Daily Flash Fiction Challenge

No Regrets

The wind blew off the English Channel and chilled Jeremy to the bone. It was as he always remembered it.
A seaside town in winter with grey skies and grey angry seas.
He shook his head and wondered why he had made the trip.
It was nostalgia.
The need to justify the decisions he had made as a young man to leave these shores forever.
He stared at the block of flats that now stood where his family home and his neighbours houses had once been.
There was a lady in the window of a ground level flat staring at him from behind her curtains.
Jeremy smiled back.
She waved and then she was at her front door calling out to him.
“Can I help you Love?” she said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude,” he replied.
“You look lost,” she said. “Are you alright?”
Jeremy nodded and crossed the road. He pulled out a photo from his thick overcoat.
He held it out for her.
“That’s me when I was sixteen sitting on my first motorbike.”
The lady looked at the photo. It was a view looking down the road towards the seaside with a young man sitting on a motorbike.
“Is that here?”
Jeremy nodded. “Yes. A long time ago before the developers moved in.”
“It looked a nice house,” she said staring at the photo.
Jeremy smiled. “It was. But it’s nice to see you have a beautiful flat and you’re close to the beach and the shops.”
She dropped her gaze momentarily before looking up at Jeremy and forced a weak smile.
“It is nice. Just a long way from my son. He moved to New Zealand.”
It was Jeremy’s turn to feel ashamed. He’d done the same to his mother many years before.