“Some people have all the luck,” Meghan answered with a shrug. “What’s she doing back here?”
“Her engagement’s off, apparently.”
“You saw her?”
“I clean the Wests’ house every other Wednesday.”
“Right.” Meghan yawned. “I so do not feel like working tonight,” she said, stretching, and Nathan nearly fell off her lap. Rachel managed to keep herself from saying her sister never felt like working; she only did three nights a week at the Hangman’s Noose. “I’d better get on, then.” She stood up, settling Nathan onto her hip. “Time for the tub, Nath. Aunt Rachel won’t want to bathe you. She’s too grumpy.”
“I’ll read you a story after tea tonight,” Rachel promised Nathan, who smiled hopefully in response. Meghan headed upstairs with Nathan, and Rachel listened, wincing, as the taps went on and the pipes screeched. She imagined the headline on the cover of Fate & Fortune: Help, There’s a Banshee in My Water Pipes!
She turned the sauce on to simmer and went into the sitting room; it was as much of a mess as the kitchen, with half-drunk cups of tea making damp rings on the coffee table, along with a towering Play-Doh creation of Nathan’s and two Lottery scratch cards, a vice of her mother’s that Meghan happily enabled even though Rachel had forbidden it. They couldn’t afford to play the Lottery, and it was a waste of money. She’d tried to explain the ridiculous odds of winning to Meghan, and her sister had rolled her eyes.
“You don’t get it, do you, Rachel?” she’d said, to which Rachel had replied tartly, “I was just about to say the same to you.”
Now, as she collected the mugs and worthless cards, Rachel wondered what Claire West was doing up at Four Gables. She pictured her in that endless gourmet kitchen with its Sub-Zero fridge and pristine Aga, cooking an elegant meal for one. If Claire was staying for months, she must have left her job in Portugal showing rich retirees newly built villas in the Algarve. What would she do in poky Hartley-by-the-Sea? Rachel was surprised she’d come here at all, instead of going to London to stay with her parents.
Not that she cared what Claire did, or why. Rachel straightened, gazing around the little sitting room with its saggy sofa and warped coffee table, bits of hardened Play-Doh littering the carpet, despite Meghan’s hoovering. Upstairs Lily’s music blared with a relentless, pulsing beat, and from the dining-room-turned-bedroom she heard the squeak of bedsprings as her mother shifted her weight. No, she had far too many peoplein her life to manage to waste a single brain cell wondering or worrying about Claire West.
Chapter two
Claire
Claire listened to the door click shut behind Rachel, leaving the house empty and silent. She stood for a moment in the center of the sitting room, the cream carpet stretching out in every direction in a pristine sea, the still air smelling faintly of lemon polish and lavender potpourri. Home, even if it didn’t feel like it.
After a moment she went to one of the huge overstuffed sofas and sat down gingerly, because even though her mother was three hundred miles away in London, Claire could imagine her hovering, clucking her tongue and plumping the pillows.
She tucked her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, resting her chin on top. Her mother would screech in alarm to see her bare feet on the silk sofa cushions, and sitting like this felt like a tiny but important act of defiance.
She savored the silence for a few minutes, because after four weeks at Lansdowne Hills, where the noise had been soft but persistent, the company constant, she was glad of a little solitary time. No one chirpily telling her it was time for the discussion group or counseling session or a massage. No supposedlysoothing sound of water trickling over rocks playing incessantly in the background. Lansdowne Hills had been elegant and expensive, but it had still been a prison.
Now that she’d escaped, she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with herself. She had no intention of going back to Portugal; Hugh hadn’t called her in the four weeks she’d been at Lansdowne Hills, and she didn’t particularly want him to call her now, although she supposed she’d have to have a conversation with him at some point. They were, technically at least, still engaged. The ostentatious diamond Hugh had bought her was in her toiletry bag; she’d taken it off on the plane from Portugal, after Hugh had staged his intervention.
Grimacing, Claire rose from the sofa and paced the elegant confines of the sitting room. She wasn’t sure why she’d come back to Cumbria; she didn’t have too many happy memories of living here. Home had been miserable and school had been a blur. Her parents had moved to London five years ago, and Claire hadn’t been back to Hartley-by-the-Sea since.
But when it had been a choice between Hartley-by-the-Sea or living with her parents in London...
Cumbria won, hands down.
And yet she’d been in Hartley-by-the-Sea for only two hours and she was already starting to feel restless and uncertain. What on earth was she going to do here, or anywhere? She had no job, no fiancé, no future. She had no plans whatsoever, and she didn’t know how to go about making them.
The phone rang, breaking the stillness, and Claire didn’t move. She listened to the answering machine pick up; she could hear her mother’s recorded message, the tone nasal and sharp, although Claire couldn’t make out the words. Then a second’s silence followed by the long beep of someone having hung up.
Then the phone rang again.
It had to be either her parents or her brother, and neither of them was likely to give up calling. With a sigh Claire rose from the sofa and went to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Claire?”
“Hi, Andrew.” Claire leaned against the kitchen wall and closed her eyes. She was glad it was her brother rather than her parents, although he could be almost as bossy.
“You got there all right,” he said unnecessarily.
“Yes.”
A little sigh of disappointment, the soundtrack to her family life. “Mum wanted you in London, Claire.”
