Page 15

Zara parked her car outside The Eclipse and surveyed the chaos spilling out from the entrance of the old cinema.

Getting the loan agreement in place and the money transferred had gone smoothly. Now came the tricky part: turning a crumbling relic into a profitable, thriving business.

The sight of workers hustling around, tools clattering, voices shouting over each other—it should have felt overwhelming, but Zara was used to seeing potential buried under a mess.

Inside, the scene was no less chaotic. Workers shifted ladders through tight spaces while some of the cinema’s staff tried to pitch in, with mixed results.

One of them, an older gentleman Zara vaguely recognised from the beach screening—she was pretty sure his name was Jerry, though no formal introduction had been made—was attempting to carry an armful of old posters, only to nearly trip over a paint bucket left abandoned in the middle of the lobby.

‘Watch it!’ a painter yelled.

‘You bloody watch it,’ the old guy yelled back. ‘Leaving paint about. Honestly! You kids now, you’re so thoughtless.’

‘I’m forty-eight,’ the painter said defensively.

Zara carefully stepped around the debris before spotting Tess in the midst of it all, hands on hips, befuddled.

‘Tess!’ Zara called out as she weaved through the crowd. ‘You’ve got a full house.’

Tess turned, frazzled. ‘Oh, you’re here.’ She checked her watch. ‘Is it that time already?’

‘Busy morning?’

‘We’re in that phase of renovating where it looks even worse than it did before,’ Tess said.

‘That comes just before it looks better,’ Zara assured her. ‘You got a minute for that meeting?’

Tess raised an eyebrow. ‘I like how you’re saying it like it’s optional when you own my arse now.’

Zara tried not to take that personally.

As they headed toward the office, Zara heard a voice behind her.

‘You must be Zara.’

Zara turned to see a woman leaning against a half-painted wall. She looked a little like Tess but younger and with long, braided hair. The energy was very different. Lighter.

‘That’s me,’ Zara said, extending her hand.

‘I’m Fi, Tess’s sister,’ the woman said, shaking her hand with a firm grip. ‘The money woman, right? I’ve heard a lot about you.’

Zara smiled tightly. ‘Oh?’

Fi gave a small laugh. ‘It’s not that bad. Some of it was even good. I think she’s quite impressed by what you’ve done so far. In her own way.’

‘Fi, shut up,’ Tess said quickly.

‘What? The Jaws screening was fucking great.’

‘Yes. But don’t give her too much credit. We actually had to make the bloody thing happen.’

Fi rolled her eyes. ‘She’s very hard work if you didn’t know that yet,’ she said as an aside to Zara.

Zara glanced at Tess. ‘Oh, well, I…’

Fi smirked. ‘It’s OK, you don’t have to finish that sentence.’

Zara nearly said thank you but caught herself in time.

‘Fi, just help Jerry with the posters,’ Tess said pointedly.

‘In a minute,’ she said with a smirk.

A woman’s head suddenly popped up from a hole in the floor. A shriek escaped Zara. She was immediately embarrassed. ‘Sorry, I didn’t know you were in there.’

The woman wasn’t massively interested. ‘Tess? I need to talk to you about these electrics.’

Tess looked down. ‘Do I need to come down there?’

The woman frowned. ‘Don’t be daft.’ She climbed out of the hole. ‘If you want to know why the back-office breaker is tripping, it’s because it’s overloaded. The circuit you’re using for your screen is pulling more amps than it can safely handle. You’ll either need to run a new circuit or redistribute some of the load to prevent overheating.’

‘Jesus, that’s why I can never use a blender in there without the lights going off!’ Fi exclaimed.

‘You were blending in the office?’ Tess asked.

‘Yeah, why?’ Fi replied.

‘Why me? Why you?!’

‘I make my own face masks,’ Fi said as though it were obvious.

Tess seemed incapable of speech.

‘I have this recipe that makes my skin look incredible for dates,’ Fi explained. ‘I got it off Tik Tok.’

‘Why do you need to do it here?’ Tess asked.

‘If I’m going on the date straight from work, I don’t have time to piss about going home, do I?’

‘You go on dates straight from work?’ Tess asked, amazed.

‘Only if the pic is hot. You gotta snatch joy where you can.’

Tess looked as though Fi were speaking a different language.

‘She doesn’t understand because she’d been dead from the waist down for years,’ Fi said to Zara. Zara tried not to laugh.

‘Fi, Jesus! I’m not…’ Tess stopped herself and turned to Zara. ‘Can you give me a second with the electrician?’

Zara nodded, still battling laughter.

As Tess hurried off, Fi stayed behind, studying Zara. ‘You really think this place can turn a profit?’

Zara smiled confidently. ‘I know it can. We just need to get people in the door. Once they’re here, the magic of this place will do the rest. If your sister is… amenable to my strategies.’

Fi raised an eyebrow and grinned. ‘Very carefully put. She loves this place, but she’s… a bit sentimental.’

‘Sentiment’s a good starting point. But a smart business plan? That’s how we’ll make sure it’s here for the long haul,’ Zara assured her.

Fi turned to the chaos of the renovations. ‘I’m starting to wonder if that leak was a good thing.’

‘Why.’

‘Because the place was failing. We needed help. And she’d never have asked.’

It was clear that beneath Fi's laid-back exterior, she cared about this place more than she let on.

‘But she did ask,’ Zara said. ‘She applied for the loan.’

Fi considered that. ‘I don’t think she knew she was getting you, though.’

Zara chuckled. ‘I’m just here to make sure Tess gets what she wants.’

Fi was silent for a beat, then nodded slowly. ‘But Tess… She’s stubborn. You know that, right?’

Zara smiled, glancing over at the office where Tess was deep in conversation with the electrician. ‘I figured that out pretty quickly. But I’m not here to bulldoze her. I only want to help. I hope she’ll see that.’

Fi nodded. ‘This place means the world to her.’ She shifted, then added, ‘To both of us, really. It's our mum’s old cinema, you know? Our grandparents too. We grew up in this building. After our dad buggered off, this place was even more important to us. And then our mum died, and Tess took it all on. She was only twenty-five. I was fifteen. And somehow, she kept it going whilst taking care of me.’

Zara’s gaze softened. ‘I didn’t realise.’

Fi shrugged, her voice becoming quieter. ‘Yeah, well… that’s why we can’t just let it go under.’

Before Zara could respond, Tess reappeared. ‘Now that’s sorted, time to bend over for The Bank,’ she said dryly. ‘Hey, should I start practising my “yes, sir”

now, or wait till they tell me to put up ads for toothpaste in the lobby?’

Zara gritted her teeth. This was going to be a long morning.