Eva and her mother, Andrea, were among the passengers who got off the train, and they caught up with Lucy as she stared towards Tarn House.
“Had a day away?” Andrea asked.
“Yes, down to Ravenglass. Trying to catch some of the sights.” Lucy smiled at Eva, who was dancing on her tiptoes as she clung to her mother’s hand. “Where have you been?”
Andrea made a slight face. “Down to Barrow for a doctor’s appointment.”
Eva did a little twirl. “I get to draw pictures and talk about myfeelings.”
“An art therapist,” Andrea said. “We go on the weekends.” She drew a quick breath and added, her voice so low Lucy had to strain to hear her, “Her dad and I split up last year and it wasn’t . . . friendly. It’s been tough on her.” She gave Eva a quick, concerned glance, but the girl was oblivious.
“I’m sorry. Divorce is tough.” It had been hard on Thomas’s two boys and Lucy’s attempts at helping certainly hadn’t worked.
“It’s also a blessed relief,” Andrea said, and then let out a guilty laugh. “Sorry, I know how that sounds. But I’m glad Eva and I are shot of him. He wasn’t a nice man.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said again, helplessly. Despite Andrea’s laughter and easy smile, a darkness lingered in the woman’s eyes and in the tightness of her mouth. She reached once more for Eva’s hand.
“I should get on. Have a good night,” Andrea called, and hurried up the main street.
Tarn House was quiet when Lucy entered, and guiltily she wondered if she should have come back sooner. She could have helped Juliet with dinner, although that thought hardly inspired happy images of them chatting while chopping vegetables.
Lucy shed her coat and walked into the kitchen, struck again by the coziness of the room—and how many discouraging conversations she’d had in it.
Juliet was out with the dogs, and Lucy didn’t dare start making dinner on her own. Juliet was the kind of person, she was quite sure, who knew exactly what was in her fridge at all times, and would be seriously annoyed if Lucy used up something she wasn’t supposed to.
But she was hungry and tired after spending all day wandering around, and she felt like eating her favorite comfort food, scrambled eggs and toast. Resolutely, a little defiantly, she got out the eggs a local farmer delivered every Monday morning and cracked two into a bowl. She waslivinghere. She should be able to make herself a meal. And she’d talk to Juliet about contributing to the grocery bill and paying rent. Feeling both better and worse at the thought, she made herself eggs and toast and ate them at the kitchen table, gazing out at the sheep fields, thinking about Andrea and Eva, about Dan Trenton and Mary from the beach café, and, yes, about Alex Kincaid. All of them with sorrows and stories to tell.
She’d cleaned up everything, wiped the counter and stove top until they gleamed, and even inspected the sink drain for bits of egg, when Juliet came in. Her narrowed gaze took in the kitchen, the plate Lucy was about to load in the dishwasher, and absurdly, she felt guilty.
“I was just thinking,” Lucy said, her voice sounding a little too loud, “that I should contribute to household expenses. And I’ll pay rent.”
Something flashed across Juliet’s face but was gone before Lucy could figure out what it was. “That sounds like a good idea,” she answered tonelessly, and Lucy swallowed.
“So if you think of an appropriate amount . . .”
“I think one hundred pounds a month should cover both bed and board.”
“Okay.” Lucy had seen a sign in the post office shop advertising a room for rent for a hundred pounds a week. Juliet was being generous, even if it didn’t feel like it. “Great. I’ll . . . get a bank account, I guess.” She hadn’t even organized how she was to be paid at school. “When would you like me to . . . pay?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Juliet replied, her tone both flat and brisk. “Whenever you get around to it.”
“Okay.” And then, because it was painfully obvious they had nothing more to say to each other, Lucy started upstairs. The last thing she heard was the sound of Juliet closing the dishwasher she’d left open.
Juliet was out with the dogs when Lucy left for school the following morning; it was another crisp and sunny day, and her spirits lifted at leaving Tarn House—and, she had to admit, at seeing Alex again. Would he be different towards her, now that they’d had a coffee together and could, perhaps, consider themselves friends?
That question was answered when Alex stalked by reception without so much as a glance at her, or even his usual muttered hello. Lucy felt the expectant smile fade from her face as Alex disappeared into his office, shutting the door behind him with a very firm click.
Okay, so maybe they weren’t friends. Maybe he’d just had a difficult morning. Still, a hello would have been nice.
Moodily Lucy started up the computer and watched the first trickle of pupils come up the hill. She could hear their excited chatter and laughter, and something inside her twisted and ached.
She’d wanted that once. A husband. Children. An actual family, something she’d never experienced. She’d tried to find it with Thomas and his sons. She’d met the boys first, two towheaded imps who had come into the gallery café and careened wildly around, arms out as they pretended to be airplanes. Thomas had come in after, looking handsome and harassed, and something in Lucy’s heart had squeezed.
She’d made the boys chocolate milk shakes with extra whipped cream and sprinkles, and chatted to them—they’d been to the Boston Aquarium and their father was a professor at boringHarvard—while Thomas had sipped an Americano and had looked, in retrospect, quite self-consciously wryly self-deprecating.
Still, Lucy had fallen for it. She’d fallen for the whole package: the adorable, if a bit wild, boys, the winsomely nerdy academic father, the image of the four of them spending lazy Sunday afternoons on Boston Common.
She’d served Thomas another Americano on the house (actually it had come out of her wages) and listened to him drone on for half an hour about eighteenth-century politics (most boring subject ever), and then his cell had rung and he’d spoken tersely to someone named Monica, who Thomas had explained after the call was his nasty ex-wife. Actually, Lucy remembered, he didn’t call her nasty. He just implied it while insisting that he couldn’t speak badly of her because of the boys.
