Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Call
She was in the middle of a quarterly review when her phone rang.
This was not, in itself, unusual. Her phone rang constantly — the particular tyranny of being three years into a job that rewarded availability above everything else, at a financial consultancy that believed the phrase out of office to be a kind of moral failing. She had silenced it for the meeting. She had silenced it during every meeting for three years and it had never once felt like a sacrifice.
This time she looked at the screen — reflex, the glance that takes half a second — and saw Aunt Patricia and something went cold in her chest.
She excused herself. She took the call in the corridor outside the conference room with the door clicking shut behind her and the glass wall still showing her colleagues' faces in her peripheral vision, looking at the spreadsheet, not at her.
"Patricia," she said.
Her aunt's voice was the voice of someone who had been preparing a sentence for a very long time and was now delivering it as cleanly as possible. "Elena. Love. It's Mae."
She stood very still in the corridor.
"When?" she said.
"Yesterday evening. It was peaceful, the doctor said — she went in her sleep, in the flat above the shop. She'd been reading." Patricia paused. "She had a book on her chest."
Elena pressed her back against the wall. The carpet in the corridor was the specific grey of all corporate corridors, and there was a motivational print at the far end that she had never once found motivating, and the fluorescent light above her hummed with the sound of everything carrying on.
"I'll come now," she said.
"You don't have to—"
"I'll come now," she said again.
She went back into the conference room. She said family emergency, I'm so sorry to the faces around the table — her manager's expression going from mildly annoyed to appropriate concern in the time it takes to say three words — and she picked up her notebook and her phone and she left.
She did not cry in the car. She drove very carefully, because this was something Mae had told her once: when you're in shock, you drive carefully and you keep your hands on the wheel and you let the road take you where you're going. Mae had a great deal of practical wisdom of this kind, dispensed at low volumes as if she were sharing a secret rather than a life lesson, and Elena had been collecting it for twenty-eight years.
She had not thought about the fact that the collecting would eventually stop.
Merrow Cove was four hours from London on a Thursday afternoon with reasonable traffic on the A30, which was the route she had driven enough times to know every services stop, every stretch where the road narrowed to a single lane through a village, every turn off toward the coast where you first smelled the sea. She had grown up thirty minutes from here — not in Merrow Cove itself, which was its own small particular world — but close enough that the landscape was her landscape, the specific Cornish countryside she had left at eighteen and returned to every summer and Christmas since.
She had spent more time in Merrow Cove than anywhere else on earth except her parents' house and the London flat she'd been renting for three years. This was partly because it was beautiful — a small harbour village on the south Cornish coast, the kind of place that appeared on calendars and in the background of people's holiday photographs, with its whitewashed cottages and its fishing boats and its harbour wall that curved like an arm around the small bay. But mainly it was because of Mae.
Mae Marsh had run Mae's Pages for thirty years. Not the same shop — the original had been one room above a dry goods store, which she'd eventually expanded into the ground floor and then into the building next door — but always the same shop in the sense that mattered: full of the books she loved, curated with a taste that was entirely hers, presided over with the warm authority of someone who had thought carefully about what reading was for and had arrived at a considered position. She had been known, in Merrow Cove, in the way that people who run important small things are known in small towns — not famous, but woven in. Part of the fabric.
Elena arrived at half past seven in the evening.
She parked in the small car park off the harbour road and sat for a moment with the engine ticking. Through the windscreen she could see the familiar lines of the village — the pub lights on the waterfront, the boats at their moorings in the harbour, the cottages climbing the hill behind. Above the row of shops on the main street, a window was lit: the flat above the bookshop, where Patricia would be, sorting things.
She got out of the car. The air was salt and cold and the beginning of May — the specific coastal May that was not quite warm yet, the sea still dark grey rather than blue, the wildflowers on the cliff path behind the village. She stood for a moment and breathed it in and felt the thing she had been holding back during the four-hour drive begin to move in her chest.
She walked to the shop.
Mae's Pages was closed, naturally — a CLOSED sign in the glass-paned door and the interior dark except for the reading lamp Mae kept on in the back room as a habit, turned on automatically each evening for thirty years. Elena had a key. She had always had a key.
She stood outside it for a moment before she used it.
The shop front was the same as it had always been: the deep green painted exterior — not trendy, just original, never repainted since Mae had done it herself in 1994 with help from Elena's grandfather, who had been gone for twenty years now — with the name in gold letters above the door in a font that was somewhere between elegant and homely. The window display had been changed recently: a spring arrangement, picture books and poetry, a ceramic rabbit among the books that Elena recognised as belonging to Mae's private collection of small cheerful objects.
She used the key. She went in.
The shop smelled like itself — like old paper and something floral and the particular quality of a room that has been full of books for a long time. It was dim, the front lamps off, only the glow from the back room and a slant of streetlight through the window. She stood in the doorway and let it settle around her.
She had spent so much time in this room. Reading on the step stool in the children's section at five years old. Helping with re-shelving at ten, learning Mae's system — which was not alphabetical but thematic, the sections organised by feeling rather than genre, which confused visiting tourists and delighted regulars. Working the till on Saturdays at fifteen. Sitting in the bay window with a coffee and Mae on Sunday afternoons, when the conversation ranged from books to marriage to grief to the best way to make a pasty, and Mae never seemed to notice or care that they had been talking for three hours.
"Elena." Patricia appeared from the back room — Elena's mother's older sister, a solid, practical woman in her mid-fifties who showed love through competence. She hugged Elena with both arms and said nothing, which was the right thing to do, and Elena put her face against her aunt's shoulder and let herself be held.
After a moment, she pulled back. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "The shop," she said.
"That's what she wanted to talk about," Patricia said. "There's a solicitor. Meeting next week. But I can tell you the broad strokes now, if you'd like."
"Tell me."
Patricia put the kettle on — also the right thing to do — and she told her.
Mae had left the shop to Elena. This was not entirely a surprise — it had been half-understood for years, a gentle assumption that lived in the background of holidays and birthdays, never formally stated but present. What was a surprise was the state of the shop's finances.
"She never told anyone," Patricia said, wrapping her hands around her tea. "You know what she was like about money — she thought worrying about it was a kind of failure. So she just... didn't worry about it, outwardly. And it got—" She stopped. Chose words carefully. "It got difficult."
The numbers, spread on Mae's kitchen table above the bookshop, were not good. The rent had not been increased in a decade — Mae had a handshake agreement with the building's previous owner that had not survived his retirement and the property's subsequent sale. The new landlord, a developer called Hartwell Properties, had increased the rent significantly eighteen months ago and sent two letters since about the building's future. There was a bank overdraft. There were unpaid supplier invoices going back six months.
"She was managing," Patricia said. "Just. But—" She stopped again.
"The landlord," Elena said.
"Wants to sell. According to the solicitor, he's been in discussions. The building is worth considerably more than the rent it generates." Patricia looked at her steadily. "The solicitor thinks we have a few weeks before it becomes formal. Before we're looking at a notice."
Elena looked at the numbers on the table. She looked at them for a long time with the particular focused attention of someone who has spent three years doing financial analysis and now wishes, quite forcefully, that she didn't understand what she was looking at.
"Right," she said.
"You don't have to—"
"I'm not going to let it close," Elena said. She said it quietly and entirely without drama, in the same register that Mae had always used when she'd made a decision. "She built it for thirty years. I'm not going to let someone turn it into luxury flats."
Patricia looked at her. Something moved in her expression — the fond, slightly worried look of someone who loves a person and knows that person is about to do something that is going to cost them something.
"Take a few days before you decide anything," she said.
"I've already decided," Elena said.
She looked around the kitchen — Mae's kitchen, with its hanging herbs and its collection of small watercolours of the harbour and its shelf of beloved cookbooks with handwritten notes in the margins. The familiar particular world of a woman she had loved her whole life, still so full of her it was possible, for a second, to think she might walk in from the other room.
"I'll take the leave," she said. "The firm will give me compassionate leave. And if they won't I'll take the annual leave. I'll be here."
She picked up her tea.
"How do I reach the solicitor?" she said.
She slept in Mae's flat that night, in the small spare room with its sloping ceiling and its window that looked out over the harbour. She had slept in this room dozens of times since childhood — as a child when her parents were away, as a teenager when the combination of the holidays and Mae's company was preferable to going home, and more recently when the city had become temporarily too much and she needed two days of Mae's conversation and Cornish air.
The harbour was dark below, the boat lights reflected in the water, the occasional sound of the rigging carrying up on the wind. She lay with her eyes open and thought about the numbers on the table, which were not good but were not unsurvivable with the right plan. She thought about Mae's filing cabinet, which she had looked through for half an hour and which contained a level of financial organisation that suggested Mae had known the situation perfectly well and had chosen, in her particular fashion, to deal with it by writing very neat records of it and never mentioning it to anyone.
She thought about the shop — the smell of it, the way it felt in the mornings before it opened, the quality of the light through the front window in the late afternoon. The children's section and Mae's thematic shelving and the back room with the kettle and the biscuit tin and the three armchairs that Mae had acquired over the years from various sources and arranged by some principle of comfort that only she understood.
She was going to save it. She didn't know exactly how yet. But she had never once walked out of a difficult financial situation without having spent the night with the numbers, and she was not going to start now.
She turned onto her side.
Through the window, the harbour was very still.
Mae, she thought. I've got it. I promise.
She did not sleep for a long time.