Chapters (39)
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Epilogue
- Author’s note
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
Anna turned away from the window. ‘That’s really sweet of you, but Liam’s going to come. He called the other day and said he wanted to.’ That had been a taut conversation, but Anna hadn’t felt as if she could refuse. Whatever happened, wherever she and Liam ended up, he was still the baby’s father. They had to find some way to make it work.
‘Fair enough,’ said Rhona. ‘Right then, I’d best be off. Got to set another firing off yet tonight. It’s all go!’
Anna went outside to drag her tubs of flowers closer to the house, the better to survive the wind, which was already getting up.
The storm made landfall overnight, rattling the windows of the Fishergirl’s Luck hard enough to wake her. She lay with one hand on her stomach, listening to the whistle and scream of the wind against the window until she drifted off again, her dreams full of indistinct shapes transcribed from nebulous fears. She had an unspoken terror that there was a second shoe about to drop, and could only hope it wasn’t a premonition about the scan.
The next morning the wind was high and it was still raining hard. Anna realized there was no way she could go ahead with lunch club. She had set up a Facebook page specifically so that she could alert would-be visitors any time she would have to cancel for any reason, and by ten o’clock she had posted to explain that the weather had forced her to cancel for the day. She immediately received a few replies, some expressing their support, others their disappointment. More than one person, presumably those who had never visited Crovie and so had no real idea of what the village or the Fishergirl’s Luck was truly like, suggested that at times like these she move lunch club indoors.
Anna closed her iPad and listened to the whistle of the wind outside, wondering what to do with her day now that she didn’t have six three-course meals to prepare. These days, her week revolved around these lunchtime services – what she would cook for them, what produce she could find from local sources, what inspiration she could take from Bren’s notebook, from her own grandmother’s. Sometimes she didn’t recognize the person she had become in the short months since she had arrived in Crovie. When she’d got here, Anna had been considering giving up cooking for good. She couldn’t begin to imagine, now, how that thought had ever crossed her mind.