Maja Nord
She often wondered if she would have married Tommaso De Luca if they had been alive. She shuddered-probably not. The man had ruined her life.
And how!
Maja chewed her lip grimly.
He had turnd out to be a low life slim ball.
And then she wryly smiled as she looked at the young people sleeping haphazardly, sprawled ungainly on the seats beside her.
Well, not exactly. She had two amazing kids in her life because of that rotter.
Madelyn Burns, her eleven-year-old daughter, was the one who was constantly questioning all the norms around her, eager to know more, challenging, and inquisitive to a fault. She sighed as she glanced over at her son, the fifteen-year-old Magnus. Even in sleep, he had his headphones on, his perpetual petulant scowl having vanished from his face, making him look handsome, she thought sadly, her heart wrenching. The boy was lanky and slim, and like his sister, both of them had inherited their father’s coloring. Sleek black hair and the burning black eyes that could sparkle with charm and turn hard with anger …
Shuddering, she sat up as Grace’s soft voice interrupted her thoughts.
“So you are going to be staying at Hollowford, right?’ Maja nodded in reply.
” I have managed to get a small place a little away from the school.”
After finally getting the divorce, all she had wanted was to put as much distance between herself and her abusive husband. So she had grabbed the chance to work at a school in a remote little town in Central USA.
Her friends in San Francisco had tried to stop her:
‘You might be going to a hill-billy kind of place,’ warned Samuel Wanes, her close friend and colleague at the school she had been working at in the small town tucked away a few hours away from Milton Town. But she had been desperate. She wanted to flee from her ex-husband and if that meant going to the other end of the world, so be it.
*
Tommas with his goings-on connected to the underworld in the streets of San Francisco, had scarred her for life. He had been a foot soldier in a small-time gang on the streets of the town she had been made to shift to following the demise of her parents. rebellious at the turbulent age of sixteen, and used as she was to her parent’s freewheeling style of bringing her up, where she had been given her freedom and not constantly tripped up and pulled up for small faults, she had hated every minute of her new life in England under the stern eyes of her spinster aunt, her father’s sister.
Goaded to rebellion, she began to spend more time in the small pubs, working as a waitress in the local pub, flirting and enjoying the power of her bright good looks and effervescent nature. And Tommas had walked into the pub one day with his mates, his eyes had fallen on her and he became a regular.
The handsome Italian who was a few years older than her but who walked with a swagger and was obviously smitten by her, made her imagine she was in love with him. Soon, she was pregnant. Her aunt had been livid and had thrown her out of the house. Tommas had reluctantly agreed to marry her when she had begged him, tears in her bright blue eyes.
It was only then that she discovered that Tommaso was just a man who moved from one woman to another. Making a commitment was alien to his nature. Soon after Magnus was born, she was forced to take up a job as a salesgirl, to make ends meet. Her husband was away on long spells and not really happy to be tied down to one woman. But she continued to wait, and had even become pregnant with Maddy , imagining that a larger family would create strings to tie him down.
Nothing of the sort happened, she thought bitterly, sighing as she leaned back into the soft upholstery of the aircraft’s seat.
The man had become abusive, using his fists to ‘tame’ her as he put it. She had cowered before him as he became more violent. Of course, Tommaso was still a gangster, low down in the chain but when she saw how he was spending his earnings on other women, she had finally taken a decision.
Tomasso was a devout Christian and divorce was not on the cards for him. It was something that had attracted her to him in the early days of their courtship for her parents had been atheists. But she soon realised that his religion was a sham for Tommaso.
When she had asked for a divorce, he had beaten her up brutally and she had been taken to the hospital but for the first time, she had stood her ground. And finally, with the support of her friends, she had got it.
But her children had not taken the decision well. Magnus looked up to his father and hated her for what he said was, ‘leaving Dad.’ Maddy was angry at having to leave her life, her friends, and everything familiar to shift to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. It had been the first school to respond to her frantic job application and she had jumped at it.
In desperation, as she knew Tommaso would use every weapon he could think of, to turn her children against her, she had grabbed the opportunity to take up a teaching job at this out-of-the-way little city in the US.
As far away as she could get from Tommaso.
She sighed as the announcement for putting on the seatbelts was made as the plane prepared to land. Glancing across at her children, she saw that Magnus was awake, scowling as he stared out of the window. Maddy was straining to look outside over her irritated brother’s shoulder.
What would life throw at her next, she thought with a sigh.