Not even any booing. Just staring, either at us or at the devices in their hands, in icy silence.
For six sonorous clangs, I was back in front of that church. Exposed. Loathed. Ashamed.
The church bells made it hard to forget.
* * *
I trudged up our narrow staircase toward the smell of something burnt, as usual. The flat above the shop was, in many ways, an echo of the books below: tattered, torn in parts, but well loved. The ancient appliances were tricky to regulate even for an experienced chef, which Nick was not, and so the aromas wafting from his general direction come dinnertime were always just left of tempting. Nick had been raised in a place where chores were done before he would ever realize they needed doing, and in these few weeks on our own, I think he’d enjoyed playacting as a civilian—running to the market, doing laundry, scrubbing down the kitchen counters. What was a drudge for most people was a novelty for him, as was the concept of cooking dinner for us every night.
“Evening, Margot,” Nick said, greeting me at the door in an apron with a sketch of a carrot on it, his sandy hair sticking up haphazardly. “How’s the shop?”
“Hi, Steve,” I said, kissing him deeply. “You taste like butter.”
“All good cooks sample their ingredients.”
I wiped a smudge off his face. “But you’re technically not a good cook.”
“Not yet,” Nick said. “But I’ve come a long way from burning lasagna.” He made a voila gesture at the dining table, where two charred circles sat on mismatched, chipped dishes. “Now I’m burning meat pies.”
“These look almost edible!” I said.
“See?” Nick clapped adorably. “I’m really improving.”
I tossed my glasses onto the table, where they landed next to a copy of the Mirror. I didn’t look. Instead, I poked at one of the pies. Black flakes matching the ones on Nick’s cheek came away on my finger.
“Yes, unfortunately, they are indeed only almost edible. The second lot are in the oven now.” He frowned. “They look a bit better. Maybe? I keep wanting to text Gaz a photo, but…”
He didn’t need to finish.
“I missed you in the shop today,” I said. “You and your saucy new mustache.”
Nick wrapped his arms around me from behind. “I took my mustache into town for a bit,” he said. “Steve had a lot of advice for the butcher’s assistant about her rude girlfriend who deletes everything prematurely from the DVR. And then Steve popped round the off-license for a new box of wine and ran into Keith from the betting shop. You will not believe what his landlord is trying to pull.”
“Hang on,” I said, swiveling in his arms to face him. “We’ve only been here a few days. How do you know all these people already?”
He grinned. “I have always wanted to be some village’s busybody,” he said. He dipped his head and kissed me. “Isn’t it sexy?”
My laughter was lost in the clash of our mouths. Both our pulses quickened. So did my breathing.
“Margot,” he said, pulling away. “I approve of where you’re going with this, but if I ruin this second lot of pies, I might pull off your wig and weep into it.”
I nipped at his lip one last time. “Fine. I’ll go collect myself elsewhere.”
“Send my wife Bex out in about fifteen minutes for her pie, please,” he said, hurrying over to the oven. “These are going to blow her mind.”
Grinning, I headed into our tiny bedroom and pulled off my blond hair, plopping it onto the top of the dresser next to a pile of romance novels Nick had bought downstairs. One of them was called Fancy Ladies, and I itched to take a picture and send it to Freddie, who could spin it into a solid month of brotherly teasing.
But I couldn’t. We weren’t telling Freddie, or anybody else, a thing. After our wedding-day fiasco, Nick and I went off the grid, hoping to start our married life anywhere other than amid the ashes of a tabloid tire fire. It had been hard. I missed my sister, my mother, our friends. I even missed Marj, the boys’ personal secretary, and the way she would hiss through her front teeth whenever one of them ticked her off (which was often). I especially missed Freddie. But missing Freddie was more complicated, because Freddie’s feelings for me didn’t stop at friendship. He and I had once crashed impulsively into a kiss; we’d agreed it was a careless,