Page 19 of The Little Board Game Café

Nico’s was well within her budget. She’d have a short commute. And it was a short lease: if running a café turned out not to be her thing after all, she wouldn’t be tied in for years.

But it had a tiny kitchen. A back-street location too far from the high street. It had been closed for two weeks already: would it have lost some of its customer base during that time? And it was a miserable little place making some – but not much – profit.

It was a non-starter, Emily decided.

Although…

With a business like Nico’s, she’d be able to make her mark. Give the entire place a make-over. Liven up the menu, putting the emphasis on quality not quantity. And Kate had offered to advise on publicity: surely the right marketing could ensure a steady stream of customers to her door, even if the place was a little off the beaten track.

If she were to buy a beautiful café that was already making plenty of money – if that was within her budget, which it wasn’t – there’d be no challenge in it. She’d sign on the dotted line, hand over the cash, and carry on the business that someone else had established. If she could transform Nico’s into the kind of place she and her mum had always dreamed of running, well, imagine the satisfaction. Just imagine.

Chapter Eight

Books by Emily’s bedside: Surviving Unemployment; Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway; and How to Make the Right Decisions.

The alarm went off like on a weekday. Peter was out of bed immediately and straight into the shower, whistling away. In an especially good mood as he always was on a Saturday because it was his golf day. Emily rolled over, and tried to doze off again. Impossible with the rather out-of-tune version of Pharrell Williams’ ‘Happy’ coming from the ensuite.

‘Any chance of a coffee, Em?’ he said, emerging with an off-white towel wrapped around his waist. All his towels had been hotel-white when she’d moved in. They were an assortment of shades now. Everything from grey to very pale pink. She ought to check the washing machine for stray socks before she put a load on.

With a sigh, she got out of bed, pulled on a dressing gown and went downstairs to put the kettle on. She popped some bread in the toaster, laid out his favourite high-protein, low-carb muesli and some milk – in a jug, of course, like his mother did. No milk bottles on the table in this house, thank you. As a tiny act of rebellion, she decided she wouldn’t take his coffee up. He could come down for it.

By the time he finally appeared – ‘I thought you were bringing a coffee up to me’ – she’d already eaten her two slices of toast, smothered in creamy Irish butter, not the supermarket own brand she used to buy, with a generous dollop of marmalade.

‘No news this morning?’ he said.

‘News? Oh yes. I have news. I’ve recently lost my job.’

‘I meant…we usually have Radio 4 on.’

She stood up and turned the radio on. Amol Rajan’s voice filled the kitchen. He was grilling a politician about unemployment figures.

‘How appropriate,’ Emily said.

She didn’t like herself when she was like this, but couldn’t snap out of it. She hadn’t expected to feel this hostile towards him. It was business, after all. They were still together. Still engaged. They still loved each other.

Didn’t they?

*

An airing cupboard.

There were lots of things that Emily didn’t like about Peter’s house, but today, her biggest objection was that, like many modern houses with their combi boilers and instant hot water, it didn’t have an airing cupboard.

It wasn’t that her clothes needed airing. Far from it. Peter had a tumble dryer for making sure that everything was ‘cupboard dry’. Heaven forbid they should lower the tone in this fancy little estate by hanging their socks and knickers on a line in the back garden for the neighbours to see.

No, the problem was this: where was she meant to place her precious loaf of seeded dough for it to rise?

She had decided, after Peter had left for the golf club, that she’d do something she hadn’t done in a very long time; she would bake.

She’d never made so much as a Victoria sandwich at his house. Since they’d been living together, she hadn’t scratched her baking itch. Not once. Her cake tins, mixing bowl, wooden spoons and scales were all squashed into two cardboard boxes in the smallest of the guest rooms. He kept promising to make room for them in his kitchen cupboards, to move one of the high-tech gadgets that only got used once a year, if at all. But he hadn’t got round to it yet.

Apart from butter and eggs – always plenty of those in the fridge for Peter’s keto diet – there weren’t any baking ingredients in his kitchen cupboards so she’d had to stock up in the corner shop. The supermarket would have been cheaper, of course, but the corner shop was closer and Emily had felt a real urgency to get started.

She flicked the radio in the kitchen to Radio 2, making a mental note to switch it back before Peter got home, then set to work. She’d decided to make the bread first. There was something therapeutic about all that kneading and she definitely felt as if she needed some therapy.

With aching arms, she put her precious mound of dough in front of the French windows in the lounge. Or, as Peter liked to call it, the sitting room. It was definitely the warmest spot in the house. Fingers crossed that it did the trick.

Emily was on a roll now – no bread pun intended – and decided to make brownies and apple crumble tarts.