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THE KITCHEN YIELDED little information other than that Mary liked PG Tips and full fat milk. She wasn’t much of a cook, apparently, since the cupboards were filled with tins of soup and spaghetti.

Ash sucked on her teeth and made her way upstairs.

She wasn’t completely alright with this digging around, she realized. She was self-aware enough to understand that her discomfort came from the fact that she’d hate anyone digging through her own things. The very thought of it made her shudder.

But then what would that somebody find?

She thought of her own neat flat. Books on the shelves, computer on its table, ready meals in the freezer. She wasn’t exactly giving much away, was she?

That was how she liked it though. She’d never been one for other people, not really. She was comfortable in her own skin, comfortable alone, and that was that. She was indisputably the polar opposite of her mother, something that Ash was satisfied with and her mother was bemused by. But Ash didn’t need a parade of men in and out of her life to make her feel like she was beautiful or something.

In fact, beautiful didn’t factor into her life at all.

If she had to think about beautiful, she supposed she’d think of someone like Pen next door, with her blond curls and her luscious curves and her bright smile. That was beauty. Ash herself was just… stringy.

There was a set of pictures on the mantlepiece, the same woman appearing in a few of them, enough times that Ash assumed it had to be Mary. She grinned. Mary was stringy too, all long legs and narrow hips, more masculine than she might have cared for. Or maybe not, maybe she liked the androgyny.

Ash frowned at the picture. How did a woman like this end up owning a romance bookshop?

She put the picture carefully back in its place and started opening cupboards and pulling out drawers.

But after an hour she’d found nothing more incriminating than a secret stash of crime novels, which she supposed a romance bookseller might consider contraband.

She sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. There was little here that let her know who Mary really was. She eyed the hatch to the attic and her back groaned in protest.

It was late, the attic would have to wait for another day. It was time to open a tin of spaghetti and start winding down for the night.

There was plenty of spaghetti in the kitchen cupboard, and Ash heated it up in a pan on the stove. While it was heating she went into the bookshop, the cat was nowhere to be seen. She sucked on her teeth as she looked around, before finally selecting a book from a shelf marked ‘Our Bestsellers.’ It had a bird on the cover. That couldn’t be too bad, she figured.

Almost as an afterthought, she grabbed a couple more biscuits on her way back to the kitchen.

“GET THAT CAT out of here,” Ash said when she came down in the morning to find George feeding the animal.

“He lives here,” pointed out George.

“Well, he needs to not live here. Either he moves in with that woman next door or he goes to the rescue center,” said Ash, putting the kettle on for coffee.

She watched as George stroked the cat and had a thought. “You must have known Mary pretty well.”

“As well as anyone else,” George said.

“So what was she like?”

He smiled. “Fun, smart, loving. She was kind and had a good word for everyone.”

“Sounds like a veritable saint,” Ash said, thinking that Mary might have looked slightly like her but was apparently her opposite when it came to personality. She poured water over instant coffee and went out into the shop.

Light streamed through the windows and the sign on the door was turned to open.

“Um, what’s happening here?”

George had followed her but now he stopped. “What do you mean?”

“We’re open?”

“Aren’t we?” he asked. He started to flush. “I mean, I sort of assumed when you said you wanted me to work, and well, maybe I shouldn’t have, but then, what’s the point of a shop that’s not open?”

“It’s not quite my shop yet,” Ash said thoughtfully. She sniffed. “You’ve got a point though. A closed shop makes no money. We’ll be open for now.”