Page 4 of The Little Board Game Café

With thoughts of food swirling round her head, she’d barely noticed how far she’d walked and was surprised to find herself almost at home. Well, she tried to think of it as home, but this place still felt like Peter’s home rather than hers.

She stopped outside the house and looked at it for a second. She knew she ought to be grateful to live in a place like this. Spacious. Modern. Warm. But it was sterile. Characterless. Red-brick with an ostentatious portico and ornamental urns, it was one of a small cluster of new executive homes built on the northern edge of the town. It had a gravel driveway with steel gates – the kind that you opened remotely with a little gadget as you drove up – and it wasn’t very… Essendale. Only a few weeks ago, she’d given up her lovely stone-built terrace – well, the top floor of it; a lovely old lady called Marjory had the downstairs flat – to move in with Peter. Probably as well. Now she was going to be unemployed, she wouldn’t be able to afford the rent.

Emily turned her key in the lock, praying that Peter wouldn’t have come home early, and pushed the shiny black front door open. In the hallway, she took off her coat and shoes – cream carpets so no shoes allowed inside – and headed for the kitchen. It wasn’t her sort of kitchen either. It was almost clinical; the sort of kitchen where you felt you shouldn’t make a mess. Stark-white units lined every wall. Everything hidden away. It had taken her ages to remember which door was the fridge when she’d first stayed here. She’d opened and closed practically every cupboard in search of a pint of milk the first few times she’d made a cuppa.

She opened a cupboard now, looking for a glass. Peter’s glassware was incredibly organised. There were everyday glasses – small tumblers, highball glasses and wine glasses – then a whole array of crystal glasses for when his mother descended on them. What on earth were people meant to give as wedding presents when the time came? She selected a tumbler and filled it from the tap. There was mineral water in the fridge, of course. Peter never drank tap water, but Emily liked to do her bit for the planet so tap was fine with her.

She rummaged through her handbag in search of her phone, intending to message Kate to tell her about her impending unemployment, but when she found it, she saw that she’d had three texts from Peter.

At 14:17 – in other words, five minutes after she’d left the office and seven minutes after she’d Just Been Fired – he’d written, Don’t forget the milk.

At 14:18: Semi-skimmed.

At 15:25: You did get the milk, didn’t you? Don’t worry about cooking tonight. Let’s eat out. My treat. Make up for today.

You couldn’t make up for firing someone by taking them out for dinner. But still, he was trying to be thoughtful. Peter always tried to be thoughtful.

She’d been working at Thorp’s, one of Ridley’s suppliers in the neighbouring town of Hebbleswick, when she’d first met him. He’d come into the office one day to argue with Richard Thorp about the increased price of some component or other. She’d been wrestling with the printer; a sheet of A4 had got jammed in there for the fifth time that morning.

‘Bloody thing,’ she’d said, giving it a punch, which hurt her fist more than it did the printer.

‘Allow me,’ came a voice from behind. A deep male voice, with only the slightest hint of a Yorkshire accent. Emily turned to see who it belonged to.

A suited and booted, tall, dark and – she had to admit – rather handsome stranger, with hair so perfect it looked like the plastic hair on an action figure. Dark eyes. A shiny leather zip-up folder tucked under his arm.

He wasn’t her usual type. She liked quirky men. Men whose ambition was to live on a narrowboat or who grew their own organic vegetables on their allotments. The sort of men who’d buy an old van and spend every spare minute converting it into a beautiful camper, and when it was finally finished, would drop everything to spend a month touring round the Highlands of Scotland. Geeky men who knew random facts like how far Jupiter was from Pluto or how many service stations there were on the M6. Men who collected unusual things like antique beer bottles or railway memorabilia. Men who wore interesting spectacles and their hair in a ponytail or had a mop of corkscrew curls.

Corkscrew curls. Emily sighed, remembering Greg.

Peter – she would learn later – wore a suit to work and jeans in the evening, drove a BMW and watched telly every night – documentaries rather than the reality-TV programmes like Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and The Apprentice which she preferred – and his idea of excitement was their bi-annual trip to his mother’s second home in Cornwall.

‘Allow me,’ he said, putting the shiny zip-up leather folder down on her desk.

He deftly flipped open the lid of the printer, removed the offending sheet of A4 and fiddled around inside for a few seconds. She peered over his shoulder but couldn’t quite see what he was doing.

‘Aha, there’s the culprit.’ He held up a torn corner of white paper that had been stuck somewhere inside. ‘Do you have a pen?’

She rummaged around in the general detritus on her desk and handed him her least chewed Biro.

He jotted something down on the tiny piece of paper, handed it to her, picked up his shiny zip-up leather folder and proceeded in the direction of Richard Thorp’s office.

Emily looked at the paper.

Call me, he had written. And then he’d added his name and number.

She wasn’t the kind of woman men normally handed their number to. She wasn’t unattractive: dark-blond hair with fading highlights and a fringe that was always far too long and mostly ended getting tucked behind her ears (visiting the hairdressers was never top priority). She had pale-blue eyes and a chin that was a little bit too pointy in her opinion but Kate said it gave her that elfin look. Her best feature was her nose: she liked to think Nicole Kidman in Bewitched, but even more cute and buttony. But men didn’t usually go for noses. Most men went for boobs and pouty lips, didn’t they? And, let’s face it, she was a bit lacking in those areas.

Men didn’t go for the clothes she liked wearing either, but she’d no intention of changing. She loved dungaree pinafores: they were fun but practical and she had several in a variety of colours. They were suitable for most occasions and most seasons – with a plain or stripey t-shirt underneath in summer and a long-sleeved top, cardigan and woolly tights if it was cold. As it invariably was, living in the Pennines.

Emily stood there in the office, staring at that piece of paper, thinking, but this never happens to me. It happens to Kate with her sleek, dark bob, her come-to-bed brown eyes and her elegant, figure-hugging dresses, but not to me.

Later, despite all Kate’s advice that she shouldn’t be the one to call first, she did. After all, she had his number but he didn’t have hers, did he?

Kate assumed it was his money that had piqued her interest. Emily wasn’t a gold-digger or anything – she’d never been particularly interested in money – but in Kate’s eyes, Peter’s wealth was the only interesting thing about him. He was rather taciturn when Emily had first introduced them, disapproving almost.

In reality, the thing that had attracted Emily to Peter was that Peter was a grown-up. She’d never dated a man who was a grown-up before.

Greg, her first proper boyfriend, had been so young. They had met in the park in Thornholme when she was seventeen. She was taking a short-cut into town and he was walking his auntie’s Labrador. She’d stopped to pat the Labrador and they’d started talking. Okay, not strictly true. She stopped to pat the Labrador because she’d spotted Greg’s curly hair. She’d always been a sucker for curly hair. They’d been inseparable until… Well, she didn’t like thinking about how that had ended. She’d behaved badly, she knew that.