Page 17 of Memories of the Lost

Liam sighed, unwilling to spend any more time on the subject now. He met his friend’s eye in the mirror. “Everything good with you? Your dad’s recovered?”

“He’s all right. Thanks.”

“Of course.” Their friendship had become a bit off-kilter on this tour. They’d never had big heart-to-heart talks or anything like that, but since the age of seven, they’d spoken almost daily, which kept them both in the loop. Krish carried a lot of familial expectations—a sister with mental health challenges, a father who’d just had a heart attack and could not work at his former profession as a baker, a large working-class family who turned to him for many needs.

Neither of them had grown up with money, and the tremendous wealth spilling from the app, then the workshops, was surprising and welcome. It also came with challenges.

Like, how much was enough?

Krish said, “It’ll all work itself out.” He tilted his head. “Go with the purple. It’s your best look.”

Liam listened.

“Have a good time,” Krish said. “Just don’t be late. Gives me a bloody heart attack.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wulfecombe

Sage Evely had learned to find pleasure in ordinary things. It was the thing that had, in the end, made life bearable.

Walking to work every morning was an ordinary thing. She loved her village, particularly on a spring morning when few people were afoot. Her terraced house crouched on the edge of town, and she followed winding streets down modern pavements to cobblestones, past the ford over the river that had been built by the Romans, and then the requisite castle ruin. It hadn’t been much of a castle even in its heyday, only a tower keep and a wall that lay in ruins, but it was theirs, and they prized it.

History ran deep here. Wulfecombe had been a market town in the Middle Ages, raided by the Vikings in the Dark Ages, occupied by the Romans. Stone circles littered the fields with evidence of Bronze Age people, and it was possible to find archaeological bits from five thousand years of history. On the coast, fossils from dinosaurs littered the rocky beaches.

This morning, Sage took pleasure in the more-fleeting present-day beauty of flowers lining the gardens along the way—a competition of daffodils and narcissi of all sizes and shapes and incarnations, from standard yellow to white to ruffled white and peach. One border boastedwhite stars centered with apricot ruffles. It looked for all the world like an art installation of lady parts.

Sage’s walk took her to Rosemary’s Chocolates—her joy, her pride, the business she’d created and now run for more than six years. She’d learned her art in London and brought it home to her own little village, taking advantage of the tourist trade, visitors who came from many directions to the famed open-air market, or on their way to the coast.

This morning, it was only Sage and a fairly new hire, one who’d shown enough promise that Sage had pulled her from behind the counter to work in the back, making chocolate. Lexie was as skinny as an exclamation mark, her dishwater hair still straw-dry on the lower half, glossier on the new growth. She’d come to the shop through a council program designed to help find stable work for girls with a criminal background—almost always rooted in addiction or poverty and the wretched choices of partners the girls made. Lexie had a three-year-old daughter she desperately wanted to see regularly, and the motivation made her a reliable employee.

It would until it didn’t. Sage knew firsthand how easy it was to suddenly find yourself awash in a mess again. She’d been clean for eleven years but didn’t take it for granted.

The Wailing Jennies sang on the speakers, and rain tapped against the windows, sometimes admittedly leaking through the cracks in the ancient walls. The building had stood since the Middle Ages, always a place of hospitality, often run by women. An alehouse, a bakery, and various cafés over the centuries. Sometimes the staff feared the cellar below and avoided certain other areas—a dark stairway to the storage rooms overhead, a particular alcove near the alleyway, but she loved to imagine the ghosts were all women like herself, making their way in a world often more than a little hostile.

This morning, Sage and Lexie were working on ganaches to be flavored in various ways, then run through the temperer. She used a mandolin to slice ginger paper thin, ginger her mother grew organically in her greenhouse.

Clare grew carrots, too: purple and yellow, red Indian carrots, common English orange, which she’d promised to bring this morning. Sage would use them for dinner tonight at home, mixing the carrots with heaps of similarly shredded cabbage, red and green, with yellow and red onions, and then roast with olive oil and salt and pepper, a warm salad for a cold spring day. Nourishment for herself and the baby growing within.

“This good, boss?” Lexie asked, offering a pile of finely chopped walnuts, the sizes even and tiny.

“Well done,” Sage said. “I’ll start the jelly. Get the molds ready.”

“Which one again?” Lexie looked at the stacks of molds in dozens of varieties stacked up on a pair of shelves that ran the length of the room. “I keep forgetting.”

“That’s all right. It takes time.” She kept meaning to make a chart of which chocolates went into which molds, but there never seemed to be enough time. Paula had been nagging her to hire an admin assistant, but the truth was, it was hard enough to get and keep even a skeleton staff for the shop. Like everyone in the service industry, she struggled with staffing post-pandemic. It was the constant subject of conversation among small business owners, and it had put more of them out of business than the pandemic by far.

No one could figure out where all the people had gone. How did they live?Wheredid they live?

It was a mystery, and until it was solved, Sage would continue to hope to hire an administrative assistant to make a chart of the molds for her chocolates. “The round ones with lines on half.”

“These?” she held up a pleated version.

“No, one more over. That’s right. Make sure they’re clean. No water.”

“Right. I remember.”

Sage poured water over finely chopped ginger and brought it to a simmer, inhaling the scent that mixed with the overt chocolate fragrance in the room. The ginger and walnut chocolates were one of herbestsellers, and she loved the mingling of flavors. She made a mental note to add them to the list of things she needed to be sure were stocked for her maternity leave, which would likely not be a long stretch, but she wanted to make sure this baby was well cared for, too.