This chapter takes place the day after John and Mary's wedding. For an account of the wedding itself, see "When Mary Changed Her Mind", in which you will glimpse just how much influence Harry has over her brother's opinion of himself. Also see the second chapter of "To Hold Her Heart" to find out about the "entertainment" provided at the wedding reception. And for a peek into the Watsons' honeymoon, as well as an inkling of why they were made for each other, read "A Dream of Rain."

000

Harry spent the evening before John's wedding getting completely legless while listening to old CD's playing maudlin American blues ballads. Her own wedding had been such a joyous affair, and John had flown all the way back from Iraq for it and had seemed so pleased for her; and Clara had been so lovely and happy; and Harry had been sober for six long months by that time and had actually felt pleased and lovely and happy, too, for the first time since her dad had died.

But it hadn't lasted, had it? Because nothing good lasts in this life for a Watson. Mum had lost Dad, hadn't she, at such a young age? Harry and John were still in their teens when they lost their parents. Harry had lost Clara to a moment of utter madness after only six years. And John—well, hadn't he lost every girl he'd ever dated? Why did he believe this would last? She had said as much to him earlier that day when he called to ask her once again to come with Annie, Joe, and Charlotte to his wedding.

"Why should I come and watch my brother make a fool of himself over a girl half his age?" she had demanded impatiently. "She's a young, beautiful, and apparently intelligent child according to you—why should she throw her life away on a broken-down old soldier whose best years are behind him? She thinks she's in love with you now, but you know it's just a romantic crush on a public figure. She'll leave you sooner or later, just like everyone else always does. Please, John, don't put yourself through hell like I did! Drop the silly little bitch now before it's too late!"

And John had sighed and said, "Have it your own way, then, Harry. We'll be three weeks in the Med for our honeymoon, but I'll call you after we get back."

That should have been that. But then Harry had called Mary.

She had saved the number from when Mary had called her, and now in a last ditch effort to save her little brother from heartbreak and legal entanglement and alimony and public humiliation, she used it. And she lost her temper and called the little slag a number of unpleasant names and made quite a few threats.

"I'm so sorry you feel that way, dear," Mary had said, sounding so genuinely sad that Harry could almost have believed she really was as gracious as she seemed to be. "I do hope that once we get to know each other, you will think better of me. I promise you, though, that I'm not going anywhere. I will never leave John and I will never hurt him. Never, ever."

Unfortunately, John had been with Mary when Harry called and had overheard Harry's perhaps excessively loud tirade. He had taken the phone from his bride-to-be and let loose a stern censure of his own.

"You can say anything you like to me, Harry," he told her firmly, "but I will not allow you to abuse Mary in any way. Until you've decided to be civil to her and accept her as my wife, I have nothing further to say to you. It's up to you." And with that, he rang off.

John had always forgiven her for things, no matter how angry he was. He had forgiven her for trying to sell the house behind his back and for wasting his money on useless rehab and for never answering his letters while he was in the army and for never visiting him in hospital. He had even apparently, forgiven her for trying to take his life. But she had crossed a line at last, it seemed. He would not forgive her for shouting at his precious Mary.

000

Harry spent her brother's wedding day curled up in bed with a hangover and her own dark thoughts. Her conversation with Sherlock six weeks earlier had weighed greatly on her mind. However much she had told herself that she had been acting for her brother's own good that horrible day when he had arrived home from the war, she knew deep down that she had just lost her mind and acted on impulse alone. She had never allowed herself to think about it afterwards, but Sherlock had forced her to face the facts: if she had succeeded in disconnecting John's life support, she would not have spared him from a life of useless misery as she had thought to do. He would have just been dead, instead of recovering spectacularly and going on to forge a wonderful new life for himself as he had done. She had not had enough faith in him.

While her brother's wedding ceremony was being conducted, Harry sat alone in her little house and pondered all that had happened in the days after John had been stabbed and tried to understand what all it meant. She had stayed in London for a week, Sherlock's accusation ringing in her ears the entire time, while John was still in hospital. She connived always to avoid running into Mary. However, someone was always with John; she was never alone with him. And on that last day, she had approached the room to hear DI Lestrade's distinctive, gravelly, compassionate voice saying,

"Must've been damned difficult, growing up with a mentally ill sister."

And Harry had frozen in place just outside the open door, out of their line of sight, unable not to listen.

Thus she heard John's quiet reply, "She wasn't always like this, you know. I mean, she's been anxious since I can remember—she'd be paralyzed with fright sometimes or would melt down into a panic attack. Most of the time, though, I remember her being sweet, fun to play games with, and always drawn to beautiful things. But then my dad was killed when she was ten and she went a bit mad. Needed to feel in control of everything after that." His voice was strained, still weak from his wound and the infection he'd been fighting off all that week.

Lestrade made sympathetic noises and offered his friend some water.

"Looking back now, though," her brother went on thoughtfully after a few moments, "I realize that the narcissistic tendencies were always there. One just doesn't notice them in a child."

The DI chuckled pleasantly. "All the little monsters think the world revolves 'round them, yeah?" he agreed.

John hmm'ed and went on. "So maybe it just became more noticeable then, I don't know. I was only eight at the time."

"Did your mum try to get help for her?"

"Not that I know of. But this is all me looking back on it, you know. At the time, I was only a kid, and it was just the way things were. One doesn't question things that seem normal to you. I suppose it just seemed normal to Mum, too. Harry had been that way her whole life—just a personality trait as far as anyone who'd always known her was concerned. Then, after Mum died, Harry lost the plot entirely for a while. But I was only sixteen—had no idea how to help her. I just kept doing what Mum always did: anything to keep the peace. Sherlock says I'm a classic enabler."

Lestrade laughter bubbled over. "No kidding! Even I worked that one out, mate!" he said affectionately. "But now that you know better, I suppose you've tried to get her the help she needs."

John sighed his patented sigh. "She doesn't believe she needs psychotherapy. And I can't make her go against her will. Clara tried, too—her wife, you know—with no more success than I. So she self-medicates with alcohol and actually functions pretty well most of the time. Her art calms her and gives her focus. She managed all right all the while I was in the army and things stayed pretty much the same for years on end. But any change in her life puts her into a right tail-spin. My getting shot and Clara leaving her set her back a lot. And now that I'm getting married. . . ."

At this point, Harry had walked away from the door. She had gone to the station and got on a train and fled to her lovely little yellow cottage and had not seen John again. But distance and drink could not drown out his words.

Of course, he'd mentioned psychotherapy to her a great many times over the years, but she'd always taken it as a pointless insult. Hearing him talk of it in solemn tones to his friend as if it were reasonable seemed entirely different, as if it were really a valid option.

000

The day after the wedding, Harry got up and dressed and had a light breakfast and headed off to work. Life as usual. She would just go on with life as usual. She wouldn't let it matter that John wasn't speaking to her anymore. This would be like when John was stationed overseas for years at a time—she had done all right then and she would do all right now. The only difference would be that she would no longer receive letters or phone calls from him. She still had her home and her art and her job, and she would be fine. She stopped as she passed by her beloved willow trees and let her fingers gently run over the light green leaves. As long as the willows were here, she would be fine, wouldn't she?

"Ooo, Harry, you ought to have gone with us to the wedding!" was Harry's greeting when she arrived at the shop. Charlotte looked exactly like her mother had looked thirty years ago—just as fluffy and plain and sheeplike, but with short brown curls instead of white; however, she had her father's outgoing personality. "It was so much fun! In a lovely park, it was, and the reception was ever so exciting!"

"Weddings are always boring," Harry said sullenly. "Even my own wedding was boring. Yours was especially dull, Charlotte—all the usual nonsense for hours on end."

Annie's daughter and Harry had grown up together almost as sisters. Harry supposed the woman was as close to a best friend as she'd ever had, slow-witted though she was. Astoundingly, Charlotte had always found Harry's barbed tongue amusing and persisted in believing that her friend was saying these things in jest. Accordingly, she laughed at Harry's insult, her curls bobbing jovially.

"Quite right, you are. All the droning on and on, talk, talk, talk," Charlotte agreed good-naturedly. "But John's wedding ceremony was short and sweet, weren't it, Mum?"

"Very minimal," Annie nodded. "To the point. The reception was a simple picnic on the grass. So novel, but quite lovely. And Mary was a radiant bride. I've never seen our John so happy in all his life, the dear boy."

Harry frowned. "Happy now, of course. But you know how it always goes for him, don't you? Women adore him initially, but they always get tired of being second-place to his work," she sneered "She'll get fed up and leave soon enough, and our John will be broken-hearted." Our John, indeed. What did they know of her brother?

"Oh, but I don't think so, Harry!" Charlotte exclaimed. "She seems to be as interested in John's work as John is. There were some pickpockets in the park during the reception, and John and Sherlock took off chasing them—and there went little Mary, kicking off her shoes and racing after them, wedding dress notwithstanding, and a great smile on her face."

Annie chuckled mildly. "A bit of unusual entertainment for a wedding, but seemed fitting in their case. The area they were using for the reception was marked off in crime-scene tape, it was. So amusing."

Charlotte was enraptured by her own tale. "Back they came at last, the men dripping wet and muddy from going into the lake, and Mary covered with grass stains and her stockings all torn. And they were laughing together. John told me that Mary had knocked one of the pickpockets over and bloodied his nose for him. Not afraid of anything, our Mary."

So, our Mary, it was now, was it? "I'm going to organize a bit in the stock room, shall I?" Harry said abruptly and went through the door in the back of the shop.

The stockroom doubled as a break area, and Harry switched on the kettle and made herself a cuppa to steady her nerves. Life as usual might not be as easy to slip back into as she'd thought—not with Charlotte and Annie so enamoured of John's new wife. She sorted through paintings and unpacked some boxes and tried to keep John's words out of her mind.

"She doesn't believe she needs psychotherapy. . . .she self-medicates with alcohol and actually functions pretty well most of the time. . . .But any change in her life puts her into a right tail-spin. . . ."

The bell on the door tinkled and a familiar voice in the shop snapped Harry back into the present. "Hello, Annie. Hello, Char," a soft, Irish lilt wafted gently through the stockroom door.

"Clara, my dear. Fancy seeing you two days in a row. Come in, come in, love," Annie said warmly.

"Is Harry here?" It was the first time Harry had heard Clara's voice in two years. She had not seen her spouse since Clara had gone back to her childhood home in Dublin, right after John had been released from the hospital. They texted back and forth constantly, but phone calls and visits had never been considered. Neither had divorce. Their relationship was difficult to define.

"In the back," blabbed Charlotte, the traitor. "Go on, you know this shop as well as we do, eh? Good to have you back in the village!"

And so through the door slipped Clara, her black hair streaked with grey, her violet eyes flashing at Harry from under long, dark lashes. "Hello, Ree," she said, just as if she'd never left. "I'd hoped to see you at the wedding."

"And I told you not to go to the wedding," Harry retorted. "You know full well how this will all end."

"How could I not go to our lovely John's wedding?" Clara asked softly in her familiar, reasonable tone. "Been like a brother to me, he has, and he's one of my oldest friends. I'd not have got through uni but for him, and he's always been nothing but kind to me."

"I think you love him more than you love me," Harry muttered resentfully.

"Not more, Ree love, just longer," Clara's eyes laughed although her voice remained serious. "And he's a big boy, our John. He can take care of himself, you know he can."

She looked around at the paintings and drawings that hung on the walls of the stock room, waiting their turn for display in the shop. "There's the Ree I fell in love with, there. The girl who sees such beauty in the world and captures it so perfectly." She stopped at a version of the willows and reached up to touch it gently with reverent fingertips. "Remember all the picnics we had under those trees, Ree? The best times of my life were spent there."

"You're the one who left," Harry reminded her bitterly. "You're the one who ran away."

"I did," Clara nodded soberly. "I couldn't bear it, seeing you the way you were. Mood swings and alcohol I could manage—I knew all that about you when I married you. But the person you became when poor John was hurt. . . . I hadn't seen that side of you before. I couldn't bear to watch you self-destruct. You wouldn't get help for yourself, and I didn't know what else to do but leave. But you know I've missed you. I've told you that every day."

"What do you want?" Harry cried impatiently. "Why did you come here? Did John send you?"

Clara smiled wistfully. "I just told you I've missed you. I'd hoped to see you yesterday, but as you didn't come to the wedding I didn't want to go back to Dublin without seeing how you are."

"Well, I'm fine!" Harry snapped defiantly. "I didn't self-destruct after all, did I?"

"You didn't," Clara said fondly. "You're a strong, stubborn woman, Ree. As stubborn as any Watson. And I know you would never have really harmed our John; not if you were in your right mind. But you need to get help, you do. Come to Dublin with me, Ree."

Harry scoffed. "Dublin! Why would I do that?"

"This place," Clara swept her hand to indicate all of Old Alresford. "It's the village of enablers, it is. They all know you, they all look after you. You need a change. There's a centre I found near the surgery where I work. They have drug and alcohol rehab coupled with psychotherapy. You can live there for up to a year; then it's outpatient for as long as you need it. I could visit you as often as you like, and then you could live with me when you get out."

Six weeks ago, Harry would have found Clara's suggestion infuriating, patronizing, and utterly wrong. Today, she found herself listening in spite of herself. "Why would I want to do that?" she asked again, but without her usual fire.

"Just think about it, so," Clara said simply. "Say, I have to catch the train in a few hours. I'm due back at work tomorrow. Let's go get Joe to make us up a picnic lunch and we'll sit under our willow trees, for a lark."

Harry hesitated. It sounded tempting.

"Come on, for old time's sake," Clara coaxed.

Harry went.