“Shall we walk into the village?” Ellie—or maybe it was Ava—suggested. “What’s it to be, The Drowned Sailor or The Three Pennies?”
“Oh, I don’t think I can bear another night at The Three Pennies,” another woman said. Maybe that was Ava. She was gorgeous, with a long, tousled mane of golden-brown hair and a throaty voice that made her sound like a film star. “That place gets more stuck-up by the second.”
“The Drowned Sailor it is, then,” Harriet said cheerfully, marching in front of them all like a suffragette holding her banner.
The Drowned Sailor. Perfect. This already awkward evening was now potentially going to become even more torturous. Emily would most likely see Owen Jones, with his loud laugh and unsettling manner that had been flirty one second, vaguely hostile the next. Talking to him had felt like static electricity; she’d never known when she was going to get a shock. It had left her all weirdly tingly, too.
Emily trailed towards the back of the gregarious group as they headed down the darkened road towards the village. The sun was setting but it had been raining all day and the sky was already dark and heavy with clouds, the air damp and cold. Emily pulled her coat more tightly around her as she ducked her head against the onslaught of a decidedly chilly wind, despite it being April in just a few days.
“Sorry if we’re a bit overwhelming.”
Startled, she glanced up to see one of the women had fallen in step beside her. This had to be Ellie, and she confirmed it with a shy smile.
“Ellie Venables. I used to live in number one, before I moved to Oxford.”
“Oh…right.” Emily tried to think of something else to say and couldn’t. Her brain felt as if it were full of cotton wool.
“I moved with my husband Oliver and my daughter Abby,” Ellie continued with a quiet kind of pride. Even in the midst of a dark and rainy night, Emily could see the love shining in her eyes, the happiness that surrounded her like a rosy bubble and radiated from her fingertips just as it had for Alice. “But it was a happy home for the two of us, for a little while. And Marmite too, of course. My dog.”
“That’s…nice.” She sounded so lame. But she couldn’t think of what else to say, and it was nice. Still, Emily felt her lack rather keenly as they continued to walk in a somewhat suffocated silence, and a burst of raucous laughter from the front of the group punctuated the quiet night.
“Are you missing London?” Ellie asked in a voice full of sympathy. “All your friends?”
“I suppose,” Emily managed. She felt like a fraud. “It’s very different here.”
“Yes it is, isn’t it? I moved from Manchester, and you would have thought I’d come from the moon. Some of the la-di-da types looked at me as if I were an alien, at any rate, especially when they heard my accent.” She laughed ruefully. “But you don’t look as if you’d have that sort of problem.” She gave a friendly nod towards Emily’s camel-hair coat, not exactly the most sensible clothing option considering the rain, but Emily liked to be stylish. It was her protection.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she murmured. When she’d started at Ellis Investments, it had been important to look the part. And she loved the feel of nice clothes—the silkiness of a blouse, the heft of a good coat. Comforting somehow, and solid. Dependable in a way that people often weren’t.
As Emily had continued to work and earn and she’d been able to build her wardrobe, she’d also liked the image she presented—someone who was in control, who had made it.
And yet, as she’d taken in Ellie’s rueful smile just now, Emily knew the clothes were no more than a costume, a designer wardrobe hiding the deficiencies underneath. She suspected she was far more of an alien here than Ellie-from-Manchester ever could be, not that she’d ever admit it.
They’d reached the village green, The Drowned Sailor twinkling with friendly-looking lights on one end of it, and conversation was thankfully prohibited as they entered the crowded, noisy warmth of the pub and found a table in the back.
Harriet put herself in charge of amassing enough chairs and stools as everyone took off their coats, and Ava announced she’d spring for the first round of drinks.
“Red or white?” she asked the group.
“What about cocktails?” Harriet suggested, and Ava let out a surprisingly dirty laugh.
“Owen doesn’t do cocktails, you git.”
Harriet rolled her eyes. “Of course he doesn’t.”
“Why not one of each?” Ellie suggested mischievously. “Red and white? We’re a big group, aren’t we?”
“That we are,” someone else agreed, and laughter and comments flew around as Emily perched on a stool in the corner and quietly tried to make herself invisible.
As the women continued to chatter and laugh, her gaze moved around the crowded pub. The Drowned Sailor did a brisk business on a Friday night—mostly men clocking off after shift work, by the looks of it, some with their significant others. Emily glanced at the bar and a frisson of something unexpected went through her as she saw Owen Jones standing behind it, just as he’d been when she’d come to this pub three days ago.
There was something weirdly magnetic about him, with that quick smile, the booming laugh she could hear even from across the noisy room. His hair was dark and curly, springing up in a wild thatch around a face that looked as if it had seen a few fights, with a nose that had been broken at least once, and an ear that must have got a bit mangled somehow. Although she couldn’t see their colour from here, Emily remembered his eyes—a bright, laughing blue.
She watched as he pulled a pint, his biceps rippling
