– “Emily, please come home, I beg you…”
– “Mum, you know I wont.”
– “Emily, darling, hes really poorly…”
– “Dont ask. I wont come.”
“I hate him!” Emily hurled the phone across the room. She yanked open the fridge door, grabbed a bottle of gin, and poured a shot. Hesitating, she tipped it down the sink instead. Slumping onto a stool, she burst into tears.
Ten years had passed since shed last set foot in her childhood home.
In her final year of school, Emily had fallen in love. Her friends often sneaked off to university parties near their sixth form. One night, swayed by their coaxing, she went along. There, she met *Him*. He played in a band, sang like an angel, was the son of some diplomat. Girls trailed after him like ducklings, each dreaming of his attention. Emily never understood why he chose *her*. But she fell hardskipping classes, lying to her parents, shirking chores just to see him.
Their whirlwind romance ended when she got pregnant. He avoided her, then vanished entirely. His mother appeared instead, offering to arrange a private clinic visit. “We never wanted a tart like you for our son,” shed hissed.
Emily hid her swelling belly as long as she could. When she finally confessed, her father roared: “You disgrace! Gallivanting about like some common slagget out! Dont dare show your face again!” Her mother just wept silently, too broken by years of his tyranny to argue.
She stuffed a few T-shirts into a rucksack and left.
Friends let her couch-surf at first, but patience wore thin. Borrowing train fare, she fled to Leeds, where an aunt supposedly liveda woman her father had cut off years ago. But the aunt was gone, married to some bloke up north. Starving, Emily loitered near the station, eyeing an old woman selling pasties from a folding table. She tried to swipe one. Clumsy. The woman raised a hand to strikethen froze, spotting her bump.
Between ravenous bites, Emily spilled her story. The woman, a widow, took her in.
Until the birth, Emily sold pasties at the station, dreaming of earning enough to return home, to forgiveness. Instead, she stayed ten years.
She had a daughter. The widow became “Gran,” minding the baby while Emily scrubbed floors at a corner shop. Then a cashier fell ill; Emily filled in, proved herself, climbed to manager. When a supermarket swallowed the old shop, she rose higherdepartment head, then overseeing three sections.
Once, after her daughters birth, shed rung her mum, hoping to return. “Dont,” her mother whispered. Her father had erased her existence.
When Gran died, leaving Emily the house, she called againneeding help with her girl, longing to rescue her mum from that tyrant. Another refusal. Silence followed.
And now, this call.
Ten years of waiting for “*Come home*,” or “*Im sorry*.” But why *now*? What did he want? Some grovelling apology?
The rage had dulled, replaced by a hollow ache. Yet shed built a liferespect, a sleek modern house, her girl in private school, a fiancé who adored her.
“Would I even *be* this strong if he hadnt thrown me out?” she wondered.
Forgive. Say goodbye. Bury it.
For herself.
Emily phoned work, explained, then went to pack.
