Winter Wishes by Ruth Saberton

possibilities. The idea that anything would ever be otherwise had never crossed her mind. She’d got married in her dream dress, a riot of frothing lace and pink ribbons, and Danny had been heart-stoppingly handsome in his ceremonial uniform. Mo and Issie had been trussed up in fuchsia ruffles (was this why they hated her?), and their respective sets of relatives had been beaming proudly. It had been a huge wedding, the Polwenna Bay event of the year, and exactly what Tara had wanted.
    The sun slipped behind a cloud and Tara shivered as the warmth vanished. She’d felt something similar a few months after her wedding. Once the exhilaration of the big day had gone and the novelty of her new name had worn off a little, Tara had focused on her beautician’s job at the Polwenna Bay Hotel and lived for the times when Danny came home on leave. Each of these visits was like a honeymoon, and Tara had basked in the glamour of having a gorgeous soldier husband – especially when Danny was promoted swiftly to Second Lieutenant. At this point Tara had quit her job and flown out to join her new husband at his army base in Germany, full of excitement about going abroad for the first time. The elation was short-lived. Their married quarters were small and spartan, and life as an army wife was nothing like she’d imagined. There were no glitzy balls or parties, and the other wives operated within a strict hierarchy. As she was bottom of the heap, she was generally ignored. Tara’s German was on a par with her Klingon, which meant that any trips into the nearby town were pretty limited. Meanwhile, Danny had been working long hours and was rarely home. When he was, all he wanted to do was sleep; partying and exploring the local nightlife weren’t high on his list of priorities. Tara had been lonely and bored, and if young wives on army bases got lonely and bored it was a sure recipe for trouble.
    And when that trouble came in the form of a six-foot cadet with eyes like rain-washed violets and a great line in banter, things could only end badly…
    Tara got up and carried her mug to the sink. Sometimes reliving this next part of the story was more than she could bear. She’d tried her hardest not to think about it, had pushed it to the furthest and darkest part of her mind, but from time to time the memories rose to the surface like bloated corpses drifting up from the sea bed.
    Bloated corpses? Tara shook her head at this analogy as she rinsed the mug and watched the water swirl down the plughole. Talk about a sense of the melodramatic. And yet, in a way her story did resemble a horror movie: it haunted her and caused her to wake in the night with a racing heart and dry mouth. The difference was that the past that haunted Tara wasn’t dead. It was very much alive. She lived with and regretted it every day.
    It was, after all, the reason why Danny had stopped loving her.
     

Chapter 7
    For the past few minutes, Tara had been standing at one of Seaspray’s upstairs windows, leaning her forehead against the glass and watching the clouds scudding across the sky. Beneath them, the white-tipped waves galloped onto the pale slice of beach. Winter mornings in Cornwall had a cold beauty all of their own, she thought. Something about the bright sunshine glancing off the sea, the harsh cries of the gulls and the knife-edge wind that slashed one’s breath away was always capable of luring people from their cosy cottages and out onto the cliffs.
    A man was walking at the water’s edge, throwing a stick into the surf for a bouncing chocolate Labrador to fetch, and the rocks at the far side of the bay were dotted with children searching the rock pools for treasure and nature’s curiosities. Morgan had loved that, Tara recalled. It had been one of his early passions – and there had been nothing he didn’t know about the creatures that inhabited the cracks or lurked in the bottom of the seaweedy pools. He and Danny had spent hours clambering