“It was fine,” Emily said a bit woodenly, and then surprised herself by adding, “I know I come across as a bit reserved and cool.”
Olivia made a face. “I thought you’d heard that cold fish comment. But you don’t come across that way to me, Emily. At all.”
“Well, that’s a relief, I suppose,” Emily said as lightly as she could. This conversation was deeply uncomfortable, and she searched for something innocuous to say, unfortunately coming up with nothing.
“You remind me a bit of myself, actually,” Olivia said, and Emily nearly did a double take. She and Olivia were miles apart in every way possible—the messy cottage, Olivia’s eclectic, hippyish style and frizzy hair, the easy warmth with which she seemed to approach everything. Absolute miles.
“I just mean,” Olivia clarified with a smile, “that you seem a bit…isolated. Lonely.” She paused, sipping her tea as she watched Emily carefully. “Sorry if I’m being too nosy. But I can relate.”
You are being nosy, Emily wanted to say. She felt, suddenly and surprisingly, really rather angry. What was with people here? Why did everyone feel as if they had the right to weigh in on her life, ask prying questions, make absurd judgements? Who did that? No one in London, certainly.
Right then she resented Olivia’s friendliness, and Alice’s kitchen confidences, and even Henry insisting she traipse up and down the high street meeting people because he thought it would be good for her.
She didn’t need any of it. She didn’t want any of it, as well intentioned as it might have been. She didn’t need a bunch of sanctimonious strangers telling her how screwed up she was, or how she should live her life.
“Sorry,” Olivia murmured when Emily still hadn’t replied. “I think I overstepped a bit.”
“Yes, you did,” Emily agreed, her voice trembling. “I understand that everyone wants to be welcoming, but I’m actually fine the way I am, and I don’t need people telling me how I feel, even if they mean well.” Olivia flinched, and Emily realised how biting she’d sounded, just as she realised she didn’t, in this precise moment, care. “Look, thanks for the tea, but I think I ought to get home.”
“Oh, Emily, I’m sorry.” Olivia looked at her in dismay, her face crumpling with obvious regret. “Me and my big mouth. I didn’t mean to tell you how you feel, honestly. I just thought I recognised a kindred spirit—I’ve gone through a lot of life on my own and I know how hard it can be—”
“Thanks again for the tea.” Emily stood up from the table with a screech of chair legs. She walked out of the cottage on watery legs, amazed at how bolshie she’d been. Well, so much for being friends with Olivia. Cold fish clearly didn’t even begin to cover it; she’d turn herself into an absolute pariah before too long, and so be it.
Her fingers were shaking as she turned the key in the lock, and then stepped into the reassuring calm of her own cottage, where everything was in its place, every surface free of clutter and dust. Yet looking around it now, the single sofa and the one bookcase, the kitchen seeming as spotlessly unused as one in an Airbnb, she couldn’t help but think how empty it looked. How barren.
She went upstairs to change, drawing the curtains against the lashing rain and struggling to hold on to some sense of peace and order. Then she caught sight of the rocking chair in the corner of the room, its wood now burnished to a honeyed gleam, an inviting place to sit that made her think of half-forgotten memories of she didn’t even know what.
And, quite suddenly, she thought she could burst into tears and never stop.
“Don’t be so stupid,” she muttered under her breath as she undressed, putting her work clothes back on their hangers, tights in the laundry hamper, understated pearl earrings back in her jewellery box. Everything in its place, and yet the tears were still there, at the backs of her eyes, rising in her throat, refusing to be ignored.
She changed into her comfy clothes, a matching pyjama set, and willed all the emotion back. Who were these people, to tell her how she felt? That she was lonely?
She’d never considered herself lonely before. Not until she’d come to wretched Willoughby Close.
Back downstairs Emily soothed herself with her usual routines—heating up some lentil soup she’d made earlier in the week as she listened to radio four. Tidying up, wiping down the counters, taking her lone bowl to the table with her book, just as she’d always liked it, and still would.
She was just about to start eating when she saw a tiny, drenched form of black and orange huddled by the French windows. It was, or at least she thought it was, the kitten from the barn.
“Oh, no…” Emily rose from the table and opened the French windows, letting in a sheet of rain that promptly puddled on the floor. The kitten looked utterly woebegone and nearly half dead, cold and wet, and tiny.
Gently Emily picked it up in her hands, amazed at how small it was, and then dried it carefully with a hand towel, its fur sticking up in a marmalade-striped fuzz. Its little eyes opened and a tiny pink tongue darted out and licked Emily’s hand. She let out a little laugh of surprise.
“You’re going to be all right, aren’t you?”
The kitten meowed, and Emily felt as if a crack had opened up right in the middle of her heart. Poor, wee, abandoned kitten. Jace had said its mother would leave it somewhere, and so she had…right on Emily’s doorstep.
Emily didn’t know if it was providence or chance that had brought the kitten to her, but she knew one thing with a bone-deep certainty: she was going to keep it.
Chapter Nine
Jace and Ava inhabited a fairy tale, in more ways than one. Emily ducked under
