“What?”
I was busy having my terrifying epiphany: Jones, my job-stealing knitwear-wearing deep-chatting roommate, had shifted from the category of “distractingly hot guy but obviously won’t go there” to “major, major problem.” Because you can’t ignore a stomach swoop like that. It’srare. It’s precious. It demands your attention.
“A whole empty room. And Marly got so weird about it. She started talking about the shop, and us, as if me being told about the room was conditional on me telling them stuff about me, and my life? Then she got sort of pissed off at me.”
“Sorry,” I said, catching up, “thereisa spare room? But we can’t have it? Why not? Do they not trust us in their house?”
So weird to think we could’ve potentially stayed on the island without being housemates. Imagine not saying good night to Jones through the wall every evening, or brushing against him as we pass in the kitchen, or talking the way we do over dinner sometimes, the way I’ve never talked to a man before. Don’t think I actually knew men could be as interesting as Jones.
“I have no idea,” Jones said. “I’ve been out here ruining your flower beds trying to think it all over. Do you think it has something to do with the job mix-up? Somehow?”
“The room? How could it?”
“I really don’t know,” he said.
He paused for a moment, looking at me in the darkness. I shivered.
“What will you do, if we can’t get the shop running a better profit by harvest festival?” he asked softly.
“We will.”
“We really might not.”
I looked away. “We will. I’ve got a plan with Galoshes. You’ll see.”
He seemed relieved. Which just demonstrates the problem with the stomach swooping. Because I don’t have a plan with Galoshes at all—just didn’t want him to worry. The sort of shit you do for a person you like way too much.
Thursday September 25th 2025
New day. Have pulled myself together and stopped lusting after my inconveniently named roommate. Well, notstopped, but have redirected my brain to other, more productive avenues. Don’t know what I was thinking last night—I’ve let this crush get too far. No more sexy daydreaming about Jones. The plan is solo motherhood. There isnoway to do that with a man in the mix.
Helpfully massive job crisis to deal with anyway—it’s less than two weeks until harvest festival, which means the Galoshes problem needs sortingnow.
Have decided to tackle this one element at a time. The most pressing issue is not the in-my-face insubordination, it’s the factthat she’s blocking the coffee and biscuits. We’re losing precious days to prove the concept—we’re almost out of time. Had a brain wave on my run this morning, though. One thing I learned in my old job is that a woman who feels powerful will relax. And I think Galoshes feels powerless right now. So as much as I want to show her who’s boss, and force her to do as she’s told…
“How would you do it?” I asked, sitting down opposite her as she ate her lunch on one of the farm shop picnic benches.
She looked startled, and then irritated. Not surprising. This was absolutely an ambush.
“This is my lunch break,” she said, taking a very deliberate bite of her pasty.
“Then you can have the time back. I want to know how you’d do it. How could we introduce coffee and biscuits at the farm shop, but do it the Ormer way?”
Her chewing slowed a little. She swallowed, looking at me with narrowed eyes through her pink-rimmed glasses. I bit down on the anxious impulse to tell her not to worry and that I’d come back later. There was no later. I was out of time.
“The Ormer way? Do you even know what that means?”
“No,” I said. “Not really. I would really like to, though.”
“Well. I suppose I’d offer discounts for locals, so they could afford it, too.”
“Good idea.”
She looked at me suspiciously.
“What else?” I asked.
“When they used to serve drinks down at the post office, some of us would just wander over with a mug.”
