heatherington
Remember the true meaning of Christmas with this heartfelt and beautiful novel from bestselling author Emma Heatherington.Can a single act of kindness change a life forever?To many people, Ruth Ryans has everything: the perfect job, a beautiful home and a loving family. But as Christmas approaches, Ruth feels lonelier than ever.Then Ruth meets Michael. A man who she showed kindness to during his darkest moment. That one single act, his miracle, helped change his life forever.Ruth decides to make this Christmas the most perfect one ever, opening up her home to those who need her help – the lonely, the lost and the ignored.Actions speak louder than words and Ruth Ryans’ kindness will create little miracles for everyone … including her own battered heart. Readers love this magical book:‘This heartwarming and emotional story highlights the magic of reaching out to those who otherwise would be alone’ Stacy is Reading‘I utterly adore this book…one of the most inspirational stories I've read’ Kate‘A warm read that will make you think and smile’ Kathleen
(#u41dc66ef-3636-5a1f-9cc7-6f5c5a5e2900)
Emma Heatherington is from Donaghmore, Co Tyrone, where she lives with her children Jordyn, Jade, Dualta, Adam and baby Sonny James. She has penned more than thirty short films, plays and musicals as well as seven novels, two of which were written under the pseudonym Emma Louise Jordan.
Emma’s novel, The Legacy of Lucy Harte, was an eBook bestseller in both the UK and US.
Emma loves spending time with her partner (the talented artist and singer/songwriter Jim McKee), all things Nashville, romantic comedy movies, singalong nights with friends and family, red wine, musical theatre, new pyjamas, fresh clean bedclothes, long bubble baths and cosy nights in by the fire.
@emmalou13 (https://twitter.com/emmalou13?lang=en)
www.facebook.com/emmaheatheringtonwriter (http://www.facebook.com/emmaheatheringtonwriter)
For my daddy Hugh McCrory, probably the best daddy in the world
Table of Contents
Cover (#u694e257f-d998-5c45-a5c5-2503c1b995bb)
About the Author (#uc60f99cb-b0d1-5b85-bb46-47693acf6d24)
Title Page (#uc60f99cb-b0d1-5b85-bb46-47693acf6d24)
Copyright (#u75469692-5cba-5165-8435-89e9a9344571)
Dedication (#uedff6b60-5c89-575e-a74d-d359fc242459)
Chapter 1 (#u494b54ad-59a1-5a15-87c5-d125f0c3bb62)
Chapter 2 (#u1b1b4e8f-8dbc-513c-bf8d-952e64ffa810)
Chapter 3 (#ucff94158-cc30-5b47-986a-60b3ed04a425)
Chapter 4 (#u84d3792b-bfb7-5628-805e-8aeccdc05b37)
Chapter 5 (#udd08bb66-e014-59de-bc6c-da8466d364c0)
Chapter 6 (#ud58dcf58-72d5-54fb-9627-9dc3549a645b)
Chapter 7 (#ue8fa4627-d84e-5548-b522-952d3870de96)
Chapter 8 (#u88f617f7-ccb1-5026-a3de-e8f1dfc731fd)
Chapter 9 (#u9884feda-4120-5ce6-b597-58ba2763fb3e)
Chapter 10 (#u6334e1d1-efa2-5e17-9ef0-8dff2466fbb0)
Chapter 11 (#u270550dd-3ab5-5ef7-a52c-c2f5f40c0e2d)
Chapter 12 (#ua66c52a9-ff93-5955-af50-8f31ddb45082)
Chapter 13 (#u8dea8809-f1e0-5745-800c-8263b7acae70)
Chapter 14 (#u72963547-bbcf-5d66-a3f1-e874be0b7df2)
Chapter 15 (#u15e76dc2-58e2-5384-ab54-2805b1ff7b05)
Chapter 16 (#u924e0013-d056-5302-81a3-bf294f4b4709)
Chapter 17 (#udb5b6236-d023-5a73-93e9-d64551329cba)
Chapter 18 (#u828b9cdc-4647-542a-b0f8-6cf48567698f)
Chapter 19 (#u04c7e6b1-e85b-51a7-8b72-88d60cd94cf4)
Chapter 20 (#u4ca7855e-ad55-530c-b7f7-3b98d9f2f623)
Chapter 21 (#u5fd4f686-af20-5c0a-a402-697a22a155c7)
Chapter 22 (#uc6b6127e-e05a-5018-82f3-6426b7c90752)
Chapter 23 (#u1045df89-b342-5868-9109-17699630cb94)
Chapter 24 (#u35f7ab5d-bcae-533b-b50d-5488d377343b)
Chapter 25 (#ua08e5614-2584-5d18-8cec-361305ed31ab)
Chapter 26 (#ucc05a2c1-a925-57d1-ba3c-543f1611e3b2)
Chapter 27 (#u3ed17ddf-4f9c-548a-b6cb-1d70fa663e1e)
Chapter 28 (#uf23d2e2b-a403-5f31-b4f6-57999e89d943)
Chapter 29 (#ubefd0ca2-7093-50f8-b3d2-5389dca5681f)
Chapter 30 (#u29cb4b7e-49ab-5f2d-b627-ba7f41567052)
Chapter 31 (#u47086a14-fa5e-5e98-9513-9829bb989f24)
Chapter 32 (#ub776ba1a-cd0d-562b-b809-7fd967e8a9ef)
Epilogue (#u1979323d-6a74-52e1-9484-ebe81b70d38b)
Acknowledgements (#u39a215cb-df14-5579-bb1b-50739e728ee3)
Also by Emma Heatherington (#ud7c05ea5-6646-5715-a72b-abb08eb2ca5e)
About HarperImpulse (#ua2eb4965-743b-5ca2-af32-a2ad1a78a3dc)
About the Publisher (#u7559a44c-a051-524b-b76e-e72026acc552)
HarperImpulse
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Copyright © Emma Heatherington 2018
Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com (https://www.shutterstock.com)
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Emma Heatherington asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008314989
Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780007568840
Version: 2018-11-06
A simple act of kindness
Can sometimes change the world
Chapter One (#u41dc66ef-3636-5a1f-9cc7-6f5c5a5e2900)
Ruth
Eight Days before Christmas – One Year Ago
‘I bet it was the husband. It’s always the husband in the end, isn’t it, Dad?’
My father looks like he’s actually considering my analysis of the TV detective show from his bedside armchair, and even though in the blank stillness of his mind he’s more than a million miles away, I know he’s still in there somewhere.
I just don’t know where.
I reach across and squeeze his hand, taking in the smell of his musky new aftershave, an early Christmas gift from his buddy Mabel who lives just down the corridor in Room 303. He gives me a vacant but twinkly-eyed smile in return.
‘I know, I know, you men aren’t all bad,’ I joke and my heart skips a beat as I look into his eyes and see for the first time in ages a glimmer of his darling personality that used to shine so brightly before this dreaded illness squeezed the life from inside him.
There are rare little times when I see a moment like this, a memory, a time when he is really my father again. I might hear it in his laughter or catch a knowing smile or feel it in the grasp of a hug or see it in the look in his eye, but such moments are becoming fewer and fewer, so I cling to them and savour them when they do surface.
Mostly now, it’s just me watching him go into an adult-like shell in a childhood like state, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute and it’s killing me to see him slowly disappear from the inside out.
‘It’s about time you found a partner of your own,’I imagine him saying to me like he used to when I worried about him after he had the stroke that started all this sickness. ‘And never mind all this looking out for me, you hear? You’re a special girl, Ruth. Find a good man; a good life partner. Find someone to look out for you for a change.’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I whisper, pretending to have that very conversation with him right now, ‘but I don’t need anyone, so don’t you worry, Dad. I have you and Ally, not to mention her gorgeous boys, Owen and Ben. And you can’t stop me from looking out for you. It’s kind of what I do best these days.’
I can pretend all I want that I am having a proper conversation with him, but I know by the silence and the glaze in his eyes that he’s in his own very simple, hazy world; a world of mixed-up noise and colourful shapes bouncing from the television screen that flashes in this darkened room. I lift the bottle of new aftershave from his tight clutch, put the wrapping paper in the bin and then settle back into my own chair to savour every moment of this precious time with him.
‘You smell really nice,’ I tell him. You smell just like—’
And then I stop because my voice just can’t let out the words. I want to tell him what I’m thinking but I can’t. I want to tell him how his aftershave reminds me of happier times, of safety, of security, of those carefree days before it all went so horribly wrong for us; when our family of three was a family of four. When it was me, Dad, my sister Ally and our mother before it all ended.
‘I always remember your aftershave, Dad. It brings back good memories,’ is as much as I can whisper eventually. ‘How kind of Mabel to remember your favourite just in time for Christmas? I hope she isn’t too cross that we’ve opened it already.’
Dad never did wait until the Christmas Day to open his presents, so I carried on his tradition today, opening the carefully wrapped gift for him and then gave him a generous spray of the cologne. Not that he knows if it’s Christmas or if it’s spring or summer or autumn or winter. But it’s definitely very much winter outside. It’s dropping down dark on the other side of the window and I sit back and relax in the bliss of it all – just me, my dad, the smell of new cologne, Christmas around the corner and some good old Poirot on the telly.
‘This is nice,’ I mutter, but he doesn’t respond of course. Instead, he just smiles and stares at the screen and that’s quite enough for me right now.
We are both totally fixated once again with what is going on in the old-school detective TV show on the small telly in my father’s tiny bedroom, my hand now automatically reaching in and out of a supersize bag of crisps to find my mouth which subsequently chews and crunches and the feeling of contentment I had before the aftershave smell brought me back in time returns and I relax again.
It’s my favourite time of the day on my favourite day of the week and I have thirty whole minutes left before I go back into the rat race of my other life which consists of everything from deadlines at my desk in my home office, to hair and makeup appointments and fake smiling for the cameras, plus everything else that being a ‘celebrity agony aunt’ for the city’s biggest newspaper brings, so I wrap my new fuzzy cardigan around me a little tighter, then reach up and pull the curtains, taking just a moment to notice the dark, crisp December afternoon that lies on the other side of the world from where I am right now.
I reflect on how I somehow lead a double life in many ways. There’s the public Ruth Ryans, the well-known half-Italian, half-Irish thirty-something agony aunt for Today newspaper’s weekly magazine, who is invited to every event in town with a new man for every season on her arm and a new outfit to boot. A curvy and cuddly brunette, average size in height, warm in the face and just pleasant enough on the eye to be relatable to every man, woman and sometimes child who put pen to paper to tell me their biggest fears and problems in this big bad world with a guaranteed reply to everyone who takes the time.
Then there’s the private Ruth Ryans – the quiet, single one of the family, the one who never settled down despite being proposed to twice, the caring one, the soft one, the one who everyone loves to see for a laugh and the craic and then watch on in wonder from afar when she’s gone – the one who takes after her deep-thinking father with her wise words and advice; the one who likes to hide behind the persona that made her a household name; and the one who never, ever mentions the mother who left forever without warning one Sunday all those years ago.
I delete the thought of my mother, Elena, immediately, just as I’ve trained my mind to do so if she dares to make an appearance in my head and I focus on the present which is my father; the one who never, ever left us and who deserves every moment of my attention. I’ve learned, as the years rolled by, to live in the present, even though it’s desperately hard to let go of the past.
Focus, Ruth. Focus on the here and now. The great job in the public eye, the home to die for that has so much potential, the father you adore, the sister you idolise, the opportunities you frequent, the places you go, the people you meet, the independence, the empowerment. Focus.
The places I go. . . I used to travel the world, but now my world is here in this dark little room my father calls home or in the empty and silent rooms of the place we all used to call home. I decorated this cosy room in the nursing home to reflect the beautiful house on the tree-lined Beech Row that he worked so hard for my sister and I to grow up in, despite his pain at being left on his own to raise us. The house that I now live in alone, watching it grow stiller and stiller around me, suffocating me, not only with the memories that my father worked so hard to create, but with flashbacks of childhood memories that are separated into life before her and life after her like a line that is drawn down through everything I do and everything I am.
I’ve tried to awaken my dad’s full senses in this room with family photos of days gone by, moments of great pride captured in press clippings from his lengthy career as a highly regarded university lecturer, memories of my graduation day when he grinned nonstop from ear to ear, pictures from my sister Ally’s wedding as he walked her proudly down the aisle, snaps of my little nephews on the many stages of their young lives and posters of Dad’s favourite movies such as Gone With the Wind and Casablanca. His banjo hangs on the wall and an old flute that he once played with such pride lies polished and proud on a shelf by the window, where a potted plant sits waiting on the morning sun and a CD player, with all his old familiar songs stacked beside it, plays constantly on low in the background.
I have softly lit lamps, a little fluffy rug and a bookshelf filled with novels and autobiographies that he once used to devour but can no longer understand. It is heart-breaking yet soothing to see his things scattered round this room, haunting shadows of the man he used to be, and who I believe, still is inside.
This may not be his ‘real’ home, but I’ve made it the best than it can be. It’s a place where he is looked after in a way that I no longer can and it’s like an alternate universe where the most important things are stripped back and carried out in a regimental routine every day. I feel safe here, close to the nest of familiarity, if you like, even though it’s only been just under a year since my sister and I made the decision to have our darling father cared for, far away from the cosy townhouse existence where he lived with me, when he was well enough to do the everyday things we took for granted.
‘Can I get you a drink, Dad?’ I ask and he nods a bit. A reply of sorts, most welcome in this foggy existence where he struggles with the answer to the simplest of questions.
This place is good for him, I keep telling myself. It is warm, it is safe, it feels familiar by now and most of all it gives him a steady routine that I really couldn’t devote to him at home which is empty and dark and silent without his wise words, philosophical ways, eclectic taste in music and hearty laughter.
