It was still dark, and Imelda lay cocooned in her duvet, listening to the huff and puff of Mabel’s breathing and the tick of the clock on her bedside table. Outside, rain caught by the gusting wind splattered against the windowpane and the gnarled branches of ancient wisteria that clung to the side of the house tapped on the glass like arthritic fingers. Imelda felt for the chain around her neck and as she caught the moon and stars in her hand, her eyes filled with hot tears. The necklace had lain against her skin since the day that Cillian had fastened it there. She had never taken it off. For so long she had clung to the hope that the brief time they had shared together was as precious to them both as she believed it to have been. That the passing years had not hoodwinked her and burnished it to a brightness that it had never quite possessed. That he had looked forward to a future together with the same excitement as she had. Imelda hadn’t wasted her life mourning what might have been, she had lived it to the full. But the absolute certainty that he had loved her as she loved him had always eluded her, and with it the sense of peace that knowing would have brought her.

The sound of footsteps on the landing woke Mabel and she lifted her head and rubbed her sleepy eyes with one paw. There was a tentative knock on the door.

‘Are you awake? I’m making breakfast. Would you like some?’

Billie didn’t come in and Imelda was glad. She brushed the spilt tears from her cheeks.

‘Lovely. I’ll be down in a minute.’

_______________________

After breakfast Billie went straight to the booth. Imelda was going with Mabel to visit Esther at her salon for a morning of pampering and said that afterwards she would meet Billie in The Tea Leaf for lunch. The booth was filling up with stock and Billie wove her way through the cardboard boxes that were piled up on the floor.

She spent the next couple of hours sorting through the boxes and making an inventory of the stock that she had so far acquired. She had taken Treasure up on his offer of help and he was coming the following day to put up some extra shelving and help give the place a lick of paint. Imelda had moved her table and the other things that she would need into the back room and Billie had bought a beautiful heavy velvet curtain patterned with dark emerald leaves and blood red and purple roses to separate the two areas of the booth. She had decided to call her mini-shop Billie’s Beside The Seaside and had ordered an A-board sign to stand at the door to the booth. Madame Burova’s signage would, of course, remain.