Page 48 of The Village Shop for Lonely Hearts

‘I had dreams too,’ she heard him say.

‘Like what?’ she prompted, gently.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I wanted to run my own business. To make something special. Make a difference and try and educate people regarding sustainable living.’

‘You could still do that,’ she told him.

But Josh shook his head. ‘Not here. It’s too late.’

‘No, it’s not.’ She stepped forward to grab his arm. ‘Maybe this wasn’t quite what you had in mind, but I think we could really make something special here. A country store. The Cranbridge Stores. It could be really something.’

She saw him hesitate and open his mouth to speak.

‘Let me show you how good it could look,’ she said quickly, before he could say anything else.

He lifted his palms up. ‘Why not? Things can’t get any worse.’

‘Gee, thanks for the encouragement,’ she said.

But as she ran upstairs to find her sketchpad, she realised she was filled with a dogged determination to prove him wrong. To show him that Cranbridge Stores could be something very special indeed.

In her bedroom, she picked up her sketchpad and immediately began to fill in the blank middle of her original drawing. She pencilled in a rough outline of the tractor before adding in some boxes to represent the crates. Then she grabbed her coloured pencils to show the different goods that could be displayed.

Finally, her hand hesitated before she grabbed the bright red pencil to colour in the tractor.

With a feeling of both excitement and trepidation, she went back downstairs to show Josh.

She shuffled nervously from foot to foot as he stared down at the paper and then up at the shop around him. Then he looked down again and up once more.

Finally, he turned to her with his eyes blazing. ‘It’ll never look this good,’ he said, holding out the pad for her to take from him.

‘It can and it will,’ she told him, feeling bolder than she had ever felt in her life. ‘Give me a week or so to change things around in here. To make it different. If you hate it, then it can go back to how it was. I’ll even work out a way to get the tractor moved. But give me a little time and I’ll show you how amazing it could really look.’

A silence stretched out between them before finally, he nodded his head. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I’m not making any promises.’

‘Nor am I,’ she told him. ‘But let me see what I can do.’

‘It’ll take us a week to carry on sorting through all this stuff,’ he said, pointing at all the boxes of goods everywhere.

‘Just trust me,’ she found herself saying.

He smiled unexpectedly. ‘Funny, I never saw you as a confident person before now.’

She returned his smile. ‘I’m not. I don’t know where all this is coming from. Maybe it’s the fumes from the tractor.’

‘Well, be my guest,’ he said, waving his arm around the shop. ‘Lord knows, it can’t get much worse.’

‘That’s what you think,’ she said, with a wink.

At least he was smiling in response as he left to head into the back of the shop.

Amber stood alone in the centre of the shop and did a slow 360 turn on the spot. With a loud gulp, she tried to suppress her fears and doubts about her ability to make the place look good.

Could she really do this? She’d promised Josh she could, so she supposed she had better get on with it. She just wasn’t really sure, deep down, that she could, despite the faith in her own skills.

But she didn’t want to let Cathy down. Nor Grandma Tilly. Not even the memory of Todd. Most especially, she didn’t want to disappoint Josh, because she was beginning to care for him.

And that worried her even more than the sheer magnitude of overhauling the shop.