Page 55 of The Village of Lost and Found

‘Because you’re the perfect person for this newspaper and I trust you.’ They locked eyes for a moment, sharing a small smile, before she picked up the coffee again. ‘Mmm, I need this,’ she said.

‘Yeah, it’s been quite a twenty-four hours so far,’ he said, with a soft chuckle.

She smiled. ‘Mine started with falling into a stinking pond so it was only going to go downhill from there.’

He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry about the quip I made about your glamorous life in London. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘It wasn’t,’ she muttered. ‘Glamorous, I mean.’

He looked at her, hearing the pain she was trying to hide in her voice.

She shrugged her shoulders in response to his enquiring stare. ‘Back then, I was young and stupid, of course. But once I’d grown up glamorous parties weren’t really my thing. I wasn’t really suited to my parents’ financial business either. I’m useless with things like that. The only time I ever felt useful was when I volunteered to help at various charities.’

He looked at her, thinking that he had totally underestimated her. ‘What kind of volunteering did you do?’ he asked.

‘Just homeless shelters, that kind of thing,’ she told him. ‘It certainly proved to me that there were a great many people worse off than me. Not sure they’ll want me back after all that Jamie Watkins business though. What a mess. To be honest, it’s felt like a holiday getting out of London.’

‘That’s how I felt,’ he told her. ‘I was always flat out, running after the next story in London. Trying to get the scoop before everyone else. It was a pretty stressful time.’ He paused. ‘Then my mum got sick. So I left London to be with her… And my wife had just run off with another man.’

She took a deep intake of breath. ‘How awful! I’m so sorry.’

He nodded, reflecting back on the previous night’s phone call with Andrea. ‘Thanks.’

‘And you didn’t ever think about going back?’ she asked. ‘To London, I mean.’

‘I’ve found that I like going at a slower pace. Literally smelling the roses. Making friends.’

Lucy was quiet as she took another sip of coffee.

‘What I’m saying is that I’m a happier person these days,’ he said.

‘I see.’

But her tone didn’t seem to correspond with her dry tone so he looked at her in question.

‘Look, don’t take this the wrong way,’ she told him. ‘But if you were that happy, you maybe wouldn’t spend quite as much time in the pub as you do.’

He took a sharp intake of breath. ‘You’re right,’ he said, eventually. ‘There’s things I’ve been putting off doing, as well as taking care of myself. And that’s something I accept that I need to change. But hearts break and you have to deal with them however you can.’ He looked at her. ‘What about you? Ever had your heart broken so completely that you can’t function?’

Expecting her usual tart and bolshie answer, he was surprised to see her look stricken. ‘Only when we lost Aunt Jane,’ she said. ‘But Uncle Frank was broken too, so I had to get on with it.’

He looked at her and realised that for all her tough talk, Lucy Conway was just as vulnerable underneath as he was. So he didn’t come back with his typically snappy answer and instead moved his mouse over the screen to bring up the current newspaper website.

‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Tell me what can we do to save the paper.’

‘I’m not sure,’ she told him. ‘It’s not something that I know much about. All I’ve found out is that most of the people I’ve talked to are really upset about the quarry and rightly so. But there’s far more going on too. Belle’s worried about the local economy with the pub. There’s more important things to deal with locally that people care about.’

Tom was quiet, thinking through about what she said. ‘So local is what counts.’

‘It is. Not just huge turnips and prize givings. Uncle Frank told me that he had felt proud to live in a village like this when the floods happened last year because it was a community. People came together.’

‘My newspaper used to do that as well,’ he finally said. ‘Bring people together, I mean.’

‘And it can do that again,’ she replied. ‘But we need an online presence as well. We need to think about an app of some sort.’

‘Del’s nephew is some kind of whizz kid at that kind of thing. I’ll have a word,’ said Tom. ‘You said something about Molly?’

Lucy nodded. ‘She’ll be brilliant. She’s always on Instagram and Twitter anyway.’ She hesitated before speaking. ‘But you need to be honest with her about the state of the business. It’s only fair.’