The Last Train Home

Chapter Forty-Four

"I was bored." He shrugged and looked down at the puzzle and the piece I had in hand. "Although clearly not as bored as you."

"It's actually quite fun."

"You keep telling yourself that." He laughed and scratched Goose behind the ears. She had got up the moment she saw him.

"For that, you can come and help," Jonathan said. "If you want Sybil to be allowed to continue working on the treehouse, then we have to get this finished today."

I stared at Jonathan. "Do I get a say in that?"

"Nope."

"Might as well, I have nothing else to do."

Alec crossed the room and joined us on the floor, Goose following him and sitting beside him in the hopes that she could get some more head scratches. He collected a handful of pieces and started to turn them over in the hopes he could have an immediate match with the spaces still left. None of them fit and he ended up dropping them to the floor with a dejected look on his face. For someone who didn't think it would be that fun, he certainly looked disappointed not to find an immediate match.

It didn't take Alec too long to become as absorbed in the work as the rest of us had over the past week. He too dug through the piles of pieces in the hopes of finding matching ones and before too long had started to make a decent amount of headway on his section. Barbara joined us not long after, settling down on the floor and grabbing her own collection of pieces to try and match them together.

We worked in silence with no one feeling the need to talk unless we were passing pieces to one another that we thought might match the other person's section. Goose had laid down beside Alec in protest about not getting any more head scratches, but at least she had stopped trying to run away with the pieces which made construction a little easier.

"I'm surprised your father is alright with you being here, Alec. Aren't there a fair amount of chores on the farm to complete now that your brothers are away?" Barbara said, bringing a tray of tea over to us all. She had decided to make tea since she was starting to lose feeling in her legs from sitting for so long.

"He's fine with it; there isn't much to do on the farm." Alec shrugged, but I noticed a slight change in his facial expression. "Dad managed to hire a farmhand who had been declared unfit to serve."

"That's a good idea. I can't imagine there are too many young men around here that were declared unfit," Jonathan said, "otherwise I might have to steal his idea.

"What do you need a farmhand for? You have me."

"True. You're cheaper than a farmhand too, we don't need to pay you."

"About that-"

"We pay you in food and with a roof over your head, young lady," Barbara said.

I laughed. "Just kidding. What exactly would I spend money on anyway?"

Barbara pulled a face and took a sip from her mug before turning back to the puzzle pieces scattered around her. I glanced at Alec who appeared a little more relaxed now that the topic of conversation had been moved away from him and his lack of work on the Thompson farm. In truth, I didn't care all that much about whether I got paid for the work on the farm, I just wanted the conversation to change direction for Alec's sake.

We hadn't spoken about his distinct lack of work on the farm since our trip to the clearing a few weeks before and I hadn't probed any further. If Alec didn't want to talk about it, then that was fine with me and I wasn't going to press him for information that he clearly didn't want to disclose. Maybe he would talk about it one day, maybe he wouldn't, but that was up to him. We might have been friends, but we were allowed to have secrets - although it did feel like Alec knew almost everything about me.