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THREE JANUARY

Ash picks up the card that is propped on the sideboard in the kitchen and reads the greeting inside.

Dear Nina and family

I just heard the news about Paddy. I am so devastated to hear of his death last year.

Paddy and I worked together in a restaurant in Mayfair many, many moons ago.

He was one of the nicest guys I ever knew, and one of the best chefs I’ve ever worked alongside.

A few years ago, I chanced upon his restaurant in Whitstable and didn’t realize it was his place until I saw him passing across the floor.

I stopped him and we had a chat, and he looked so well, so full of his usual bonhomie and generosity of spirit.

He pulled up a chair and joined me for the rest of my meal, forced good wines upon me.

We caught up a little on our lives, his spent growing a family and a restaurant empire on the south coast, mine living the bachelor life and running a wine bar not far from where we first met in Mayfair.

I always thought our paths would cross again someday, that I’d go back to Whitstable and enjoy another hour or two in his delightful company, eat another one of his delicious meals, but it never happened, life got in the way, and now it is too late.

Anyway, I just wanted you to know how much I adored Paddy and how sorry I was to hear that he had gone so young and in such tragic circumstances.

Yours, with sympathy and with love, Nick Radcliffe

Ash waves the card at her mother, who is standing by the kettle, waiting for it to boil.

“Nice card.”

Her mother turns. Her eyes are dull and tinged with gray circles.

“Oh,” she says. “Yes. Very sweet.”

“You ever met him?”

“No. I don’t think so. At least, not that I remember.”

Ash pulls her phone out of her pocket and googles the name, adds Mayfair to the search terms. His name pops up on LinkedIn and she clicks it.

Nick Radcliffe is listed as the “Co-founder and Owner of Bar Amelie in London W1.” In his profile photo he looks about fifty, has pure white hair, a trim white beard, very blue eyes, and a pleasant smile. She turns the phone toward her mum. “Look,” she says.

Her mum glances distractedly at the photo and says, “Nope. Never seen him before. He’s quite hot, though.”

Ash throws her mother a look of horror.

“What?” says her mother. “There’s no law against it.”

Ash googles “Bar Amelie” and finds a glitzy website for it.

It’s just off Curzon Street and is sleek and beautiful—brushed brass and pale velvet, three different types of caviar on the bar menu.

It’s the antithesis of her dad’s restaurants: sandy-floored, rough-hewn, chalkboards, tongue-and-groove cladding, smoky chowders and chargrilled lobsters.

“We should go there,” Ash says, showing the wine bar’s website to her mum. “Get him to tell us more about what Dad was like back then, before you met him.”

“Your dad knew hundreds of people before I met him.”

“I know. But he sounds really nice. He might have stories.”

“Well then, you can go there,” she says. “I’m sure he’d be thrilled to meet Paddy’s lovely girl and share his stories with you. And you might get a free dinner. Or a job.”

This last sentence is clipped and raw and there follows a small, tense silence.

“I might,” says Ash. Then she puts the card back on the sideboard with a slightly haughty snap of her wrist. “I might.”

Ash works at the fashion exchange boutique in the village.

People bring in their old clothes; she and the shop’s owner, Marcelline, steam them up in the back room to get the smell off them; then they hang them on expensive hangers next to displays of silk flowers and snazzy cabinetry.

If the item sells, the customer gets 50 percent; the shop gets the rest.

It was meant to be temporary, this job, just a stopgap for the summer after coming back to live at home when London didn’t work out for her, while she sorted herself out.

But then it had been September, then October, then her dad had died and now it is January, nearly February, and she is still working in the fashion exchange boutique and still sleeping in her childhood bedroom, and she will be twenty-six soon and did not expect to still be here.

But as much as she knows she shouldn’t be here, she doesn’t want to move out. Not now. She wants to be in this beautiful house where she grew up, which still smells of her father.

She has regressed. She is going backward. She is falling.