‘Good for you.’ Brooke stood and stretched. ‘Well, have fun kids. I’m going for a walk – alone.’ She pointed a finger at her brother. ‘Got that, Trip? Alone. I want peace and quiet, not having you point out every landmark you’ve decided is totally adorable.’
Trip grinned. ‘She’s kidding,’ he told Ivy. ‘She loves me really.’
Brooke rolled her eyes again, then headed out into the morning mist that still shrouded the cobbled streets, leaving behind the faintest scent of expensive perfume. Ivy watched her go, frowning. Had Brooke seemed oddly evasive about her reasons for being here? Or was Ivy so bored of Fox Bay life already that she was imagining drama where there wasn’t any?
Trip sipped his coffee happily. ‘She liked you.’
‘Really?’ said Ivy. She hadn’t got warm and fuzzy vibes from Brooke.
‘Yeah! I could tell. She doesn’t open up like that to just anyone.’
If that was Brooke opening up, Ivy wasn’t sure she wantedto get on her bad side. She took a sip of her own coffee. Hot, bitter, delicious. ‘This is really nice coffee,’ she managed. ‘And it was … very thoughtful of you to get it for me.’ She headed into the stock room with a backwards wave. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I have to work.’
After their brief meeting, Brooke remained as reclusive as Aunt Josie had promised, preferring to hole up in her room typing furiously on her laptop, holding long, muttered calls, or going for solitary walks along the coast. In contrast, Trip remained ever present; always cheerful, always smiling, with his perfect hair flopping on to his forehead.
‘That young man,’ Josie remarked the next day while restocking the history section, ‘has a very distracting energy.’
‘Distracting?’ asked Ivy.
Josie laughed. ‘Not tome, of course, I could be his grandmother, but you know what I mean, don’t you? I’m surprised you can do any work at all with him around. Those eyes. Have you noticed the dimples yet?’
Ivy had no intention of agreeing out loud, but she was keenly aware of Trip’s dimples. And also his eyes, and the way they changed according to the time of day. Caramel brown in the morning sunlight, wide, warm brown as he burst in with some other new and apparently utterly charming Fox Bay discovery, crinkled with laughter in the twilight of closing time when he told them some hilarious anecdote from around the harbour. Never had Ivy met someone so enthusiastic about everythingand anything. Which was very annoying. In fact, Trip was entirely lacking in the sort of intellectual depth that Ivy needed right now.
‘I do wish you’d show him around a bit, darling,’ Josie said now. ‘It feels churlish not to. Fox Bay is full of glorious secrets that only the locals know. The poor boy must be getting a bit bored, with his sister up in her room most of the time.’ Josie lowered her voice. ‘It’s quite odd behaviour. But I was thinking – maybe she hasburnout. I hear lots of young people have it these days. I do wish she’d let me cleanse her aura.’ Josie shook her head worriedly. ‘I hope she’s having a nice holiday here. Anyway, it must be dull for Trip. Why don’t you take him on a tour?’
‘I’m too busy to babysit Trip,’ Ivy said firmly. ‘If Trip wants a tour he can pay for one, along with the rest of the tourists.’
It was true – shewasbusy. Each time Trip had stopped to talk in the last forty-eight hours, Ivy had had her hands full. Literally. Once with a stack of paperbacks, once with a hair-raising inventory that Josie had blithely asked her to ‘glance through’ and once with her phone buzzing from the winter pageant WhatsApp group that Ivy had been added to against her will.
As if on cue, it buzzed now in her pocket. She pulled it out.178 unread messages.
Ivy groaned and started to read, scrolling through a fast-raging argument. She had suspected the show planning would be a nightmare and so it was proving. Mr Hargreaves, sweetly eccentric but ineffectual, had no more control over the HolidayShow Planning Committee than he did over his students. The committee were growing anxious. The teacher heading up the direction, Mr Patterson, had ideas that weresobold andsoexperimental that Ivy thought privately they hovered on the edge of lunacy.
Things were escalating by the second. Mr Patterson had floated the idea of the entire show being performed in Cornish and there was now a vigorous debate raging over whether they could light an actual bonfireon stageto represent Midwinter traditions. Mr Patterson suggested the smugglers could also fight the tax collectors in a ‘politically loaded act of defiance’.
Technically, Ivy didn’t need to do anything until rehearsals started the following week, so she could – again, technically – ignore these messages. But Ivy found that if she didn’t nip the ideas in the bud, the group got more and more carried away. Every time she reached for her sketchbook to do some actual art, her phone buzzed. Or someone came in to ask for the latest Kathleen Lee. Or Trip appeared, trying to talk to her about running or yoga.
It was all too much. With a sudden burst of decision, she muted the show WhatsApp and flung her phone in the drawer along with a heap of rubber bands and some crystals.
There. She wanted as little part in the show and the attendant madness as possible. Once a loner, always a loner.
It was much safer that way.
On Wednesday, Ivy decided the week was flying by with unnerving speed and that she had to at least try and dosomecollege work. She motored through her morning tasks at the shop, finally clawing back a free hour before the rush started, sitting down with a muddy coffee, determined to get something, anything, on the page.
She decided to try a mindfulness technique they had studied in college in the first week to ‘loosen them up and get the creative juices flowing’. She picked up her pencil, set it on the page and closed her eyes. Quick pencil lines, letting her mind go where it chose and allowing her fingers to follow. It was surprisingly soothing. An image came unbidden to mind: a shop, drowsy with early morning sunshine, bottles glinting in the pale light, the clutter of books and cushions and a windchime above the door … she drew on, smiling slightly, lost in the moment, letting the lines flow from her pencil …
At last, she opened her eyes and frowned at the page. There was a tall figure, doing some sort of yoga pose, hair falling into their eyes in a way that seemed unnervingly familiar.
Ugh, thought Ivy, and slammed thesketchbook shut.
Enough of this, she thought. If Trip was invading even her private thoughts, not to mention her sketchbook, it was time for baked goods. Fin had told her yesterday that he was planning on making his mythical cheese and chive scones this week and if anything would aid artistic thought – or at least make Ivy feel better about being an artistic failure – it was one of those, warm from the oven and smothered in lashings of butter.
She hopped off her stool and stuck her sketchbook into her coat pocket. Maybe therewerea few things worth returning to Fox Bay for.
Ivy ducked into the bakery, planning to grab the goods and go. But Fin was out back and she found herself wedged between a tray of cinnamon buns and a tall girl ahead of her in a tan coat, with perfectly tousled hair, listening to Taylor Swift so loudly that Ivy could hear the strains ofAll Too Welleven through the earphones.
It was nice being back here, she thought, in this cosy space. She’d been buying cakes off Fin ever since she was small when he had decided to turn his hobby into a business. To pass the time, she took out her sketchbook and began to draw, trying to tune in to the smells and warmth of the little bakery, the rows of croissants and baguettes, the old-fashioned till, the railway clock on the whitewashed wall—
