Page 44 of The Village Shop for Lonely Hearts

‘Does your mum know?’

Josh looked up at her. ‘No. Not the whole hideous picture anyway.’

‘You’ve been protecting her from it all this time because she’s been ill,’ said Amber, thinking out loud.

Josh shrugged his shoulders in reply.

‘I get it,’ she told him. ‘We always protect our parents from the bad stuff so they don’t worry about us.’

He raised an eyebrow in question. ‘You had problems in New York?’

She hesitated. It had started a long time before New York, she thought.

‘It’s OK,’ he said quickly. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

But he’d been so honest, she thought to herself. After all, he had trusted her with his problems. She took another large gulp of wine before speaking. ‘My boss in New York was pretty awful.’

‘Pervert?’

She almost spat out her drink, laughing in shock. ‘No! Not that!’ She wiped a bit of wine from her chin. ‘No, she wasn’t very good at her job and preferred to take credit for everyone else’s work. Including mine.’

He studied her for a moment. ‘And she kept her job whilst you lost yours in the redundancies.’

‘I was the outsider,’ she told him. As usual, she added to herself.

‘Didn’t you have any work colleagues who could stand up for you?’

She shook her head. ‘I was pretty isolated over there. First in, last out, that kind of thing.’

‘So in a way it was a blessing that you got made redundant,’ he said.

She laughed without humour. ‘Yeah, I’ve got no job and no home either because my parents emigrated whilst I was abroad and they’ve gone to a place where I can’t possibly carry on with my career.’

‘I admit, it doesn’t sound great,’ he told her. ‘Look, you’ve got a job whilst you need it here. You know that. It just doesn’t pay very much.’

‘Does it pay at all?’ she asked him in jest.

‘Not really.’

She laughed once more. ‘And there was me thinking that you couldn’t wait to get rid of me.’

He stared at her for a beat. ‘I never said that. Anyway, I liked your window displays,’ he said.

She blushed and looked at her feet. ‘It’s easy when you know how.’

‘Rubbish,’ he said, frowning. ‘I think you’ve either got an artistic talent or, like me, you most definitely haven’t. You need to have more confidence in yourself.’

She picked up her wine glass. ‘That’s easier said than done, believe me.’

When their pizza and chips arrived, they were both delighted that, for once, the food was actually cooked all the way through. Probably because Belle had taken charge of their meal, Amber suspected.

They ate in a comfortable silence, with Josh filling up their glasses once more.

‘I mean it,’ he told her, after they’d finished eating. ‘You can stay here as long as you want. It’d mean a lot to Mum.’ He paused. ‘And I need the help too.’

‘Thank you.’

She was touched. Was he actually reaching out to her?