“And here I was thinking it was the glamour of working with fruit and veg all day that kept you here.” She smiled.
Joe had previously worked in marketing, but he’d become disillusioned in his last job and decided he needed to “get out of the rat race.” On numerous occasions since, she had found herself gleefully thinking, Of all the grocer joints in all the towns, in all the world, he walks into mine.
Across the room, Star and Florin had taken a break from heavy petting to help Ryan, one of the owners of the Stag and Hound, extract Perdita and the huge spliff she’d just lit out of the pub before he got fined and she got arrested. Mourners shuffled hopefully out of the pub, following the plumes of weed smoke.
“Looks like the party’s moving outside.” Maggie laughed. “Dad would’ve loved that. I wish you could have met him. He had this aura of pure jolly mischief. He was . . . impish, even in old age. I think the world has lost some of its magic with him gone.”
But if anyone had been under the impression that Augustus’s funeral marked the end of his mischief, they would have been mistaken. A few weeks later, after the mourners had fled and life in Rowan Thorp returned to its dull convention, three solicitor letters in stiff white envelopes landed on three very different doormats, and three very different women picked them up.
5
Maggie looked up and smiled as Joe placed a mug of coffee on the table and shifted a crate of cauliflowers onto the floor. He walked around behind her, lifted her fading auburn curls off the back of her neck, and laid kisses along her skin.
She melted. The brush of his lips sent the sweetest thrill down her spine, which blossomed into a warm honey caress and kept on going. Even as she told herself again that she had to put a stop to whatever this was, that she had no business having hot passionate sex with this younger man, she knew her body would betray her.
In her opinion her breasts had always been too droopy, and her bottom was the shape of two Comice pears sat side by side. Her body was etched with a silvery mass of stretch marks flowing in streams and rivulets over her stomach and thighs, the topography of having grown two humans. For years she had hidden her body in the darkness during sexual encounters, embarrassed by its many imperfections. But Joe was a lights-on man, something that had taken her a while to get used to. He had traced her stretch marks with kisses like they were something to be worshipped and reveled in her softness.
“Is Patrick home?” His voice was low, teasing against her ear.
Oh, how she wished just at that moment that her eldest child wasn’t lurking in his bedroom. If only she had the kind of son who liked to go running first thing in the morning. But alas, Patrick was a perfectly normal university student, who liked to sleep late when he was home for the holidays.
“He’s in bed,” she said, taking some pleasure from Joe’s obvious disappointment.
“Maybe if we’re really quiet I could take you on the worktop?”
She laughed. She was not about to sex up her kitchen worktop; she’d done her food hygiene course and that kind of thing was frowned upon.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for tea and biscuits this morning.” She smiled as he took the seat he’d cleared for himself.
“Tea and biscuits come a close second.” He grinned at her. “What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the letter laid open on the table, three satisfyingly sharp creases preventing the thick paper from lying flat.
She rubbed her eyes and dragged her palms down her face. My god, she was tired. Look at him sitting there all gorgeously ruffled like he’s just jumped out of a hayloft. She looked down at her dungarees, the inner thighs of which were wearing thin—the curse of the ample-thigh rub—and saw one of the cuffs on her jumper was beginning to fray. For the hundredth time, she wondered what it was that Joe saw in her.
“It’s a letter from my dad’s solicitors,” she said, nudging the letter with her finger as though afraid it might bite.
“Augustus had a solicitor?”
“Who knew? It’s Steele & Brannigan, on the high street. They kept that quiet; I’ve known Vanessa Steele for years and she never said a thing, not even at the funeral.”
“I don’t suppose she could, client confidentiality and all that.”
“It turns out he had a will, which is news to me. My sisters and I have been summoned to hear the reading of it on the third of December.”
“Maybe he was a secret millionaire.” Joe raised his eyebrows.
“I think that’s called very wishful thinking.” She smiled ruefully. It would take more than wishing to sort out her financial problems. It would take a miracle. Her landlord—Gareth Gilbert of Gilbert & Marks Holdings and Lettings—had been trying to get her out of the greengrocer’s shop and the maisonette above for the last couple of years. She had managed—just—to meet his rent hikes, designed to force her into moving. But six weeks ago, he’d pulled out the big guns and served her an eviction notice. Her home and business, which had been her mother’s before her, was to be converted into a boutique hotel, and she and her two kids would be homeless by the end of January.
She ought to have begun packing by now, dismantling the life they’d built here for the last decade. But she hadn’t told the children; she didn’t want to ruin Christmas for them. She’d simply boxed those worries up and stuffed them down with all her other anxieties. She didn’t have time to be homeless!
The eviction wasn’t the only thing haunting her, though. She hadn’t expected her dad’s death to hit her as hard as it had. Sure, she’d not seen him for five years before he died, and even before that, she could count on one hand the number of months he’d spent at home in the last decade. And yet his death had left a hole in her heart she could swear she heard the wind whistling through.
“Mags?” Joe brushed her arm, and she snapped back to the present.
“Sorry. Miles away.” She shook herself. What had they been talking about?
“Do you think your sisters will come to the will reading?” He asked.
She sighed. Another complication. “It doesn’t look like they’ve got much choice. Steele & Brannigan have been instructed to tell us that the will cannot be read unless all three of us are present.”
Joe raised an eyebrow and quipped, “That’ll please Simone no end.”
* * *
The letter dropped onto the doormat just as Simone was grabbing her keys, ready to head out of the door. She was running late because she had started her period, early this time, and then spent ten minutes crying and another ten fixing her makeup, and now she was late. Her last two rounds of IVF had been unsuccessful—as had the two before that—and now she was out of time and out of money, and every period felt like a betrayal, her body mocking her for being unable to fulfill the task that millions of women all around the world seemed able to manage with ease. She had turned forty this year, still “vibrant” according to Cosmopolitan magazine, although the eggs collected during her last retrieval might beg to differ.
“Was that the post?” came Evette’s voice from the kitchen.
No, Evette, that was the sound of my leg dropping off. Of course it’s the bloody post! She took a deep breath. “Yes,” she called, holding back the scream that lived in her throat. When had she become this rageful person?