Page 41 of One Last Gift

“Huh?” Josh glanced up from his desk, where he was sketching something on a pad, computer screen black from lack of use. “I don’t know. Not sure I have strong feelings about passion fruit either way.”

“As a cake flavor,” she explained. “It’s for that eightieth birthday celebration,” Cassie went on.

“Right.” Josh went back to whatever he was sketching. Cassie couldn’t work out what it was from here, though she was ninety percent sure it wasn’t work related. Coursework for his master’s, maybe. “The Ps.”

“Yep.” Cassie scrolled through the other possible “P” flavors, and decided passion fruit was still top of her list. The birthday was for a woman name Pauline, and her daughter, who booked the event, wanted everything to be “P” related. Literally everything. So it meant the food, drinks, cake, decorations, song choices, all somehow had to begin with a “P.” Cassie had managed to get around this with the food by pairing things up and making sure the “P” was at the beginning. Pecan and goat’s cheese salad. Parsnip and apple soup. Paprika-spiced roasted cauliflower.

“Tea?” Josh asked, pushing his sketch aside and getting to his feet. He did this when he was bored—got up about every ten minutes to get tea, and then every thirty to go to the loo.

Cassie nodded absentmindedly. “Sure.”

While Josh was out of the room, she checked her phone, saw a message from Linda.

Meeting with the solicitors scheduled for Monday x

Cassie felt a tiny squirm of nerves. Things had already started moving with the sale of the pub before that final donation had come in, and so Linda was having to meet with the solicitors who’d been handling it before she could back out. She supposed they’d find out on Monday whether they’d been too late. She was trying to be optimistic about it. It would be fine. The meeting would go well. They couldn’t make Linda go through with the final stages of selling it, though admittedly Cassie didn’t know much about the legal side of things.

Linda had been dumbstruck when Cassie told her the news over the phone a couple of days ago. She’d asked Cassie to repeat it, several times. They’d cried on the phone together, and Linda had listed all the ways she was going to make this work, bolstered by the fact that she had another few years in her of running the pub yet, that her baby wasn’t being taken away—she was going to make plans, she said, to keep it going even after she passed it on to someone else, because it had made her realize how awful it would have been to have had things ripped away without a choice in what happened to it.

Then they’d both speculated over who the anonymous donation was from.

After sending an email suggesting passion-fruit cake to Pauline’s daughter, Cassie opened up the GoFundMe account, reread the message.

I’m just someone who appreciates the value of local businesses. I’ve worked in law, helping the other side too much. I decided it was time to give something back.

The door to the office opened, letting in the artificial light of the basement corridor, where the two of them were hidden away, and Josh stepped inside. He came over, set her tea down in front of her, and peered over her shoulder at the computer monitor. “Hmmm, no further on figuring out who it is, then?”

Cassie shook her head.

“Maybe it’s Jeff Bezos,” Josh suggested, heading back to his own desk.

Cassie snorted. “What, because he’s such a philanthropist? And so interested in saving a pub he’s never been to, has never heard of, and means nothing to him?”

“You never know.”

“Shall I ring him and ask?”

Josh grinned. “Yes. Please do that.”

“It shouldn’t matter,” she said, more to herself than Josh. “Why can’t I just accept it’s a nice thing? It shouldn’t matter who it is.”

“We’re like that though, aren’t we, us humans?”

“I just want to know who I’m thanking.” It was more than that, though. She didn’t quite trust it, the fact that someone anonymous had given them such a big chunk of money. What if it was someone who wanted something in return, later down the line? And so what, she tried to tell herself—she hadn’t promised anything. There was no contract, it was a charity donation. But that didn’t mean she was giving up quite yet.

She tapped out a reply to the message. I’d love to keep you updated on the progress. Maybe give you some discount codes, once things are up and running again? Linda would agree, she was sure. Linda wanted to know who it was as much as she did. Do you have an email or something I can contact you on? She drummed her fingers while she waited for a response.

I’d love to see how things are going. Will you post updates on this page?

Cassie wrinkled her nose. She supposed she would do: for everyone, not just the mystery donor, to see—all the people who had given something, big or small, who had tried to help, made it known that they cared. So, he’d neatly sidestepped her hidden demand for a name, then. I will. Linda will too. Do you know Linda?

The reply took longer to come this time around. No. But I have some experience with pubs as businesses, and, like I said, I like the local element.

Well, that was no help at all, was it? Maybe he really was just someone who had happened upon the page randomly and decided to be charitable. She stared at it for a few more seconds but couldn’t think of what else to say just now. So instead, she went back to looking at the second clue from Tom—for some reason thinking that if she looked at the words rather than just recited them in her head, she’d have a better chance of figuring it out. Her stomach squirmed. What would she do if she didn’t figure it out in time? If she missed the spring day he had in mind and the clue passed her by, lost forever? She wouldn’t get to the gift, but more importantly, she wouldn’t finish the trail that her brother had so clearly wanted her to. And she needed to. She needed to keep going, needed the messages from Tom. It made her feel like he wasn’t really lost to her.

“What’s wrong now?” Josh asked, paying far too much attention to what she was doing—another thing he did when bored.

“It’s my next clue. From Tom.” She shook her head a little frantically. “I can’t do it, Josh. I can’t figure it out.”