Page 8 of The Little Board Game Café

He sat up and turned on his bedside light. ‘Talk to me.’

And that was another opportunity to tell him that she’d always dreamed of having her own café, and by a somewhat unbelievable coincidence, today of all days, hours after he’d fired her, she had stumbled across a café for sale right there in Essendale.

‘Forget it, Peter. Let’s go to sleep.’

Then she leaned across him and flicked his light back off.

Chapter Four

Word had clearly got round Ridley’s by the time Emily and Peter walked into the office on Friday morning. No one said anything, but she could feel every pair of eyes upon them. They all knew she’d been fired. And there was probably a fair bit of speculation about whether she and Peter were still together.

Peter practically sprinted into his office, closing the door behind him. Annie raised her eyebrows questioningly at Emily, then turned round to look at Peter as he sat down on his deluxe office chair. He stood up again, walked over to the windows and closed the blinds.

Emily put her handbag down beside her desk and fired up her computer. There was a small pile of letters to type up, all in Peter’s practically indecipherable scrawl. Who’d type his letters when she’d left, she wondered. Annie, perhaps. She’d waltz into his office and lean over as she handed them to him, affording him a perfect view of her cleavage. She was attractive, Emily thought grudgingly. Blonder hair, and straight too. Flawless make-up. Perfectly shaped eyebrows.

She typed up two of the letters, then limped into the small and ill-equipped kitchen area in the corner of the Ridley’s office to make herself a consolatory mug of instant. There was no fancy coffee machine. There wasn’t even a kettle. Someone – Peter, she guessed, or perhaps his mother – had installed one of those fancy taps that delivered boiling water on demand with an angry hiss of steam. You took your life into your own hands when you used it. Rumour had it that Annie’s predecessor had had to go to hospital with third-degree burns.

Emily was sniffing the milk to check it was fit for human consumption, when Annie walked into the kitchen, blonde hair and hips swaying as she walked.

‘I’m sorry to hear about your job,’ she said, putting a beautifully manicured hand on Emily’s arm. ‘If you ever need a listening ear or anything. You know, I’m always happy to—̓

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

Emily couldn’t imagine anyone she’d be less likely to turn to if she needed a listening ear. The MIL2B perhaps.

‘So, are you and Peter…?’

‘Are Peter and I what?’ Emily pretended she didn’t know what her colleague was angling to find out.

‘Are you…?’ Annie was usually pushy, but seemed reluctant to come straight out with it.

Emily picked up her mug of coffee with her left hand and took a sip. Her ring sparkled under the kitchen spotlights.

‘Are we still together? Of course we are.’ She smiled. ‘Very much so. Why wouldn’t we be?’

‘Well, you know. With him making you redundant.’

‘That was a business decision, Annie. Besides, when you have a bond like we do, it’d take more than a little thing like redundancy to break us up.’

‘I’d hardly call redundancy a little thing,’ she said.

She actually looked a little tearful. Odd. Emily had always suspected that Annie fancied Peter, but hadn’t thought that the news that she and Peter were still together would upset the woman quite so much. She took her coffee back to her desk, slopping some of it down her pinafore, a pale-blue one that she particularly liked.

She was irritated. By the conversation with Annie. By ruining one of her favourite garments. And by the realisation that she hadn’t clicked ‘save’ on the document she’d been working on and had somehow managed to lose it. Like the grit in an oyster that eventually leads to the production of a beautiful pearl, it was this irritation that made her put the rest of the letters to one side and google Nico’s.

It didn’t take long to find the little café on an estate agent’s website. She was surprised at the price – pleasantly surprised. Over the years, she’d occasionally googled cafés for sale so had a rough idea what they’d cost – it varied from place to place, of course – but Nico’s was less than she’d expected; within her budget, in fact.

There’d be rent to pay, of course, but even that was a reasonable amount.

Suddenly what had felt like an unattainable dream seemed like a real possibility.

And the synchronicity of it all…seeing an affordable café for sale right here in Essendale on the very same afternoon that she’d lost her job. Was the universe trying to tell her something?

No. Emily dismissed that thought. She didn’t believe in that kind of stuff. It was just coincidence. Buying a café would be such a risk. All those years of saving up. The money from her mum. If things didn’t work out, she could lose everything. Sensible people in their thirties didn’t spend thousands of pounds pursuing the dream they’d had as a teenager. She would get another job. That was the wise thing to do.

*

‘Peter said what?’ said Kate, grinning from ear to ear. You didn’t expect the news that you’d Just Been Fired to make your best friend look like she’d won the lottery.