A Season for Second Chances(22)

Annie had to admit this thought had passed through her mind.

“And what would be his reason for that?”

“To get her out of the way!” said Emily. “Distract her with a holiday and then bam!” Emily smacked her hand down on the table, making Annie jump in her seat. “Get her to sign away her house. Good-bye, historical gem. Hello, overpriced boxy beachside apartments, sports cars, and The Real Housewives of Willow Bay!”

“Now, now, Emily,” said Pam.

Pam set Annie’s wine and water down on the table. Annie swigged gratefully from first the water, then the wine, and then the wine again. Emily was rather an intense welcome party.

“Emily runs the Willow Bay library, just down the road. And the local history society,” said Pam.

“We can kiss our history good-bye if Granger gets his way!” said Emily.

“Don’t you be filling Annie’s head with your conspiracy theories,” said Pam. “John’s a good man.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that a massive piece of Willow Bay history will be lost!” said Emily.

“I don’t say it won’t be a tragedy,” said Pam. “But it’s not in our hands.”

“Isn’t the building listed?” asked Annie.

Bill arrived with Annie’s dinner. Curls of meaty steam rolled up from the plate, and Annie’s mouth watered.

“Mari never applied for ‘listed status’ because she didn’t want local government to have an opinion on things she might want to do to her own property,” said Pam.

“Which means whoever she sells it to can knock it down without repercussion,” said Emily. “The plain fact is that history should belong to everyone, not just one person. Our campaign is to have Saltwater Nook turned over to the historical society. We will maintain it for generations to come and turn it into the Willow Bay Museum.”

“Is there much call for a Willow Bay Museum?” Annie asked.

Emily eyed her like a tiger about to pounce on a deer, and Annie got the distinct impression she had managed to make an enemy on her first day of residence. Pam stepped in quickly.

“Oh my goodness, Willow Bay is full of history, absolutely riddled with the stuff,” Pam said jovially. “We have a long history of shipwrecks and smugglers, even some sunken treasure! They say British soldiers were living in the tunnels beneath the cliff and your new home during the Napoleonic Wars, gathering intelligence from boats in the night. If the walls of Saltwater Nook could talk . . .”

“But they can’t,” broke in Emily. “Which is why we have to be their voice and protect it from villains like John Granger!”

“I don’t think you give John enough credit,” said Bill.

“Dad!”

“You’re looking at it from a purely academic perspective,” said Bill. “But John’s got to think of Mari. You want Mari to sign the Nook over to the historical society, and that’s all very noble, but what happens to Mari? Her money’s tied up in that place.”

“Oh, he’s not doing it for Mari,” said Emily. “He’s doing it to line his own pockets. History is bigger than just people!”

“Some might say history is just people,” said Bill thoughtfully.

Emily snorted. Annie wished they would all bugger off, so she could hoover up her dinner. If they didn’t sling their hooks soon, she was likely to plunge her face into the food and start devouring roast parsnips.

Pam squeezed Emily’s shoulders and planted a kiss on her head.

“Come on, Emily, my love,” she said. “Let’s leave poor Annie here to eat her dinner and give the local politics a rest.”

Emily stood and arm in arm went back to the bar with Pam.

Bill placed a cruet set on the table and said, “Enjoy!” before he too left her in peace at last.



* * *



—

Happily stuffed and having received texts from both Alex and Peter to say they’d each arrived home safely, Annie headed out of the pub. As she pulled open the porch door, she was confronted by a man wiping frantically at a gray slick of bird shit on his head with a supermarket receipt.

“Happens to the best of us,” she said as she let him pass. He grimaced at her, and as the door squeaked closed she heard Bill’s voice ring out through the pub: “Shit on?”

Annie parked herself on one of the benches on the lawn and listened to the birds noisily settling down to roost.

The Pomegranate Seed was closed on Mondays, so the waning of a Sunday (one of their busiest days of the week) was always plump with the promise of liberation. Habitually, she felt that promise now, and then she reminded herself that it wasn’t just Monday she had off but Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday . . . it was a lot to comprehend. What would she do with all that spare time?

She thought back to when Alex and Peter were little. Annie would drop them off at school or nursery with hugs and kisses, and then she’d race home to get the house straight before work at eleven. At three o’clock, she would dash back to the school gates to pick them up. A play in the park, help with homework, cook dinner, do bath and storytime, brief the babysitter, and head back to the restaurant by seven fifteen p.m. to oversee the dinner service.

School holidays were a whirlwind of guilt and self-loathing.