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“With the grief—I know what Nina’s mother feels because I felt it—but with the grief, I felt a failure. I lost my child and there would never be another.”
She flipped the omelet with the panache of a French chef.
“We got through it, but it was hard. It was brutal. We had our beautiful daughter. Steve had his work. I started throwing pots.” She laughed at that. “I was absolutely terrible at it, and never got better. I’m a businesswoman and no artist, but trying to be gave me a deep respect and admiration for artists, craftspeople. So it gave me a new direction.”
“The lopsided green cup he kept pencils in on the desk in his study,” Morgan remembered. “He told me once you made that in the long ago.”
“It was supposed to be a vase.” Olivia shook her head. “That man loved me. ‘Sell the stuff, Livvy,’ he said to me. ‘You know what’s good and you know how to sell. You just need a place to sell it.’”
“Crafty Arts was his idea?”
“Another chocolate from the box. So I gave up making bad pottery, and we started the shop, just a tiny place at first. But it grew, and so did Audrey. And I had a world again. A different one than I’d always planned, but a good world.”
She set the plated omelet in front of Morgan. “You’ll make new plans, build a new world. Now eat.”
“Thanks. Thanks for telling me. Gram? Could I have that cup? The lopsided green cup? It’ll remind me of him, and you, and finding new directions.”
Olivia came around the island, pressed a kiss to Morgan’s temple. Held on an extra minute.
“Of course you can. Now, you keep this in your busy mind. The man who did all this? He’ll pay, one way or the other, whether or not you ever know about it, he’ll pay. Karma’s not just a bitch, she’s a righteous bitch. And he won’t break you, because you won’t let him.
“Two weeks,” she added.
“Two weeks,” Morgan agreed. “I love you, Gram.”
“Of course you do. I love you right back. Now eat.”
So she ate, and she slept. She took walks and sat by the fire with a book. By the third day, she wondered how much longer she could keep it up without losing her mind.
Her grandmother might request two weeks, but Morgan’s wiring demanded busy. On day three, with both Olivia and Audrey at work, she sat down at the secondhand laptop, opened the spreadsheet she’d created months before.
Reality hadn’t changed since the last time she’d gone over it. Broke still equaled broke. But this time she worked on projections. No question she could live in the pretty blue room as long as she wanted or needed, rent free. But wiring also required she pull her weight.
She could take over some household tasks, but her ladies already had a weekly cleaning crew, and the trio of women who tended the rambling old Tudor had done so for a dozen years.
If she took over cleaning, she put people out of a job.
Unacceptable.
Laundry—the cleaning trio already dealt with most of that.
She could do the marketing—something—but she couldn’t subject the ladies to her cooking unless she got a lot better at it.
Marketing, doing the dishes after meals? That should keep her busy for about three hours a week, which didn’t begin to fill the hole.
She needed work. A job. Needed to earn an income.
To start on that? Drive into town, look around, visit the shop. And no, she wouldn’t work there. It steered much too close to living rent free.
She put on makeup, and since she hadn’t indulged in a professional cut and style in months, tried a few snips here and there.
She definitely wouldn’t get a job at a salon, but it wasn’t terrible.
She dressed in something other than sweats. Winter-weight leggings, boots, a red sweater over a thermal shirt. Before she could change her mind and just retreat to her room, again, she dragged on her coat, wool cap, scarf, and stepped out into the frigid, unrelenting grip of winter.
And prayed Nina’s car started.
It coughed a little, wheezed a little more, but turned over.
