Jill stood on the platform waiting for the train to arrive. She hadn’t been back in Boston for over a year, not since she fell out with her father. She thought about the falling out. How she hadn’t listened to him when he told her that Sam wasn’t the right guy for her. She had told him that at twenty four she could make up her own mind about what was right or wrong for her. It was only now, after Sam had cheated on her with another girl, that Jill understood her father had been right. That he only had her best interests at heart.
She wanted to apologize to him. She wanted to say sorry that she hadn’t been in touch and for excluding him from her life. When her mother had died suddenly it had torn Jill apart and even though it was six years ago she still felt guilty about having never told her mother that she loved her. She was determined when she met her father that she would tell him that she loved him.
She looked up at the clock on the platform. It was nine twenty-five. The train was due in five minutes. She was excited about meeting her sisters and her nieces again. Even though they had stayed in touch by phone she hadn’t seen any of them since she fell out with her father. She had bought presents for her nieces. Just some books but she hoped that they liked them. Mandy was bright and had already decided that she wanted to be an astronaut so Jill had bought her a picture book on the solar system. For Joan she had found it hard to decide what book to buy her because she tended to change her mind on a weekly basis about what she liked. So she decided on a book about all the animals you can find in the zoo.
Jill wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of her time with her family. She had told her boss that she was taking two weeks leave even though they were in the middle of an important product campaign. Going back to Boston meant too much to her. For the last ten months she had focused on her relationship with Sam. Purposely defying her father to prove to him that she could make up her own mind but in the last two months, since the split, she realized that family were too important. It was time to move on from Sam and reconnect with her family.
The train pulled alongside the platform and Jill edged herself closer to the white line. It was going to be a long journey. Four and a half hours but she knew that it was worth it. As she boarded the train she promised herself that she would never hold a grudge against anyone in her family again. She boarded the train and walked through the carriage sitting down by the window. She had one last thing to do before she arrived in Boston one more thing to let go of. She took her phone from her bag and searched her contacts till she came to Sam’s number. She knew that she could still remember his number without looking it up but she also knew that in time she’d forget it too. She pressed delete.
