Simone was tall and athletic; she’d been on the rowing team at university, and Maggie always thought that her upper body strength must be a boon in her profession. She had an aquiline nose and a full mouth, which along with her excellent posture gave her a regal air that caused catcalls to dry and shrivel in throats.
Star, by contrast, was waiflike in appearance. To Maggie’s mind she looked constantly like she needed to eat a pie or six, even though Maggie knew she ate heartily. She was beautiful in a beach-bum way; her skin held its tan year-round and her sun-bleached eyebrows matched her hair. She would fit in well with the Florida surf set; her hair was a permanent tangle of salt-sprayed waves, and her blond eyelashes were long and thick. She had a wide smile that beguiled men and women alike and had no doubt got her out of and into any number of tricky situations.
If Maggie was pushed to describe her own looks, she would say farmer’s wife chic. Her skin was pale and freckled all winter, but at the first hint of sun she would tan to the color of a leather satchel, a throwback from her mother’s Greek heritage, and her freckles would darken to form constellations over her nose and cheeks. She kept her thick curly hair—liberally streaked with gray—chin length for practicality, often pinning back the sides with Verity’s glitter clips, not that this stopped it from constantly dropping over her eyes. Though she was fit from hard work she lacked the lean athleticism of Simone, and no one in their right mind would ever describe her as waiflike.
“Ah, yes,” Maggie said knowingly, “the famous North green eyes. I used to hate it when I was growing up, always being referred to as one of the North girls or the North sisters. I think that’s partly what I was trying to run away from when I left the village. I always felt like I was trying to live down a reputation that didn’t belong to me.”
“But then you came back, and you never left.”
“I only came back to look after Mum when she got sick again. I’d never intended to stick around. But when I got here, I don’t know, I felt differently about the place. All the things I’d run away from suddenly seemed like reasons to stay. Plus, it’s a nice place to bring up kids. It was hard being a single mum in the city; here I already had friends, people who would look out for us. Who wouldn’t want that?”
“I get it. Not the single parent bit. But I understand the appeal of belonging to a community. I felt it the moment I moved in to the pub.”
Joe had arrived in Rowan Thorp a little over a year ago, having applied for the greengrocer’s assistant job in Maggie’s shop that he’d seen online. He took up lodgings in the Rowan Tree Inn and had been assimilated into the Rowan Thorp community in record time. Usually, true acceptance took at least a decade or a familial tie to the village; Belinda had been the new vicar for seven years. It didn’t surprise her, though; Joe had a magnetic personality and anyone in his radius became as metal filings.
“And here I was thinking it was the glamour of working with fruit and veg all day that kept you here.” She smiled.
Joe had previously worked in marketing, but he’d become disillusioned in his last job and decided he needed to “get out of the rat race.” On numerous occasions since, she had found herself gleefully thinking, Of all the grocer joints in all the towns, in all the world, he walks into mine.
Across the room, Star and Florin had taken a break from heavy petting to help Ryan, one of the owners of the Stag and Hound, extract Perdita and the huge spliff she’d just lit out of the pub before he got fined and she got arrested. Mourners shuffled hopefully out of the pub, following the plumes of weed smoke.
“Looks like the party’s moving outside.” Maggie laughed. “Dad would’ve loved that. I wish you could have met him. He had this aura of pure jolly mischief. He was . . . impish, even in old age. I think the world has lost some of its magic with him gone.”
But if anyone had been under the impression that Augustus’s funeral marked the end of his mischief, they would have been mistaken. A few weeks later, after the mourners had fled and life in Rowan Thorp returned to its dull convention, three solicitor letters in stiff white envelopes landed on three very different doormats, and three very different women picked them up.
5
Maggie looked up and smiled as Joe placed a mug of coffee on the table and shifted a crate of cauliflowers onto the floor. He walked around behind her, lifted her fading auburn curls off the back of her neck, and laid kisses along her skin.
She melted. The brush of his lips sent the sweetest thrill down her spine, which blossomed into a warm honey caress and kept on going. Even as she told herself again that she had to put a stop to whatever this was, that she had no business having hot passionate sex with this younger man, she knew her body would betray her.
In her opinion her breasts had always been too droopy, and her bottom was the shape of two Comice pears sat side by side. Her body was etched with a silvery mass of stretch marks flowing in streams and rivulets over her stomach and thighs, the topography of having grown two humans. For years she had hidden her body in the darkness during sexual encounters, embarrassed by its many imperfections. But Joe was a lights-on man, something that had taken her a while to get used to. He had traced her stretch marks with kisses like they were something to be worshipped and reveled in her softness.
“Is Patrick home?” His voice was low, teasing against her ear.
Oh, how she wished just at that moment that her eldest child wasn’t lurking in his bedroom. If only she had the kind of son who liked to go running first thing in the morning. But alas, Patrick was a perfectly normal university student, who liked to sleep late when he was home for the holidays.
“He’s in bed,” she said, taking some pleasure from Joe’s obvious disappointment.
“Maybe if we’re really quiet I could take you on the worktop?”
She laughed. She was not about to sex up her kitchen worktop; she’d done her food hygiene course and that kind of thing was frowned upon.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for tea and biscuits this morning.” She smiled as he took the seat he’d cleared for himself.
“Tea and biscuits come a close second.” He grinned at her. “What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the letter laid open on the table, three satisfyingly sharp creases preventing the thick paper from lying flat.
She rubbed her eyes and dragged her palms down her face. My god, she was tired. Look at him sitting there all gorgeously ruffled like he’s just jumped out of a hayloft. She looked down at her dungarees, the inner thighs of which were wearing thin—the curse of the ample-thigh rub—and saw one of the cuffs on her jumper was beginning to fray. For the hundredth time, she wondered what it was that Joe saw in her.
“It’s a letter from my dad’s solicitors,” she said, nudging the letter with her finger as though afraid it might bite.
“Augustus had a solicitor?”
“Who knew? It’s Steele & Brannigan, on the high street. They kept that quiet; I’ve known Vanessa Steele for years and she never said a thing, not even at the funeral.”