“To put down roots? No. I’m hardly one to talk, am I, Mr. Married with Kids? I moved back to the place I was born to bring up my own family—how’s that for ready, steady, boring?”
“Is it boring, though?” she challenged knowingly. He tried to play it down, but she knew how happy he was.
He laughed. “No, not even a little.”
“You see!” She pointed at his smiling face. “Contentment, that’s what my heart wants.”
“Then find somewhere you like and dig in, get settled. It’s not that hard.”
“I don’t know how. Every time I try, I mess it up.”
Troy raised his eyebrows. “You need to start by shaking Stu off once and for all,” he said in his most teacherly voice.
Antonia came in through the door to the side of the bar. A toddler on her hip, a baby bump, and Mica, newly five years old and impossibly gorgeous in Paw Patrol pajamas and slippers.
“Oh no, are you talking about the dreaded Stu?” Antonia gave a Mona Lisa smile.
“Only in the past tense,” Star replied, kissing Antonia on both cheeks and lifting Mica up onto her lap, where he began to make his toy dinosaurs dance across the beer mats.
“I’m glad to hear it. How’s it going with Maggie and Simone?”
“Maggie is her usual ‘mother to all’ self, and Simone is being forced to speak to me.”
“That’s progress,” said Antonia.
“Yeah, it only took Dad meddling from the grave to make it happen.”
“What about that appraiser down from the city?” asked Troy.
To her horror, she felt her cheeks get hot. “He’s nice. He seems to know his stuff, which is what you want from an appraiser, I guess.”
Antonia and Troy shared a look, and Star suddenly felt her capacity as third wheel. She wondered what it would be like to know someone so well that you could communicate by looks alone.
* * *
By 8 p.m. she was back at the flat. She flumped onto the sofa with Artemis to wait for Maggie and Simone to arrive. She was feeling things she hadn’t expected and wasn’t sure where to put them all. Last night after leaving her sisters, she had been overwhelmed by a silent vortex of emptiness. Her dad was gone. After a lifetime of absenteeism, she hadn’t expected his death to feel so very different. But being surrounded by his things had brought home to her that he wasn’t ever coming back. It was like having her insides sucked out at high velocity as the reality of his new, permanent absence caught up with her.
This building and its land contained all her happiest memories. She had had magical times in this place with her sisters. Long summer nights too hot and sticky for sleep when they would stay up telling stories or talking about their homelives. Often, having found their beds empty in the morning, Augustus would find them sleeping on cushions in the tree house.
When both her sisters had grown too old for summers in Rowan Thorp, and it was just her turning up on the doorstep with her bags at the beginning of the summer, that had been hard. Missing them was an overwhelming ache, enduring and unceasing. No one would accuse Augustus of being even remotely reliable or responsible, but he had been there during the times when her loneliness was a monster with gnashing jaws trying to swallow her whole.
She conceived her grief now as a body of deep dark water. Where last night it had been a roiling storm, this evening her sadness lapped gently around her, unobtrusive and perpetual. Now it had arrived, she had the feeling it would be her long-term companion.
Desertion had its own scent. It was a sad smell, the miasma of abandoned hope hanging in the stale tang of still air and the powdery chalkiness of cold walls. This place needed people; Star could feel its hunger in every armchair, mug, and cushion. She recognized the feeling in herself, the wanting.
Closing her eyes, she breathed slowly in and out, acknowledging each emotion in turn and practicing her gratitude. Something skittered against the front room window, shocking her out of her meditation. The noise came again, and she looked to the window in time to see a handful of shingle, illuminated in the glow of the streetlamps outside, click-clack against the glass.
As the panic rose up, a familiar dread dragged downward. Not again. Please not again. Not here. Her palms were clammy as she moved cautiously to the window and looked down onto the street. It couldn’t be. Could it? But it was. Standing beside a thick-trunked horse-chestnut tree with a fistful of shingle clearly sourced from the communal planter on his other side was Stu. He grinned when he saw her and let the shingle drop onto the pavement.
“Star!” he shouted. “Did you really think I’d let you get away?”
She pressed her forehead to the cold glass and breathed deeply to calm her racing heart. At what point did an ex-boyfriend evolve from extravagantly heartbroken to stalker? Her impulse was to stuff her things into a bag and run away. With her heart pounding, one thought shouted louder than all the rest: Simone is going to freak out. She couldn’t, after the tentative steps they’d taken over the last couple of days, risk losing her sister forever. Because in what world would Simone not see this and think she was in league with Stu?
“Shit! Shit. Shit. Shit!”
She unpeeled her forehead from the glass and yanked up the sash window. She was notoriously bad at confrontation, so she focused hard, channeled her inner Simone, and prepared to get snippy.
11
Simone sat in the bay window seat looking out onto the dark street. She’d spent another day in the shop with Star and Duncan, sorting through old crap and looking for Monopoly houses. Maggie had been largely absent today, and without her there to referee, Simone had found herself biting her lip repeatedly to keep from starting an argument with Star over something and nothing.
Maggie would knock for her soon and they would spend the evening back in the shop in continuance of the search for the small wooden houses, which were fast becoming another bane of her life.
The cottage was situated on the bend of Rowan Thorp’s high street and afforded a view of the general comings and goings of the little village. Each time she looked out, more Christmas decorations had sprung up at windows and in gardens. Several of the houses now had snowflakes of various sizes projected onto their front walls. She wanted to feel snobby about it, but honestly she rather liked it.
She picked up the four little houses they’d found—put into her safekeeping as supposedly the sister least likely to lose them—and was about to grab her coat, when she heard shouting on the street and a loud banging on the front door.
She answered it and was grabbed at once by Maggie, who yanked her out of the house.
“Hold your horses!” Simone yelped, reaching back in and grabbing the bag containing bottles of wine she’d bought for the evening. “What’s the emergency?”
“Come on!” Maggie shouted. “We’re on standby in case Star needs our help.”
“What?” she grumbled, pulling the front door shut and trying to unravel herself from her sister’s grip. It was useless, of course; Maggie was strong as an ox. “What is going on?”
The shouts across the street began anew. Curtains twitched at windows.
“Stu’s back!” Maggie hissed urgently.
The anger that simmered permanently in her stomach came to a boil. She let out a derisive sound. “Huh! Of course Star would invite him here. Why am I not surprised! They’re probably going to loot the shop. I’m calling the police.”