One christmas eve, p.1
One Christmas Eve, page 1
ONE CHRISTMAS EVE
SHARI LOW
CONTENTS
A Note From Shari
8 a.m. – 10 a.m.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
10 a.m. – 12 Noon
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
12 noon – 2 p.m.
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
2 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
6 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
8 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
10 p.m. – Midnight
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Midnight – 2 a.m.
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
More from Shari Low
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Shari Low
About Boldwood Books
To the Murphys, the LeCombers and the Lows,
Who continue to come to us for Christmas every year,
Despite the fact that I haven’t managed to cook a decent festive meal in twenty years.
I love you all.
Shari x
A NOTE FROM SHARI
Dear Reader,
Thank you for choosing One Christmas Eve. I can’t wait for you to meet Eve, her mother, Helena and her irrepressible gran, Cathy.
Like many of my novels, the action takes place over the course of one day, and in this book, that day is Christmas Eve.
But there’s a twist.
The three storylines are set on Christmas Eve in three different decades.
Eve’s chapters capture the story of how her day unfolds on Christmas Eve in 2023.
Her mum’s chapters follow Helena through the course of Christmas Eve, 1993, when she was about to turn twenty-five years old and starts the day with no idea of the surprises and shocks in store for her before midnight.
And Eve’s gran, Cathy’s chapters are set on Christmas Eve, 1968, when twenty-year-old Cathy is forced to make a decision that will determine the course of all their lives for generations to come.
From the second I had the idea for this book, I was excited about showing the Christmas Eve of the sixties, the nineties and then the present day and I adored exploring how the decisions made by the women in the past impacted the daughters who came after them.
So thank you again for reading this book and I hope you love visiting three decades, with three generations of women, whose lives were forever changed on One Christmas Eve.
Love,
Shari xx
8 A.M. – 10 A.M.
1
EVE QUINN
24 December 2023
T’was the day before Christmas… and it was absolutely bugger all like the traditional Christmas poem.
Admittedly, Eve Quinn’s open-plan kitchen slash living room did bear a slightly disturbing resemblance to the Christmas scene in John Lewis’s window. Largely thanks to Gabby, her theatrical flatmate who loved to create dramatic scenes of wonderment, there were silver tinsel strands draped on every wall, fairy light curtains on the windows, and fake snow on every surface. There was also a huge real tree in the lounge that was so big, it blocked half the telly, but they didn’t care because it was beautifully bedecked in silver and white balls, and under it lay a pile of perfectly wrapped gifts, courtesy of a night with a bottle of wine, three rolls of wrapping paper, two reels of ribbon and a gift-wrapping tutorial on TikTok. On the radio, Mariah Carey was still demanding that all she wanted for Christmas was a big fat royalty cheque for the most over played festive song of all time.
Yet absolutely none of that mattered to Eve, who was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at her laptop screen again. Staring. Still staring. Just as she’d done for varying amounts of time since the results from the Ancestry DNA test had dropped in the day before.
‘You’re staring at it again,’ Gabby pointed out the obvious, as she passed a skinny soy latte in a reindeer mug to her.
‘I know. It’s because I still can’t quite believe it’s true.’ Eve took the coffee and, without breaking her gaze on the screen, spooned several sugars from the bowl in the middle of the kitchen table into the mug. She didn’t have to look up to know that Gabby would be rolling her eyes at the sugar consumption. Her friend’s mission to get her on to a lactose-free, gluten-free, vegan, yoga-bendy, Pilates-crunching, paragon-of-health lifestyle had just fallen at the first hurdle of the day. For the 2007th day in a row. Eve decided she’d be better tomorrow. For the 2007th day in a row. ‘I mean, why wouldn’t she tell me? Why wouldn’t anyone tell me? Merry Christmas, Eve – your gift is a different dad. Hope you love it.’
Gabby sat down on the pine bench on the other side of their kitchen table and pulled the knees of her green and red stripy Grinch pyjamas up to her chest. ‘Maybe no one knows. You might be one of those stories that they make Netflix documentaries about – swapped at birth and it’s only discovered twenty-nine years later, when the person needs some kind of transplant – and bam!’ Gabby’s flair for the dramatic was ramping up. ‘They find out that the parents aren’t a match because they don’t share any DNA. Then they reveal there was a mix-up in a maternity ward because a doctor had worked an eighteen-hour shift and was so tired that she confused the wrist tags. I think you need to check if anyone famous had a kid on the same day you were born. I’ve always thought you bear a weird resemblance to Nicole Kidman. Only shorter and with a greater fondness for calories.’
Eve took a sip of her coffee and waited until her teeth stopped aching from the sweetness of it. She usually only took two sugars. Must have been distracted again. ‘Thank you. I think. Although the chances of Nicole Kidman giving birth twenty-nine years ago in a Glasgow hospital are pretty slim, so I’m thinking there’s probably a more logical explanation.’
‘You’re right!’ Gabby leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘You were stolen. From the hospital. Your mother, Saint Helena of the Holy Humour Bypass, ramraided a maternity ward and escaped with you in her Prada backpack.’
‘Oh no she didn’t.’
‘Oh yes she did.’
The non-Kidman-like dimples on Eve’s cheeks deepened as she smiled. ‘I thought we agreed no more panto references.’
Gabby, a half-American, half-Scottish actress, was playing Cinderella in the Christmas pantomime in Glasgow’s Kings Theatre, her biggest role since moving to Scotland from Los Angeles almost six years before, so the last few weeks had been peppered with the traditional panto hollers of ‘He’s behind you’ and ‘oh no, you didn’t’. And yes, Eve had pointed out the irony of an aspiring actress moving from Hollywood to Glasgow and landing an acting gig. After growing up in California, Gabby had originally come on an extended trip to spend time with her Scottish dad, who’d returned to his homeland after a holiday romance in the eighties had resulted in a twenty-year marriage, two adult children and an amicable divorce. While Gabby was visiting, she’d made a spontaneous decision to audition for a job in a TV campaign, landed the role and had never left. A few months in, she’d signed with a talent agency in Glasgow, immediately clicked with her booking agent, one Eve Quinn, and shortly afterwards, moved into Eve’s spare room.
Five years later, Gabby’s résumé now included several commercials, a few plays, a couple of bit parts in Scottish crime shows and – oh yes, she did – four pantos under her belt.
Of course, it had helped that Eve had her finger on the pulse of every acting, singing and extra role north of Carlisle. Gabby immediately became her priority client, a status that arose from both her absolute belief in Gabby’s talent, and her absolute requirement to have half the rent paid on their second-floor flat in the Merchant City area of Glasgow’s city centre every month.
The wild, messy bun on the top of Gabby’s head wobbled as she nodded. ‘You’re right, we did agree to stop with the panto references. And just to digress from your whole ‘who’s the daddy’ situation’ for a second, can I just tell you that I’ve explained the concept of a panto to my mother every year since I got here, and she still doesn’t get it,’ she mused, changing the subject as she often did. Gabby’s attention span ran at an average of thirty seconds per subject, unless it involved movies, TV shows, job opportunities or Michael B. Jordan.
‘What did you go with this year?’ Eve asked her, amused to hear Gabby’s latest explanation of pantos to her American mum.
Gabby sighed. ‘A traditional British family Christmas theatre comedy show, based on fairy tales, that encourages audience participation. Something in my mum’s Malibu psyche blocks her from comprehending that it could be fun. She says it sounds like her worst nightmare.’
‘It’s my worst nightmare too,’ Eve replied. ‘Well, almost. Apart from, you know… discovering that the man you thought was your dad is most definitely not your dad. Oh, and sorry to debunk your theory but I wasn’t stolen, because a couple of people on the list of DNA connections share the same surnames as my great grandparents on my mum’s side, so Helena definitely popped me out of her womb. Nicole Kidman will be crushed.’
Eve’s gaze we
Or rather, it wasn’t there.
She’d done the DNA test at the same time as her twenty-two-year-old half-brother, Angus. Or at least, he was her half-brother before this test had proved otherwise. Angus and his twin, Felix, were her dad’s sons with Annabel, the woman he’d left her mum for twenty-five years ago, barely four years after Eve was born. Angus had done the test out of curiosity because he was studying genetics at university. Eve had joined in the experiment partly so they could compare results and partly because she’d watched a whole series of Long Lost Family and was interested in finding out if she was second cousin twice removed to someone interesting. Maybe royalty. Or a serial killer. Or Delilah, the old lady who lived upstairs and banged on the floor if they spoke in anything louder than a whisper.
When the results had dropped yesterday, she’d fully expected to see Angus Quinn’s name at the top of the results, with the highest DNA commonality, but nope, no sign of him. Or any of their cousins on that side of the family. In fact, on the paternal side of the family, there were only a few names and she didn’t recognise any of them.
She’d waited for the shock to wear off, then emailed the top one through the message function on the website. Bethany Muldoon. Location, Glasgow. Relationship: second-third cousin, paternal side.
Dear Bethany, I’ve just received my DNA results and discovered that we’re related on my father’s side of the family. It’s quite a surprise, as I wasn’t aware of your branch of the family tree.
Not exactly full disclosure, but she didn’t want to scare the woman off with a shouty, all capitals, WHO THE BUGGER ARE YOU??????
No reply yet, but Eve was living in hope, with just a slight touch of trepidation over the potential serial killer link.
Gabby reached for her toast. ‘Have you told Angus yet?’
The very thought of that was enough to make Eve want to lie down in a dark room until her twenty-two-year-old brothers were in their thirties. She truly hoped it wouldn’t damage her relationship with them. Angus and Felix were really good guys and she loved them dearly. Growing up, the age difference had left them with little in common, but since they’d hit legal drinking age, she’d met up with them at least a couple of times a month for dinner in one of the many student pubs in the West End, usually when they were skint and hungry because they’d blown their monthly allowance on pub crawls. It was worth paying the bill every time, for the laughs and the fact that it gave her warm and bubbly flashbacks to her carefree student days. On the last outing, they’d told her their plans for Christmas. And nope, her dad hadn’t invited her to join them.
She hadn’t even wrapped her head around how this news would change that dynamic, or her relationship with her father. Or ex-father. Former father. Every cell in her brain groaned at the enormity of that thought. Not that she was a daddy’s girl. The stark reality was that they weren’t even close. Like her mum, her dad had always been a workaholic, and he’d had little or no interest in parenting her. She’d seen him one Sunday a fortnight when she was growing up, and even then, he’d frequently come up with a reason to cancel. Their relationship had been… perfunctory. Yep, that was the word. At some point in her teens, it occurred to Eve that she should mind, but her grandparents – her mum’s parents – had always provided all the love, support and time she could ever want, so it hadn’t felt like a huge loss in her life. Still, the very thought of all the family ties that would have to be unravelled filled her with dread.
‘No. Angus and Felix are skiing in the South of France with my dad.’ For a fleeting second, she’d considered that the lack of genetic connection to her brother’s DNA could be due to Bruce not being the twins’ biological father. Maybe Annabel had a wild fling or was a secret swinger? But no. The answer to that was in any photograph of Bruce with his sons. The boys had his build, his height, his shoulders, and more importantly, younger versions of his face. There was no mistaking the biological link there. Thankfully, the physical side was where the similarities ended. Her brothers were much more fun, more loving and took themselves way less seriously than Bruce. ‘Anyway, I feel like I need some answers before I go charging in with truths that’ll get me struck off the Christmas card list. Problem is, I’m not sure where I’ll find them.’
‘Can you really not ask your mum?’
‘Gabby, did you not just call her St Helena of the Holy Humour Bypass?’ Eve wasn’t quite sure when they’d coined that nickname, but it was so apt that it stuck. Her mum was one of the top criminal defence solicitors in the city. It wasn’t a role that was typically associated with witty repartee or a barrel full of laughs so Helena’s dry, serious personality was perfect for the job. ‘She barely admits to having had sex even once, in order to have me. There’s no way she’ll talk to me about this. And I’m not even going to attempt to broach it, today of all days. She’s already miffed because she’s having her usual pre-birthday breakfast with me and Gran this morning. I think she assumed she’d get out of it because Gran is moving house today. If I question her, she’ll flounce off in a huff and I won’t see her until Easter, and even then, Gran will have to negotiate a ceasefire. I just… I just can’t believe this. I mean, bits of it, sure. My dad went through three wives before the last one, so he doesn’t exactly have a track record of stability, but my mum…? When you told her I had a friends-with-benefits deal with Sonny, she had to have a large sherry and watch back-to-back episodes of The Good Fight to calm herself down.’
Gabby’s avocado toast halted a few inches from her mouth, ‘Again, sorry about that. Forgot my filter that day.’
‘You mean that year.’
It was impossible to be mad at Gabby for spilling her relationship secrets, although talking about Sonny had just given Eve yet another reason to sigh. She would see him today when he came to pick up the keys for Gran’s old house and deliver the keys for her new home at the same time. He’d been the estate agent who’d sold Gran’s home for her and negotiated the purchase of the place she’d bought, so he was doing her a favour by sorting out the key swap. It wasn’t usually part of the service – normally the keys for houses that were bought and sold in Scotland were dropped off or collected from estate agents or solicitor’s offices – but he’d offered, and Eve was grateful that it gave her one less thing to do. Although, that was before they’d got into a highly contentious discussion about the status of their relationship a few days ago. It had ended with Sonny giving her an ultimatum – and she still wasn’t sure what her answer would be.
Eve lifted her mug again, and this time she must have been in the motion sensor zone for their Christmas aviary section, because the family of battery-operated, furry, singing penguins on the kitchen sideboard suddenly burst into life, shaking their feathers while belting out ‘We Wish You A Merry Christmas’.
‘Why have I never got a catapult when I need one? The World Wildlife Fund would have me cancelled if they knew what I wanted to do to those birds,’ Gabby sighed.
‘I enjoyed them for the first week, but they’re wearing thin,’ Eve murmured, distracted, still staring at the page in front of her – Bethany Muldoon. Location: Glasgow. ‘And you can’t hurt them. You’re a vegan.’
‘True. I say we switch them off forever or donate them to your gran. A house-warming present,’ Gabby suggested, tossing her wild mane of ebony waves, a gift from her African-American mum and Italian-Scottish dad, over one shoulder. Eve suddenly realised that she was no longer entirely sure of the origin of her own vibrant red, poker straight locks. She clicked open the ethnicity tab at the top of the screen to see a pie chart that explained her heritage was 62 per cent Scottish and 38 per cent Irish. That wasn’t much of a surprise or a help. Her gran, Cathy, had Irish relatives and most of the population of the West of Scotland had at least a few ancestors who hailed from the Emerald Isle.
