Simone followed the bony pointing finger to the top shelf, where a thickset china shire horse reared up from its base. She pulled a set of wooden steps over and used them to carefully bring the horse down.
Miss Radley clapped her hands in delight and pushed her pince-nez back up her nose. “That’s it!” she trilled. “It used to be filled with a very expensive aged whiskey, but Augustus never could resist a good thing. We polished it off one night, naked under the stars. Unscrew the head, dear,” she instructed.
Simone did as she was told. The horse’s head came off easily, and at Miss Radley’s urging, she tipped the heavy body upside down over the old woman’s cupped hands. Something solid clattered down through the china body and a red Monopoly house dropped into Miss Radley’s wrinkled palms.
“That’s amazing!” Star was delighted. “How did you guess there’d be a house in there?”
Miss Radley handed the house to Simone and dipped her head from side to side like a small bird. “Hmmm, just a little hunch. He was a sentimental soul. To know your father was to love him.”
“What if we didn’t really know him?” asked Maggie.
“Oh, I think you’ll be surprised.” The tiny woman smiled, her sharp eyes almost disappearing behind her crinkly paper cheeks. “Now about my finder’s fee.”
“Your what?” asked Simone.
“My reward for leading you to the house. I don’t want money, but I am led to believe that you, dear, are a physiotherapist, and I’ve got this bother with my neck.”
Simone held her hands up. “Oh, no, I’m afraid I can’t. You’d need referrals, and I’m not registered here . . .”
“Oh, silly nonsense, all I need is a little massage, just to loosen things up. Call it a friendly rub, no need to be official. It will be the work of moments for someone with your magic touch. Come along, we can use the kitchen. No peeking, young man!”
Duncan bent his head determinedly to his work. Miss Radley began to peel off layers of clothing as she doddered out toward the kitchen. Simone followed behind, shaking her head.
Ten minutes later, after some mumblings behind the closed door and some appreciative squeals, Miss Radley appeared—fully dressed—with Simone close behind.
“That was just the ticket. You are a marvel, dear. It’s a pleasure doing business with you. I’ll be off now; I’m running an online seminar this afternoon on how to make last-minute mincemeat.”
And with that she tottered out of the shop.
“I could be wrong,” Simone said, looking after her, “but I think I just bartered my professional skills for a Monopoly house.”
“Welcome back to Rowan Thorp.” Maggie grinned.
* * *
At half past five, Simone excused herself from the shop and headed back to the cottage to call Evette. She let herself into the place that was to be her home for the foreseeable future and poured a glass of wine from the bottle she’d opened last night when she’d stolen unnoticed into Rowan Thorp.
The cottage was much like she remembered it, a mix of tasteful chintz and whitewash with exposed black beams in the ceilings and roughly textured plaster on the ancient walls. Mrs. Dalgleish had gone to stay with her daughter, Kelly, in Canada and wouldn’t be back until the spring. It was a happy chance that Simone had found the place for rent on Airbnb.
A picture of Kelly smiled out at her from a frame on one of the bookshelves. She was a nurse practitioner now and mother to three boys. Another mother. It was inescapable; the reminders were everywhere she looked: pregnant women, women with babies and children, in the street, in shops, on the TV. It was a deep scratch that was never closed long enough to heal over, and every baby bump was a saltcellar pouring into the wound.
Evette answered on the second ring.
“Hey, you.” She was out of breath, but she sounded pleased to hear from Simone.
A pang of homesickness threaded itself through her rib cage and pulled corset-tight. “Hey. Did you just get in?”
“Yes, I literally just dumped the shopping down when you called. How are you doing? Tell me about the solicitors’ and don’t leave anything out.”
Simone plopped down onto the cottage-style sofa, glass of wine in hand, and filled her wife in on the day’s events. They’d only managed to find four Monopoly houses, but that wasn’t surprising given how many distractions they’d had to contend with throughout the day.
“You need to give Star a break,” Evette said when she’d finished.
Simone growled in frustration. “She’s so irresponsible. She needs to learn that she can’t just float through life.”
“And you need to learn to let stuff go.”
“By that do you mean having a baby or our relationship?” As soon as she’d asked it, she wished she could suck the words back down. What was this urge to constantly pick at the scab instead of leaving it be?
“That’s not what I meant.” Evette’s tone cooled instantly.
“What does being on a break even mean?” She shook her head in despair. It was like her mouth had a will of its own. Her pain was magma looking for cracks through which it could spew out and incinerate everything it touched. “Why am I in exile?”
“I’m not doing this with you.”
This was the voice Evette used with clients on the phone: patient yet unyielding, refusing to be drawn in. Simone’s anger spiked.
“Not doing what?”
“I’m not explaining a concept that you already understand simply because you refuse to accept it,” her wife responded with well-practiced calm.
“But I don’t understand it! That’s just it. The reason we started trying for a baby is because we love each other so much that we wanted to share our love with a family. And now suddenly trying for a baby is a reason for us to be apart?”
“I get that this is hard for you. It’s hard for me too. We need to decide, if having kids isn’t in the cards for us, if we can still make it as a family of two. At the moment, I’m not sure we can come back from this sense of malcontent hanging over us.” Her voice cracked, and Simone couldn’t help the split-second of sick satisfaction she felt at having elicited it. She needed to know that Evette was as devastated as she was.
“You haven’t had to come back from anything! You haven’t been through the injections and the hormones and the indignity and the knowing that something alive is inside you only for it to not . . . be anymore.” Suddenly she was rinsed out. Her anger was like a back draft exploding outward and then sucking back in, leaving her spent and regretful as the heavy awareness that she had doomed yet another conversation draped itself across her.
“You be the one to try next,” she said now, idly watching a squirrel dash up the Christmas tree outside the butcher’s shop. “You’re younger than me, maybe it’ll work better with you.”
“My darling, think about what you’re saying. We’ve discussed this countless times. I don’t feel the same physical need as you do to carry a child. The biology of our family simply isn’t important to me in the way it is for you.”