0345549538
Authors: Susan Lewis
Too Close to Home
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Susan Lewis Ltd.
Reading group guide copyright © 2015 by Penguin Random House LLC
Excerpt from
The Girl Who Came Back
by Susan Lewis copyright © 2015 by Susan Lewis Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE & Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Century, an imprint of The Random House Group Limited, in 2015.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Company for permission to reprint an excerpt from UNDER MILK WOOD by Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Company.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book
The Girl Who Came Back
by Susan Lewis. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lewis, Susan.
Too close to home : a novel / Susan Lewis.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-0-345-54953-2 (paperback) — ISBN 978-0-345-54954-9 (ebook)
1. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR6062.E9546T66 2015
823'.914—dc23
2015028694
eBook ISBN 9780345549549
Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for eBook
Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos and Susan Schultz
Cover images: © Nadia Isakova/Plain Picture (landscape), © Stephen Carroll/Getty (woman)
v4.1
ep
Contents
Excerpt from
The Girl Who Came Back
Nothing was happening.
Everything was completely still, motionless, not a single rustle in the atmosphere, no stirrings within.
The only sounds, muted by closed windows, were the cries of white-bellied gulls as they soared around the neutral sky.
Jenna Moore, petite, dark-haired, and emerald-eyed, was sitting at the cluttered dining room table staring out at the winter-bleak garden. Looking at her, no one would have guessed she was the mother of four, the eldest being fifteen. Her smooth, playfully freckled features and girlish frame made her appear far closer to thirty than the forty she actually was.
It was Sunday afternoon and she was supposed to be making the most of some rare hours alone. The younger children—Josh, age eight, and the five-year-old twins, Flora and Wills—were on playdates down in the village, while Paige, fifteen last birthday, was somewhere with her stepfather on this sprawling misty peninsula, though Jenna wasn’t for the moment entirely sure where. All she knew was that it never failed to warm her to think of how close Paige and Jack were. He was the only father Paige had ever known, since her own had abandoned them when Paige was barely a year old. They’d never heard from him again, though Jenna had felt genuinely sorry when she’d heard how he’d lost his life in a rock-climbing accident at the age of thirty. By then Paige was seven years old and Jenna was married to Jack, who’d accompanied them to the funeral and had sat with Paige for a long time afterward explaining how losing her real father wasn’t going to make any difference to them.
“So you’re my real daddy, really?” Paige had insisted.
“That’s right. I’ll always be here for you, and no one will ever be prouder of you than me.”
“But why didn’t my other daddy live with us?”
“He did for a while, when you were a tiny baby, but he wasn’t really ready to be a daddy. He wanted to do other things.”
“You don’t want to do other things, do you?”
Jack had shaken his head gravely. “All I want to do is be your daddy, and Mummy’s husband—and maybe a daddy to a brother or sister for you too. Would you like that?”
Paige had nodded eagerly, which had twisted Jenna’s heart with longing. After two miscarriages she was starting to worry that she’d never give Jack a child of his own.
Blinking as an unexpected breakthrough of sunlight bathed the garden in a rich golden glow, Jenna began picturing Jack’s and Paige’s faces as they probably were now: intent, laughing, curious, and excited as they went about their task. This was the fourth Sunday in a row they’d been out capturing this special place in the world on film, and so far there had been no fallings-out that she knew of. In fact, between them they had gathered some impressive footage of surfers riding the waves over at Rhossili Bay; the flighty dance of marram grass as the wind gusted over the dunes; entrancing close-ups of old and young faces singing their hearts out in chapel; wild ponies roaming the vast open moors; golden plover, sanderlings, and little stints pecking and flitting about the wetlands; starfish, cockleshells, and feathers littering the shores…There was so much material now that Jenna could hardly remember it all. Today’s mission was all about local folklore, Viking raiders, the Arthurian legend, smugglers, dragons, and damsels in distress. If there was fog clinging to the rocks of the Worm’s Head, Jenna knew, Paige intended to whisper lines from Herbert New’s sonnet to accompany the haunting scene.
Patient, folded wings; with lifted head, / Watchful, outlooking seawards sits the Form / Which, dragon-like, defies the approaching storm…
The project was for Paige’s ICT course—Information and Communications Technology:
Using your mobile phones, make a tourist video of the region to include everything you feel to be worthwhile.
Jack was a big one for projects, sometimes seizing them as if they were his own until Paige—or whichever child he was supposed to be assisting—patiently, or occasionally hotly, reminded him that she was in charge.
Jenna couldn’t help but smile at the way Jack tried to hide his hurt, or frustration, at being brought up short by his children, quickly covering it with pride that they were so gifted, or determined, or simply willing to learn from their own mistakes.
“Dad, I’m fifteen, for God’s sake,” Jenna had heard Paige grumbling as they’d returned last Sunday. “You’re treating me like a baby.”
“But you asked me to help,” he’d protested.
“
Help,
yes, not take over. I need someone who’ll do as they’re told and maybe make suggestions if they’re relevant. Not someone who thinks they know everything.”
“But I do.”
Paige hadn’t been able to stop herself smiling at that. “But I’m the student,” she’d reminded him. “I have to learn, and sometimes that means getting it wrong, or finding my own way to the solution.”
This kind of response invariably brought Jack’s eyes to Jenna’s—such clarity and wisdom in one so young.
Paige had always loved to work things out for herself, whether a jigsaw puzzle as a toddler, new words in her storybooks as she started to read, or the complex challenges of the chemistry lab or maths class in school. These were the only two subjects at which she didn’t do quite so well. Even so, her eagerness to grasp what was eluding her made Jenna worry at times for how hard she drove herself.
Still, she seemed well balanced, and had continued to thrive in spite of the life-changing move Jenna and Jack had decided on just over a year ago. It had been one of their biggest worries at the time, how it would affect their teenage daughter to be plucked from the heart of everything and everyone she knew to begin a completely new life in a country she’d only ever visited for a couple of weeks each summer.
Not such a very different country; after all, it was only Wales, where everyone, at least in their part, here on the Gower Peninsula, spoke English, and all the warnings of how insular and unwelcoming the Welsh could be to outsiders had proved total nonsense. Their neighbors could hardly be any friendlier, at least to them; the way they sometimes carried on with each other made Jenna wonder if she’d stumbled into the village of Llareggub, the infamous setting for
Under Milk Wood.
This was a favorite book of hers, and recently of Paige’s since it had become a set piece for her subject achievement exams, the GCSEs. As it was Dylan Thomas’s centenary year, the whole region was celebrating his life and works in one way or another, and Paige had been chosen by her English teacher to take the part of First Voice in a school production to be staged at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea. Such an honor had never been bestowed upon a female student before, but Miss Kendrick was of the opinion that Paige’s understanding and enjoyment of the play made her such an obvious choice that she’d added Second Voice to the part as well. Since the casting Jenna and Paige had spent many hours listening to Richard Burton’s famous performance, taking it line by line, nuance by nuance, getting to the heart of why he’d spoken, whispered, or growled in a certain way, and what he might have been thinking when observing the many oddities of the characters in the piece.