Free St Piran's: The Fireman and Nurse Loveday by Kate Hardy

He shook his head, grimacing. ‘Sorry, I’m being really self-indulgent and you’ve had it harder than me, losing both your parents.’
    She took his hand and squeezed it. ‘It always hurts to lose someone you love. Look, I could come with you if you like, and help you sort through the stuff. It really helped me not to be on my own when I had to sort through my parents’things—Kate Tremayne from the surgery was really kind and helped me. It made a huge difference.’
    ‘I might take you up on that.’ His fingers tightened round hers. ‘Thanks.’
    ‘I’ve been thinking. Something else that might help Joey—you could try inviting one or two of his friends home for tea, when you’re on a day off.’
    ‘I don’t think he has any friends,’ Tom said. ‘He did get a couple of invites, the first week back at school, but when I tried inviting the kids back the mums made excuses, and there haven’t been any invites since.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know whether it’s because he’s so quiet and hardly talks, and they find that hard to deal with; or whether the other kids see Joey as being “different” because his parents died and they don’t like him.’
    She nodded. ‘Other children can be cruel.’
    Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘That sounds personal.’
    ‘Probably,’ she admitted. ‘My parents were elderly—Mum was forty-three when she had me, and Dad was ten years older than her. Everyone else’s parents were around twenty years younger than them, so the kids at school always wanted to know if they were my grandparents, and refused to believe me when I said they were my parents. Then they used to say I was weird because my dad had grey hair.’
    ‘That’s horrible.’ And that, Tom thought, was what was really at the root of her shyness. The way the children at school had made her feel like an outsider, rejecting her and mocking her; something like that would stick and make you worry about how other people saw you. And it would make you wary of others as you grew older. ‘And you’re not weird. Not at all.’
    ‘It was just childish nonsense.’ She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t bother me now.’
    He wasn’t so sure about that, but held his tongue. ‘Did you lose your parents very long ago?’ he asked.
    ‘Last summer. Dad had a stroke. He was the love of Mum’s life and she just gave up after he died—I know physiologically there’s no such thing as a broken heart, but I honestly think that’s why she died. Without Dad, she couldn’t carry on. I buried her the month after.’ She dragged in a breath. ‘I hate just having a little wooden cross and a plastic pot I stick in the ground for flowers, but the stonemason says he can’t put the headstone on for another couple of months.’
    ‘So you understand exactly how Joey’s feeling right now.’ Guilt flooded through Tom. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to rub salt in your wounds.’
    ‘You’re not. And you,’ she said softly, ‘I know how you’re feeling now, too. What you said about your sister’s house—it was like that for me at the farmhouse. I guess I could’ve sold up, but I didn’t want to—it’s my home. So in the end I painted the walls a different colour and moved the furniture around and changed the colours of the cushions, just to get it into my head that things were different now and Mum and Dad aren’t coming back.’ She paused. ‘It’s going to take a while until you get used to it, Tom, so be kind to yourself.’
    He was still holding her hand and he rubbed the pad of his thumb over the back of her hand. ‘Can I buy you lunch? As a friend,’ he added swiftly.
    Not that he needed to say that, Flora thought. It was pretty obvious Tom wasn’t going to be interested in her as anything other than a friend; she was way too mousy and boring. ‘That’d be nice,’ she said.
    ‘If I follow you back to your place, we can drop your car off and I’ll drive us,’ Tom suggested.
    They ended up at the Smugglers’ Rest,