LeEtta was four. She was going to school these days. Aidan must be quite the young man by now. And Sarah-Jane sounded almost like a teenager on the phone, though he knew she was only nine, still his little girl.
A week after he got there, Lily would arrive in New Zealand, to do the thing she knew she needed to do. Her parents, her so-called ‘parents’, had moved to New Zealand and had another baby, and they had left him to die because they could not be bothered with him any more than they could with Lily; and this time there was no family around to take him in. Jack had Googled and found out their real names easily enough. He wanted to murder them, but he would leave them to rot.
Jack and Lily would go to Mount Eden together. He would help her do what she felt she had to do. It turned out Mount Eden was a man’s prison, so they would find her dad there. They would look him in the eye and see him for what he was. Then they would do the same with her mother.
After that, anything would be possible.
It was strange, he thought, because his best friends should be the people he had known for all his life: Queenstown was full of them. But his best friend was a funny English girl with the most complicated life. He was looking forward to seeing his mates again, though he felt odd about it. It was strange to be the one who had left. Jack could barely compute the fact that while he had been learning to teach, and teaching, and learning to cook, and then meeting the girl of his dreams, everyone else’s lives at home had been going on in the ordinary way. At least, he presumed they had. But he would only be calling in.
Rachel had said that when he found a nice beach with a hotel, in a country she approved of, she would bring the children out to visit him.
His wife had a boyfriend, someone new in town, and she had looked nervous, as well she might, when she told him, on Skype, that this bloke might be moving in with her and the kids. Jack was going back to check him over. But as long as he was a good bloke, Jack could deal with it. He could deal with anything, now.
The world had never looked as big, or as exciting, as it did at this moment. He was packing up his life in Spain, but Barcelona would always be magical to him. It was where they had met, on a bench at Gaudí’s cathedral.
And now, together, they were going to go out and see what the rest of this huge, unpredictable world had in store for them. Jack smiled, and put his old guide book into his backpack.