Cherry Blossom Dreams Read Online Free Page A

old lady’s son is ready to sell his childhood home at all. If he wasn’t a friend of Miranda’s, I doubt we’d be wasting our time having it on the market at this price, but Miranda thinks we might get him to see sense in the end and she doesn’t want to miss out.’
    ‘Why doesn’t he come back and live here himself if he loves it that much?’ I asked. ‘He could totally do it up and make it really beautiful again!’ (Mum and I are both big fans of all those home improvement programmes on TV, where you see them doing up all sorts of neglected houses.)
    ‘He’s been living in Canada for a good ten years now, according to Miranda. Came back for his mother’s funeral and to sort out the house and put it on the market. Miranda says he needs to sell it but he’s just not quite ready to let it go.’
    I followed Mum up the wide Victorian staircase with its beautiful carved wooden banister rail, and we found the open window on the landing. There was a lovely oak window seat and I thought how, if I lived here, I’d have scatter cushions on the seat and sit there whenever I wanted to have some quiet time all on my own. I imagined myself as a Victorian girl in a beautiful long dress sitting in the window seat, doing embroidery, or wearing an even grander gown of the finest silk and lace, sweeping down the staircase towards the ballroom where all my guests awaited me.
    Normally Mum lets me look around with her if a house is empty and we don’t have anywhere else we have to be, but that day when I asked her she said that she just wanted to go straight home.
    And when we got home she went upstairs to her bedroom, where she closed the curtains and lay on the bed with the radio turned up loud so we wouldn’t hear her crying about Married Michael.
    Mum had elected not to get up at all the following morning and I was really taken aback when Sean announced that he had a surprise for me. It turned out he had ‘borrowed’ Mum’s set of keys to Blossom House. ‘Let’s go back and take a proper look inside without Mum,’ he suggested.
    ‘Oh, Sean, I don’t think –’
    ‘It’ll be fun and we’re not doing any harm. Come on. It’s better than having to stay in the same house with Mum at the moment. Every time I come home I feel like somebody just died.’
    Sean was right – being at home with Mum was pretty depressing.
    ‘What if someone finds out?’
    ‘Even if they do, I don’t reckon anyone will care. The guy who owns it is in another country, Miranda never goes there and Mum doesn’t care about anything right now except Michael.’ He grinned as he added, ‘Come on, Sasha. Blossom House is lonely and unwanted. Who better than you and me to give it some love?’
    I know that we were only ten then, and you wouldn’t normally expect two ten-year-olds to go and explore an empty house all by themselves, but back then Sean and I did a lot of stuff without Mum and had already learned to be quite independent. Sometimes Mum was so tired she forgot about dinner, so Sean and I got quite good at making beans on toast or scrambled eggs, or else we’d take Mum’s purse and go round the corner to pick up chips for all of us. Our primary school was really close, which meant we could get there and back by ourselves quite easily. So going to Blossom House without Mum didn’t feel that weird.
    And it wasn’t as if she noticed when we kept going back.
    Over time I had swept and polished up all the wooden floors and cleaned some of the windows. Last summer I’d got some cushions from the charity shop and made a cosy nook in the window seat. Afterwards, the big main room looked particularly beautiful whenever the sun shone in through the huge sash windows – not that Mum ever noticed on her brief visits to check up on the place.
    Now Blossom House sort of felt as if it belonged to us.
    ‘I’m coming with you,’ I told Sean firmly. We hadn’t been since we’d got back from Greece and maybe the cherry blossom would be