They discussed their game plan as they ate. Annie explained that her next job was to get her half sack of potatoes peeled, cubed, and sprinkled with garlic and rosemary, ready to go into the oven.

“And what about those pumpkin shells under the worktop?” asked John. “Were you thinking of making them into jack-o’-lanterns or are they a statement of minimalism?”

“Now who’s the smart-arse?” asked Annie. “As it happens, I was intending to carve them and have them outside on the promenade, but as you well know, I have been rather busy.”

“Nobody asked you to open a café.”

“Nobody asked me to cater Halloween for an entire village either. But here we are!”

“Here we are, indeed.”

Chapter 53

Checking out the competition?” John asked.

They were seated at the middle table in the warm café, carving pumpkins.

“No. I was checking the time on your watch.”

The corners of John’s mouth twitched as he repressed a smile. Annie looked up then and saw that it was fully dark outside.

“How long before they arrive?” she asked. She was excited and more than a little nervous. What if her Halloween was a letdown?

“We’ve probably got about twenty minutes,” John replied, adding the final additions to an impressive cat arching its back at a ghost rising up out of a cauldron. Shit, Annie thought. That’s really good. It made her scary pumpkin face seem rather ordinary by comparison. “That’s very good,” she told him, though it pained her to say it.

“Thanks,” said John, getting up to wash his hands. “The pumpkin carving was always a big deal with Aunty. I’ve passed the bug on to Celeste. You must have carved a fair few of these over the years with your boys?”

Annie pondered the strangeness of getting to know someone as herself; for so many years she had been defined by her children and her work and her husband. But John didn’t know about Annie the mother or Annie Max’s wife or Annie the chef at the Pomegranate—to him she was just Annie.

“Yes,” she said fondly. “Alex would always lose his temper because he was a perfectionist and wanted to create a perfect piece of pumpkin art, even at four; he’s a graphic designer now, no surprise really—he’s still always striving for design perfection. You’d probably get on well,” she added, eyeing his perfect feline carving.

“And Peter? It is Peter, isn’t it?”

“Peter was always more chilled out. I always felt secretly guilty that he might have had to be that way because Alex was so high-maintenance, but now, I think that was just his personality. While Alex was flinging bits of pumpkin around the kitchen in a fit of artistic rage, Peter would sit obliviously carving out his spooky face, his tongue poking out the side of his mouth; that was his concentration face.”