“Oh.” He looked relieved that she hadn’t refused him, and that made Lucy smile a little. Made it also a lot more likely that she’d say yes.
“It’s an autumn festival, I suppose. Crab refers to apples, not crustaceans. It’s one of the oldest fairs in the country—King Henry III granted a charter for it in 1267.”
“You’re obviously a teacher,” Lucy teased, and Alex cracked a smile, eyebrows raised expectantly.
“So . . . ?”
“Yes, thank you, I’d love to come.” Alex nodded, and Lucy couldn’t tell what he felt. She still didn’t know if this counted as a date. “What time do you want me?” she asked, and then winced inwardly at the blatant suggestion of that question.
Judging from the now fire-engine red of Alex’s ears, she was pretty sure he’d gotten the unintended innuendo. “Ten?” he suggested. “We can have lunch there, if that’s okay.”
“Great.”
She nodded, and he nodded back. Their social dynamics, Lucy thought, were on par with seventh grade. Then the phone rang and she heard a teacher’s heels clicking down the hall, and with another nod Alex turned and went back to his office.
Chapter eighteen
Juliet
In the week after Peter stormed out of the pub, Juliet retreated into a familiar, comforting blanket of numbness. It was how she’d reacted during the worst hurts inflicted by her mother: the Leavers’ Day at the end of Year Six, when Juliet was the only one there without a parent; the teacher in primary school who had, in front of Juliet’s entire class, shouted at Fiona for missing every single parent/teacher conference, and Fiona had simply stared at her, stonily indifferent. When she’d been twenty-six and in hospital, her baby bleeding out of her, and she’d had absolutely no one to call or come to visit.
So this wasn’t that bad, in comparison. It wasn’t as if she’d actually beenfriendswith Peter. He’d turned down her offer, fine. She’d find someone else, or she’d cough up the money to get a donor from the US, pick a profile from the book at the clinic.
Except as the days passed, she didn’t call the clinic; she didn’t even let herself think about the clinic. She tried not to think about anything.
She kept busy, though; busy was good. She had a steady stream of walkers who came hoping for autumnal color; thewind tended to blow the leaves from the trees in Hartley-by-the-Sea before they’d turned, but Juliet promised her disappointed guests that it was better towards Keswick, and the walks around Crummock Water and Buttermere, two of the nearest lakes, were spectacular.
She dug over the old stone troughs she used as flower beds in front of the house, and filled them with chrysanthemums in a riot of reds and yellows. She redesigned the B&B’s Web site, adding a guest book and more links to local restaurants and pubs. She even volunteered to organize the village’s Bonfire Night on the fifth of November, a monumental task that involved coordinating with the Women’s Institute, which handled the food stall; the local authority, which had to approve the fireworks; and the primary school, which sold the tickets. For the last she simply gave the tickets to Lucy with strict instructions to keep the money separate from the school dinner money.
“I think I can manage that,” Lucy had said with a smile, and it had occurred to Juliet how much more confident and relaxed and evenhappyher sister seemed. Hartley-by-the-Sea was good for her; Lucy clearly enjoyed working at the school, and if her secretive little smile was anything to go by, she was becoming friendlier with Alex Kincaid.
It seemed both ironic and fitting that Lucy’s life was getting better and bigger while Juliet’s was falling apart.
Except she wasn’t going to think about that.
Yet she found she couldn’tnotthink about it. At night she lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling, listening to the wind rattling the windowpanes as she went over in excruciating detail the last conversation she’d had with Peter. She remembered the look of scornful disgust on his face, the way he’d shaken his head at her and raised his voice so it had practically rung through the pub.
Remembering it all, she vacillated between self-righteous anger—her request hadn’t beenthatunreasonable—and shame. A shame she hated to feel, and so she clung to her anger and pretended she didn’t feel it.
She also avoided Peter as much as she could, which was aggravatingly difficult in a village the size of the Hartley-by-the-Sea. When she walked into the post office shop, he was buying a newspaper, and she kept her head lowered and intently studied the cover ofCumbria Lifeuntil Dan Trenton had given Peter his change. Peter walked out without a word for her, and she saw Dan raise his eyebrows at her before he sold her some stamps. If even surly, silent Dan Trenton noticed something was going on between her and Peter, things had to be bad.
When she walked the dogs down at the beach, avoiding the lane to Bega Farm, Peter was emptying his recycling into the bins by the promenade. He stared at her for a moment across several yards of concrete before turning back to chuck empty milk cartons into the big metal bin. Juliet pulled the dogs towards the sea.
She cried off the pub quiz the following week; Lucy informed her, with a narrowed look, that Peter hadn’t shown up, either.
“We had to join Liz Benson and Tara Dunwell,” Lucy said. “I like Tara, and I know she’s had a hard time, but she talks constantly. Even Rachel couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
“Liz is good value,” Juliet answered, not meeting Lucy’s eye, but her half sister would not be put off.
“Has something happened between you and Peter?”
“What do you mean?” Juliet asked, and then hurried on without waiting for Lucy to clarify. “We’re acquaintances. How could something have happened?”
“I thought you were friends.” Juliet said nothing. “Rachel thought something was happening between the two of you. Something a little more than friendship—”
“Rachel should mind her own business.”
“Seriously, Juliet. If you want to have friends, you’ve got to—”
