A Perfect Christmas by Lynda Page Page A

attention. Confident that Neil would too, that was how Cait always acted with him.
    Five months into their relationship, one evening while they were at a Chinese restaurant, she’d misconstrued a comment Neil made and believed he had asked her to marry him. When Cait broke the news to her parents on arriving home that evening, she had hoped that for the first time ever they would find it possible to lend her some support, especially her mother. Perhaps Nerys would help her organise her big day, like other mothers were delighted to do? Instead, while her father sat coddled warmly in a blanket on the sofa, never taking his eyes off the television, her mother’s reaction was to offer lukewarm congratulations, tell Cait not to expect any help from her as all her time was commandeered by caring for her husband, and then return to reading her book. There was no mention of their contributing to the wedding or how much money she could spend on her special day. This troubled Cait. She wasn’t in any position to fund it on her wages and nor could she expect Neil or his family to pay for it. This customarily fell to the parents of the bride, as far as she was aware. She therefore assumed her parents would step in.
    It wasn’t until the bills started to arrive a month or so later that a fuming Nerys informed her daughter that she had no right whatsoever to be spending money that wasn’t hers. Just because she had decided to get married did not mean her parents would automatically pay for everything. Thanks to her selfishness a trip to a special clinic in Switzerland, which would greatly have improved her father’s poor health, would now have to be put on hold. Nerys didn’t seem to consider the fact that Cait had known nothing of this planned trip. But at least she wasn’t ordered to cancel all her purchases. Thankfully the ceremony and reception were paid for, her dress and the bridesmaids’ dresses, the flowers and transport. Cait strongly suspected this was because her mother would not run the risk of diminishing herself in the eyes of several high-class business people in town by cancelling her daughter’s orders.
    She became so wrapped up in the arduous task of perfecting her wedding preparations without any help from her mother or her two friends, who always seemed to be busy, and also trying her best to finance these little extra touches out of what little she had left from her own weekly wage once she had paid her dues at home, that she had failed to notice her intended husband was becoming increasingly preoccupied and distant from her as the date for their wedding drew closer.
    Learning that the man she loved and had planned to spend the rest of her life with didn’t feel the same about her was devastating enough for Cait, without the terrifying prospect of being thrust out into the world to fend for herself on top of it. The only morsel of hope she’d had left was that, despite his denial, Neil was in fact suffering from pre-wedding nerves and might be regretting his actions. So after she’d left the church Cait had gone round to his house, in the hope of a reconciliation.
    It was his mother who answered the door to her. Neil had asked her to pass on a message if Cait turned up as he didn’t want a direct confrontation with her. She was told that he had nothing more to say to her and that he’d meant what he’d said in the church. His mother sounded sincere and there was a sympathetic look in her eyes when she told Cait to make it easy on herself and accept her son’s decision, as he had asked her to.
    Cait was in total shock as she made her way home afterwards, dragging one foot after the other, unable to understand why he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with her. Hadn’t she done enough to prove to him that she would look after him, run his house for him, take on all the stresses and strains of everyday life by dealing with them herself, just like her mother did for her father? She couldn’t