LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

       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

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