“Beautiful, isn’t she?” she said. “As you may imagine, we don’t have mains gas here, so this little beauty heats the house and hot water as well as cooking dinner. It’s oil-fueled; you probably saw the tank outside? John makes sure she’s serviced every year, and a winter’s supply of oil will be delivered next month, so even if we go into an ice age you’ll be snug as a bug till spring.”

“Wow,” said Annie. “I’ve never cooked on a range before.”

“Do you cook much?” asked Mari.

“I’m a chef,” said Annie. “Was a chef.”

Was she still a chef? Did it still count if you weren’t cooking for a living? Now what was she?

A hand brushed her arm and broke her reverie.

“Are you okay, hen?” asked Mari. “I lost you for a wee moment there!”

“Oh, crumbs! Yes, sorry,” said Annie. “It just occurred to me, I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with my life.”

Mari handed Annie a mug of strong tea and offered up the sugar bowl, which Annie declined.

“Then it seems to me,” said Mari, “that this position is just what you need. A little hiatus from the business of normality to get your head straight.”

Mari ushered Annie back into the sitting room and bade her to sit on the sofa, while she took the armchair.

“Now, why don’t you tell me what it is that has brought you here?”

It was a strange sort of interview. Mari asked a series of leading questions, which Annie found herself only too willing to answer. She told Mari about the restaurant and Alex and Peter and invariably—suffering as she was at the moment with some sort of oversharing virus—about Max’s affairs, and table nine, and the Keep Calm and Carry On cushion that hadn’t covered her usurper’s perfect young breasts.

Mari listened. Too well. Annie wished Mari would intervene or cut her off, since Annie didn’t seem able to stop herself. But Mari sat back in her chair, nodding and drinking her tea, and said soothing things at appropriate times, like “Aww, you poor wee thing” and “Goodness me, you have been through it!” And when Annie reached the point in her story where she’d answered Mari’s ad in the paper, the point at which, to Annie’s mind, her story stopped abruptly because the rest had yet to be written, Mari leaned back and took a long swig of tea and watched a seagull drop a pebble from a great height down onto the stones below.

“Well, dear,” said Mari. “I feel like my little house will be safe in your hands.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I can’t think of a better guardian for my home than one who’s lost her own.”

“Oh, I haven’t lost it,” said Annie. “I just don’t want it anymore.”