broken off an engagement and she felt guilty about it for months. But recently, after she’d heard on her work grapevine that her ex, Jay, was happily together with someone else, it was as though a weight had lifted from her mind, which meant Harvey was ready to go ahead with his plans.
‘You’re up, Daniel,’ Harvey told him. They’d been waiting until Barney and Lois were home from the village carol concert and hidden indoors and the girls would be over at the pub enjoying a drink. Barney and Lois were, of course, in on this plan. They loved it, and when Barney had let the boys into the barn earlier before bustling off to the carol concert with Lois, he’d told Daniel more details of how he’d helped to get his brother and Melissa back together when she showed up in the village after five long years away. The old man loved the drama, he was full of mischief, and a pang of jealousy that Harvey had had him in his life when Daniel hadn’t gave way to Daniel’s acknowledgement that he’d been the one to stop himself being a part of all that. He’d been asked often enough by Harvey, some of those times he’d forgotten until recently. This morning as he’d eaten his breakfast he’d remembered Harvey whispering to him when he was yelled at as a kid one time for spilling porridge on the floor, telling him to come and pick apples with him. ‘We can make juice’, he’d said to his younger brother, but Daniel had gone off over the fields that day instead and met up with the boys from his school who hung out by a row of derelict garages on the outskirts of the Cove, smoking, doing dope, some of them drinking. He’d not joined in with any of it, but he’d felt a part of something that was his own and that he could control. He was slowly beginning to realise, now he was back in the Cove, that it hadn’t only been Harvey’s fault he was left out, a lot of it he’d brought on himself. And he’d readily admit that he definitely had the Luddington stubborn streak Harvey had too.
Daniel headed off to The Copper Plough, not quite as nervous as his brother with such a monumental question to ask, but anxious all the same.
When he got there the place was packed and it took a while to squeeze through the crowds and find the girls. The idea was that he would tell Melissa he and Harvey had had a huge fight and Harvey was her problem now, he was over at the barn licking his wounds. Then, when she left, he’d walk Lucy home and finally get to talk with her properly.
But things didn’t quite go according to plan. Melissa, her concern immediately with Harvey, as expected, ran off out of the pub, but Lucy went with her.
‘I’m not letting her deal with this on her own,’ Lucy told him, and so he followed them both down the street, moving so fast to keep up with them that the cold didn’t matter.
When they filed in through Barney’s gate, past the windows at the front of the house, through the archway of trees and into the courtyard, Daniel put a hand to Lucy’s arm and stopped her before she could follow Melissa into the barn. ‘Let them do this on their own.’
‘Do what?’
‘You’ll see,’ he grinned, because no matter what happened with Lucy, this was his brother’s moment.
Barney and Lois must have been spying on them and crept out of the house, confusing Lucy all the more. ‘Come on,’ said Lois, ushering Lucy towards the barn as the men followed. ‘I don’t want to miss it.’
‘You’re all crazy – miss what?’ Lucy asked, confused as ever.
But they all filed over, Barney shushing them as they drew closer.
The door was ajar; Harvey must’ve closed it most of the way to keep the heat in. Harvey had told him the only place he could imagine proposing to Melissa was here and it had to be a surprise. He’d said he’d only ever do this the once and he wanted it to be done properly.
With all of them peeking through the crack in the barn door to see the scene unfolding, they heard Melissa’s voice first.
‘What’s going on, Harvey?’ Melissa asked. She was looking around her. ‘What happened with your brother? He said you were in a bad way.’
‘I’m still in one