Page 11

ELEVEN

Nina is dropping vegan croissants into the air fryer, wearing her business jacket (she had never owned a business jacket before Dad died, now she has a special one, dark blue with red-trimmed lapels, which she wears when she has to see people who are used to dealing with people who look professional).

Her phone buzzes and she picks it up distractedly, looks at the notification on her screen, and Ash sees a hot smile pass over her face.

Nick left only an hour ago. Ash had heard the click of the front door, then glanced out of her window to see Nick heading away in the direction of the train station.

Three nights he’d stayed in the end.

The whole weekend.

And now that air all through the house of sex and newness and hormones.

“Did you have a nice weekend?” Ash asks.

“Yes,” her mother replies softly, discreetly. “Yes. It was lovely.”

There’s a pert silence. It feels as if neither Ash nor her mother is breathing.

“Are you…,” Nina begins. She turns to face Ash, looks directly at her, and says, “Are you OK about it? About Nick?”

Ash shrugs and feels a little adrenaline spill into her blood. It’s not a confrontational question, but if she answers it truthfully, it could lead to a row. “I guess.” There’s another silence. Ash ends it by saying, “Are you… I mean—are you OK about it?”

Nina nods. “I am,” she says. “I mean, it’s very unexpected. Obviously. I thought I was still grieving. I am still grieving. I really, really am. My heart is still…” She exhales audibly as if she’s just been kicked in her gut. “It hurts, all the time…”

“Even when you’re with him?”

“Yes. Even when I’m with him. But it’s like… it’s almost like I have a new heart alongside the old one, and the new one is fresh and unused, and it can be excited to be with someone and enjoy them and want to get close. If that…” She pauses, looks up at Ash. “If that makes any sense?”

Ash nods. It does and it doesn’t. But she’s not going to question it. What does she know? She’s never been in love once, let alone twice. The only man she has ever loved is her father and he is dead. “So, is this going to be a regular thing now, do you think?”

“No idea,” Nina replies. “He says he wants to book a weekend away, maybe get the Eurostar to Lille? But I don’t know. He’s a very busy man. Hard to pin down. We’ll see.”

Ash feels a pulse of anger toward her mother. She broke her year of mourning her husband of twenty-eight years to spend the weekend shagging a man who may or may not be taking her to Lille. Ash doesn’t want to judge, but equally she expected more of her mother, a self-proclaimed feminist.

“So, you don’t know when you’ll be seeing him again?”

“No. But I’m sure it will be soon.”

“And do you definitely want to see him again?”

There it is. The really big question.

Her mother nods. “Yes,” she says. “I do. He makes me feel good. He makes me feel like… like there might be a part two? That my book didn’t end?”

“You know he lives in Tooting?”

“Yes. He told me that.”

“Wouldn’t you think someone like him would live somewhere a bit posher than that?”

“Yes, well, he’s having some financial problems with his wine bar, apparently. He did have a flat in Pimlico. But he had to give it up. The place in Tooting is just temporary.”

A red flag jumps into Ash’s consciousness.

Her father’s restaurant business is worth a lot of money, she is sure, as is this house, which her parents bought for nothing when they were young and this village was unfashionable.

Now her mother owns all three of her father’s restaurants as well as this house, and in many ways could be seen as something of a unicorn in the middle-aged singles market.

“Has he ever been married?”

“No. But he was engaged once. In his twenties. No children.”

Ash thinks of the tall, handsome man who spent the weekend in her mother’s bed, the man with the easy smile and the nice way about him, the man who smelled good and had neat cuticles and defined muscles and a brand-new haircut, and she thinks, Why has this man never been married? And why does he have no children?

“Hmm,” she says.

Nina raises an eyebrow at her. “Hmm what?”

“Nothing,” says Ash, taking the hot croissant her mother is passing her and then heading to the fridge to get her vegan spread. “Just looks like the sort of man who’d have had a family. Some kids. Seems strange.”

“The woman he was engaged to, the one he was going to marry and start a family with. She died.”

“Oh.” The sound leaves Ash’s mouth, sharp and dry. Suddenly Nick is thrown into relief. Not only does he have a good reason for being single, but he also has a reason other than her mother’s financial assets to want to be with her. They have their grief in common. “That’s really sad.”

“Yes,” Nina says. “It really is. Anyway…” She picks up her phone and looks at the time. “I need to run. I’ll be back this afternoon. I can bring you something for your dinner from the kitchen? Vegan burger, maybe? Or the vegan Halloumi thing you like?”

It’s what her dad used to do, bring her back treats from work.

“Just anything that looks good,” Ash says. “Thank you.”

Ash heads down the hill into the village at ten o’clock. Marcelline is just unlocking the shop as she arrives. “Good morning,” says Marcelline, her words leaving her mouth in clouds of icy breath. “How was your weekend?”

Ash shrugs and smiles. “It was OK,” she says. “How was yours?”

“Not so bad.”

The shop feels cold and unloved. It’s housed in a three-hundred-year-old building that sits on a corner and leaches all its heat out through gaps and cracks every weekend and then takes the whole of Monday to warm up again.

Marcelline plugs in the blow heater near the shop desk and turns it on, rubbing her hands together.

Ash takes off her coat and hangs it in the staff room at the back of the shop, fills the kettle and flicks it on.

“Mum’s got a boyfriend,” she calls out to Marcelline. “But…” Ash pauses, realizes she’s just said more than she should, that people want to know how Nina is getting on and that Marcelline might tell someone who’d inadvertently spread it around the whole village. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t.” Marcelline appears at the door of the staff room. “But that’s… good, isn’t it? It’s been…?”

“A year. And twenty days.”

“Well, that’s quite a long time. And your mother is a very vibrant woman, very warm. It doesn’t surprise me really that someone would have made a play for her. What’s he like?”

“He’s nice. I think.”

“Think?”

“Yes. I mean, I was the one who told my mum to write to him in the first place, because he sounded so lovely in the card he sent her. He used to work with my dad, thirty years ago. Saw the story about Dad in the papers and got in touch.”

“That’s sweet.”

She tells Marcelline about the Zippo in the pink box, and the wine bar in Mayfair and the dead fiancée, and then she shows her Nick’s photograph on LinkedIn.

“He looks lovely,” Marcelline says approvingly. “Tall?”

“Six foot two–ish?”

“Wow, the full package.” Then Ash sees her flinch when she remembers that Paddy was not a tall man. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

Ash smiles. “It’s fine. Who doesn’t like a tall man?”

“So, are you feeling OK about it? I know how close you were to your dad.”

“I’m feeling happy that my mum’s happy, you know. She’s such a good person and I like seeing her happy. But I’m also worried. I mean… what if he’s not what he seems? What if he’s after her money?”

“Er, you said he owns a wine bar in Mayfair.”

“Well, he co-owns it. And it’s in a bit of financial trouble at the moment, according to Mum.”

Marcelline sighs. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

“Yup,” says Ash. “I’m sure it is. It’s just… weird.”

“Of course it is.”

And as she speaks, Ash’s gaze is caught by something to her left, on the desk where Marcelline does all her paperwork.

It’s a pink box, filled with pens and pencils. It’s exactly the same as the pink box that Ash has on her own desk in her room, the box that Nick had sent Dad’s Zippo lighter in.

“Where did you get that?” she asks, pointing.

Marcelline glances at it and then back at Ash. “That pink box?”

“Yeah.”

“God, I don’t know. I think it was a gift box—it was…” She snaps her fingers. “Soaps? Maybe? A couple of years ago. Such a pretty box, I kept it. Why?”

Ash shrugs. “Nothing,” she says. “No reason.”