Page 101 of The Little Board Game Café

‘But I’d never be able to pay you back,’ said Annie.

‘You needn’t. You could find a way of paying it forward yourself. Help someone else out somehow. When you’re able to. It needn’t be money.’

‘It’s kind of you, Em, but I can’t let you pay my rent. I’ll think of something. Don’t worry about me.’

*

Emily found an auction where you could sell second-hand professional kitchen equipment. She went to watch. You could spot the new café owners a mile off – it was the hope on their faces. Perhaps they’d fare better than she had. Her stuff didn’t make much, but she insisted on Annie taking what she did make. Annie argued, of course, but finally gave in.

Emily returned all of Ludek’s games and told him the café had closed.

‘Your Friday-night games group will have to go back to playing in the pub,’ she told him.

‘Oh, Em, I’m so sorry. I hope you’ll still be joining us.’

‘I don’t think so, Ludek. I’ll see you around.’

She was through with board games. She’d loved them, almost as much as Ludek did, but playing games would always remind her of what she had lost. She took all the ones she owned – the chess sets, the Scrabble and the three Buckaroo!s – to Oxfam. She kept just two: Masala! as she could hardly give that away when Ludek had taken so much trouble to make it; and Can’t Stop! which she kept as a reminder that risks were never worth taking.

She’d never wear her Scrabble dress again, so she donated it to the hospice shop in Hebbleswick, rather than to Oxfam in Essendale. The volunteers in Oxfam would only have put it on a mannequin in the window, and Emily didn’t want to see it there every time she walked past: a reminder of her failure.

Mr B insisted on storing the tables in his shed. ‘Because you never know,’ he said.

He hadn’t got room for the chairs, so Emily gave those away on Facebook.

She took him and Marjory a large Tupperware full of Chorley cakes and owned up that she hadn’t baked the domino biscuits, dice sponges or gingerbread meeples. ‘They were Annie’s. She was a better baker than me by far.’

She went to watch the day they began to demolish the café. She debated asking if she could keep the old Lancashire Hotpot sign, but what would be the point?

She’d imagined a controlled explosion and then The Little Board Game Café falling to the ground, like you saw on the news when they demolished a power station. But it was far less dramatic. The bulldozers moved in and they kind of chipped away at it. There wasn’t even one of those giant balls.

She went back a few days later. The whole place had been reduced to a pile of bricks. If this were a film, Emily thought, there’d be a solitary meeple somewhere, lying in the dust. She would pick it up and keep it for ever to remember the café by.

But it wasn’t.

There may well have been the odd meeple, playing card or dice lurking in the rubble, but Emily didn’t stop to look. She turned away and went to Costa for a hot chocolate and a Gimme S’mores cake to cheer herself up.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

It was as if she had gone back in time.

Every morning she would go to work at Thorp’s. She’d type Richard’s letters and make his coffee. At five-thirty, she went back to her little flat, the upper floor of a terraced house very much like the flat she used to rent before she moved in with Peter. This flat was above a hairdresser’s rather than above Marjory’s so there was no one downstairs in an evening if she wanted to share a cuppa.

Kate was grateful to have her house to herself again, but they were still friends and always would be. They’d patched up their argument over a bottle or three of Sauvignon Blanc in the Red Lion one Friday evening. Emily wondered if the board games group were upstairs but if they were, she didn’t see them.

Occasionally Kate would rope her into being her wingman and drag her along to some awful event. Speed-dating. Salsa dancing. A ‘golf for beginners’ day at Peter’s club.

‘As long as you never expect me to go to running club,’ Emily said. ‘I’m not doing that ever again.’

‘It wasn’t my thing either,’ Kate admitted.

One day Peter arrived at Thorp’s for a meeting with Richard. It really was like old times. He and Emily even laughed about whether there was paper stuck in the printer. She half-expected him to ask her out again.

‘Mother says hello by the way,’ he said.

‘Say hello back from me.’

‘She says to tell you that she misses your cooking. She and Sylvia were asked to leave Costa last week because they were arguing too loudly over a game of Scrabble.’