Chapter Two
Olivia prowled around her flat later that evening, feeling unusually restless. She’d spent the rest of the afternoon finishing her shopping list and organising her storage area, hauling three boxes of Christmas decorations from the loft, without a single other person coming through the door.
At five o’clock she locked up the shop and headed upstairs to the flat she’d shared with her mum until two months ago, when Tina James had moved to a retired living housing development twenty minutes away in Witney. It still felt strange to be here alone, although Olivia had lived alone for fifteen years in London, in a shoebox-sized flat in Hackney.
Still, this place felt irrevocably her mum’s; it was a poky little place, but not without its charm: two tiny bedrooms, a sitting room with views over the river and a tiny, cast-iron fireplace, a galley kitchen, and a bathroom that you could just about squeeze into. Olivia joked about being able to use the toilet, shower, and sink all at the same time, although she’d yet to accomplish that feat.
She and her mum had been constantly tripping over each other when they’d shared the small space, but it still seemed rather ridiculously big and empty without her there. After making a mug of instant noodles—hardly the most nutritious of suppers, but Olivia had never bothered with cooking for one—she collapsed onto the sofa, planning on an evening of Channel Four reality TV. Dr Jekyll, deciding to be friendly for once, leapt into her lap, making Olivia let out a startled oof. The cat really was enormous, and you never knew whether he was going to purr or unsheathe his claws, hence the name.
Olivia stroked him as she clicked the remote. Normally, after a day of work that had begun just before five a.m., she was grateful to sink into the sofa and watch some mindless telly. Tonight, for some reason, the prospect felt the teeniest, tiniest bit…well, depressing.
She needed to get a grip, Olivia told herself crossly. She was not the type of person to feel sorry for herself, not even for a moment, and in any case, there was nothing to feel sorry about. She had a job she loved, a nice home, a loving mum, plenty of friends, even this ridiculous cat. She didn’t need anything. She was really quite sure of that.
She stroked Dr Jekyll again, a little too firmly this time, and with a resentful yowl he dug his claws in—ouch—and then lumbered off her lap, plopping onto the floor before stalking away, bushy tail raised high in dudgeon. Perhaps she wouldn’t count the cat among her blessings quite yet, but still. She was happy; she was fulfilled. It was just everyone felt a little out of sorts, a bit restless, once in a while, didn’t they? Of course they did.
The next morning Olivia was up bright and early to make her next batch of cupcakes. Last night, after turning off a trashy show about discontented and overly Botoxed housewives in some American city or other, she’d designed a banner for the shop window detailing the Twelve Days of Cupcakes, complete with a border of holly leaves and bright red berries, and pictures of various delicious cupcakes. She’d also made a card that customers could have stamped whenever they bought a cupcake; in a moment of determined optimism she’d printed a hundred of them. Her Art GCSE was being put to some small use, at least.
Now, in the inky darkness of pre-dawn, she reached for sacks of flour and sugar, a basket of eggs delivered fresh from a local farm three times a week. Even though her body ached with tiredness and her eyes felt gritty, she loved these moments in the little kitchen in the back of the tea shop, creating the concoctions that would fill the cake stand and display case that day. Baking was love; it was what her mother had done all her life, what she’d taught.
They hadn’t had much when Olivia had been growing up; her father had walked out when she was two years old, never to come back, and Tina had held a variety of menial jobs to make ends meet. There hadn’t been the money for extravagant holidays or new trainers or birthday parties, but there had always, always been cake—and biscuits and tarts and pies and meringues. Her mother splurged on sugar and flour, high-quality cooking chocolate and plenty of hundreds and thousands. And just about every day when Olivia had come home from school, there had been something delicious and still-warm on the kitchen table.
Tina had passed that love of baking on to Olivia; even when she’d been doing the nine-to-five (or really, eight-to-six) slog in London, she’d loved relaxing with a big bowl of butter and sugar to cream together. She’d always brought in tins of cakes and flapjacks, biscuits and tarts, to the office, happy for anyone to help themselves. And when a friend was down, a baby was born, anything to celebrate or mourn—well, baking always helped.
And it helped now, as the restlessness she’d felt last night morphed into cheerful purpose. She’d decided to try a new flavour of cupcake today—salted caramel, with a melting, caramel centre and a butterscotch sweet on top of the swirls of creamy icing. She’d pile them in the window, on her prized Victorian cake stand, with its intricate iron swirls to match the icing. With the banner, and a few boughs of holly and evergreen around, she thought it would look very Christmassy—and as it was only nineteen days until the twenty-fifth, certainly very timely.
While the cakes were cooling, Olivia ran upstairs to shower and change before opening the shop at half past seven, when she usually snagged a few customers grabbing a coffee and muffin on their way
