Mary, the café’s owner and a buxom woman with flyaway white hair and a booming laugh, handed them a grease-splattered laminated menu upon their arrival; Juliet had tied the dogs up outside.
“What can I do you, Juliet?”
“A cup of coffee and a toasted ham and cheese, please, Mary.” She glanced at Lucy. “What would you like?”
“I’ll have the same.”
Mary rang up their orders on a till and Juliet took out a ten-pound note while Lucy fumbled with her pockets. “My treat,” she said shortly, and Lucy stammered her thanks, which Juliet ignored. “How’s the heart, Mary?” she asked, and the older woman made a wry face.
“Still ticking, more or less.”
“Hopefully more.” Mary gave her the change, which she tipped into the plastic box for the Royal National Lifeboat Institute. “Mary had a heart attack last winter,” she told Lucy as they walked to a table by the window. The sun had retreated again and rain spattered the glass.
“Is she okay?” Lucy asked, turning around to gaze at Mary before Juliet tapped her on the shoulder.
“She’s not going to fall down dead, so you can stop rubbernecking,” she said, meaning it as a joke, but it didn’t come out like one. She clearly had trouble with delivery.
“Do you know everyone in the village?”
“No.” She didn’t actually know that many people, considering she’d been here ten years. She certainly didn’t know many peoplewell.
“So how unusual is this for August, really?” Lucy asked. Juliet had seen that the thermometer outside the café had registered eleven degrees Celsius. “Tell me the truth.”
Juliet shrugged. “Not that unusual, I suppose, but we keep hoping for better.” Mary came over with the coffees and after thanking her, Juliet stirred hers slowly, her gaze on the gray clouds, a wisp of blue just barely visible underneath. The definition of hope. “When the weather’s good here, it’s really, really good.”
“And when it’s bad, it’s horrid?” Lucy finished with a smile, and Juliet let out a sudden, rusty laugh that seemed to take them both by surprise.
“‘There was a little girl, who had a little curl,’” she quoted. “Yes, like that.” Then, impulsively, she added, “The day I arrived here, I came from Whitehaven on the Coast-to-Coast walk and the sun was just setting over the sea. It was amazing, really. It had been the most wonderful day, pure blue skies and bright sunshine the whole time. And warm, even though it was September. I stood on the top of the head by the beach right there”—she nodded towards the window—“and watched the sun turn the water to gold and I felt as if—well, as if I didn’t need to go anywhere else. Finally.”
Lucy was looking almost weepy, and Juliet felt a flush rise on her face. She didn’t normally sound so bloody sentimental. She didn’t think she’d told anyone that story before, or even articulated it to herself. And yet somehow the words had spilled out to Lucy of all people.
“Why—why did you . . . ,” Lucy began, stammering a bit, and Juliet braced herself for whatever prying question her sister was going to ask. Then Mary plonked their plates on the table and the moment broke, much to Juliet’s relief, although she couldn’t quite suppress a flicker of disappointment that Lucy hadn’t finished asking her question—not that she’d intended to answer it.
Chapter five
Lucy
On the first day of school Lucy woke up with a stomachache. She used to get them quite a lot when she was younger; seventh grade in particular had been the Year of Stomachaches. Her mother had been commissioned to do a sculpture in Boston Common, and the day before school had started, it had been installed: a huge, lumpy breast with a grotesque nipple pointing heavenwards. Just remembering that awful thing still made Lucy cringe fifteen years later.
It had been controversial, of course, and her mother had always thrived on controversy. She’d been in all the papers, on all the news networks, defending her creation against the “uninformed bigots” who protested against shepherding their children past a huge, ugly boob. Lucy had sympathized with those so-called bigots, although she’d never told her mother so.
And then that first day of school . . . walking into a strange new middle school with everyone knowing who her mother was and the sculpture she’d made. Lucy’s stomach clenched at the memory. There had been an outline of a breast, complete withpointy nipple, scrawled on her locker in permanent pen before first period.
In second period a popular boy in eighth grade called her Boob Girl; by lunchtime everyone in the school was calling her that.
By November she was throwing up every morning from stress, and begging her mother to let her switch schools. Her mother had sighed, looking sympathetic for about a millisecond, and then refused.
“If you can’t stand up to petty bigots now, Lucy, you never will. Trust me, I’m doing you a favor.”
Her mother had done her a lot of favors over the years. She’d endured three more months of teasing, sitting alone at lunch and walking through corridors with a determined smile on her face, as if she could appreciate the joke they were all making endlessly at her expense, until people had finally, thankfully grown tired of it, and even better, the sculpture had been taken down.
Eighth grade had been better. Her mother had had no major commissions.
But things were different now. She was starting school, yes, but she was twenty-six, not twelve, and her mother was on a different continent. Her boss might have his doubts about her, but she could prove him wrong. Prove herself capable. And best of all, no one in Hartley-by-the-Sea, except Juliet, knew about what had happened in Boston. None of them would have read Boston’s newspapers; they probably hadn’t seen the blogs and editorials online. They might not have even heard of Fiona Bagshaw.
Smiling a little at the thought, Lucy rose from bed to get ready for the day.
Washed and dressed, she entered the kitchen to find Juliet busy making fry-ups for another group of walkers who had come in last night, two high-flying couples in their thirties withexpensive equipment and a van service that would ferry it for them so they could walk with just their day rucksacks.
