“Morning,” a cheerful woman with dimples in her cheeks greeted him from behind a set of drums at the back. “Don’t mind me.” She wasn’t drumming; she was looking at her phone.

“Not at all.” Roy chose a green vinyl–cushioned stool at the bar and placed his laptop on the shiny wooden bar top. The stool was comfortable, its back just low enough to offer lumbar support, with a perfectly positioned slat across the legs to rest his feet on. He opened his laptop and powered it on. He might just be able to work here.

Gold, he thought, opening a new Word document. Boris Bowne Books is thrilled to announce Gold, the long-awaited new novel by Roy Clarke. Or perhaps Golden was better. No, too 007. His readers would think he’d taken to writing spy novels. Race relations and secret agents—not subjects he could tackle without doing extensive research. Best to stick to what he did best—the quiet humor of two grown children traveling with their incontinent father, a drunk boy driving to pick up the girl he likes, a tedious dinner with an incompetent waiter, a hilariously muddy outdoor wedding.

Gold. Not exactly a title for a family novel. Unless… Roy’s daughter Shy had a rich Russian-American classmate whose grandmother gave her a solid gold Krugerrand every Christmas, one for every year she’d been alive. Last spring the family had relocated very abruptly to the Bahamas.

Roy appeared to be staring hard at the blank screen, but really there was a scene playing out in his head in which a teenage girl was burying a pile of gold beneath a palm tree.

“There’s no bartender,” the woman called from the back of the bar, distracting the partially awakened lumbering beast that was his brain. “But I can probably grab whatever you need.”

Roy swiveled around. “Tea?” he said distractedly, forgetting he was in a bar and that Americans didn’t drink tea constantly, as if it were some sort of vital fuel that one’s body couldn’t function without, the way most of the English did.

She slid off her drum stool and ducked behind the bar. “Sure, just a sec. There’s an electric kettle, I think.” She looked up and smiled. “I’m Peaches. I work at the school, as a nurse. You’re Roy Clarke. I read in the real estate section last year that you moved to Strong Place. And my husband went to your book thing at the new bookstore on Smith. How do you like it here?”

Roy hated being recognized. Blustering internally, he hit return twice to demonstrate that he was writing, even though his screen was still blank.