Page 2 of Weave Your Magic

The irritation and disappointment were so clear they were making Susie’s nose wrinkle.

Her eyes pinged open. ‘Oh, mate.’

Temperance slurped back some tea. ‘Right? I mean, am I Bill Murray? Is this Groundhog Day? Because I am stuck forever in a loop of bad first dates.’

Susie’s delicate eyebrows dropped right down. ‘I can’t believe it. We vetted this guy like crazy! I even scoured his Amazon wish list for red flags. No fungal foot creams, a solid reading list. And secondhand?! We’re talking the very finest vintage here!’ Susie’s voice went into a high-pitched squeal and the pub sign creaked again as if in chorus.

‘Well, exactly. On paper he seemed . . . decent.’

Susie flopped backwards onto the unmade bed. ‘And you didn’t read anything from his jacket?’

‘Sadly not, and I held his arm for a good five minutes when I got there. Either he’s as emotionally blank as he seemed, or it was a very new jacket. Believe me, if I’d picked up that he was an arrogant arsehole in the first two minutes, I wouldn’t have wasted an evening of my life being patronised by him. I would have sprinted for the door without looking back.’

‘Why didn’t you come and find me last night? When I didn’t see you at the pub, I assumed it was going really well. Not that you’d slunk back in for a mope.’

‘I didn’t mope. I did a face pack and a hair mask: some sensible self-care. I thought I would perk myself up by waking up in the morning all glowing and ready to laugh about it. But I’m not. I’m really not.’ Her bottom lip turned out, involuntarily.

Susie stood and grabbed her big sister by the arms, shocked by the burst of actual raw emotion from someone who’d often said that they could make it through Sleepless in Seattle with two fully dry eyes. ‘You’re not heartbroken over this idiot, are you?! He sounds like a plonker. A plonker that you met once, not like when Abe—’

A stony look from Temperance cut across Susie’s last word, and her lip was caught between her teeth and held in place for a minute. They could tell each other anything: the ins and outs of a crap date, the bath bombs that gave them thrush, the gossip they’d picked up by touching someone’s shoulder on the bus. But the one thing they did not talk about was Abel Gulliver: they boy who broke Temperance’s heart. Well, not so much broke as incinerated into a million tiny particles.

‘No! No way. I’m not bothered about him. But I’m fed up of all the shitty dates, Suse. There have been so many. Like, so many! The last time I met anyone half decent was that summer I interned on Carnaby Street. And London to Devon is not a workable long-distance situation. I’m not leaving the village anytime soon, so the man I love has to be local. But I’ve Bumbled all the half-decent ones on the South Devon coast and . . . I’m in my bed at 10.30pm on a Saturday night.’ She shrugged.

Susie put her hands back on her hips. ‘That’s why you should have come to the pub! There were some quite cute backpackers in from the campsite. They were funny.’

‘I’m not looking for just funny – I’m looking for everything, for The One. Besides, I bet they were all nineteen. Please tell me you didn’t?’

Her little sister studied the warped beams of the ceiling. ‘Um . . .’

‘Susie! That’s cradle-robbing!’

‘Twenty-four is not that much older than nineteen, come on!’ Susie’s peachy cheeks turned a little strawberry. ‘And they might have been older, anyway. Why do you have to worry about The One? You’re twenty-nine, not exactly on the brink of death, babe. Can’t you just have a bit of fun?’

Temperance stood up and grabbed her dressing gown from the back of the door. ‘By the time Mum was twenty-nine she’d had us both and had set up the shop: she knew what her life was about. I just, I just,’ she shook her head, ‘have this feeling that somewhere out there is a love story for me, waiting to start. But I can’t get it started on my own.’

Susie raised one eyebrow. ‘You just haven’t borrowed the right books from my spicy shelf. I can make you a shortlist, if you like?’

Temperance couldn’t help but snort a laugh. ‘Seriously! Don’t you ever get that . . . pull? Like the other half of your heart is out there, walking around all handsome and nonchalant, and if you could just find him then together you’d make this incredible, perfect equation. Bigger than the sum of your parts. You know?’

Susie put her tongue in her cheek. ‘Not really. I don’t really like long-term jobs, Temps, let alone long-term relationships.’

Without the energy for an eye roll, Temperance turned on her heels and headed to the bathroom. She was due to open the shop in twenty minutes and she hoped that a shower would wash some of her grumpiness away.

Temperance wasn’t sure what felt worse: the sad flatness that followed another bad date or the lingering ache in her chest, nagging at her to find The One. Whichever it was, Temperance couldn’t keep going on like this.

Something had to change.

Chapter 2

Temperance’s go-to outfit on a bad morning was always the same: her mum’s denim miniskirt from her student days, with an acid house smiley-face patch sewn on the back pocket, and a Grateful Dead tour T-shirt that she’d mended years ago, turning the ragged hem into a tie-up option instead. When she pulled on the skirt she could always feel a young Lee and her bright, shiny optimism at going away to Bristol Uni – the tour T-shirt vibrated with nothing but good times and hedonism.

Temperance was hoping she could hide in other people’s positivity today, until, by osmosis, she felt just a tiny fleck of her own. Clothes still holding onto happy memories could put a spring in your step, just as clothes cloaked in misery could leave you dragging your feet. She had a great big pile of new stock that needed to be assessed and sorted. Temperance could hide in work, at least. Even if her heart was a dry husk of a thing, she had other people’s stories to distract her.

As she stomped over the green, around The Piglet Café and to their lean-to shop next door, Temperance’s head was already calculating how many garments the two massive cardboard boxes were likely to turn up, and how on earth they were going to find room on the rails for it all. Stock hadn’t been moving as quickly as usual this year. It was true that the summer was only just beginning and so their busiest months were yet to come, but they’d normally have a steadier balance between the old coming in and the still-old-but-lovingly-restored going out. It was starting to worry Temperance in the sleepless hours, when she’d exhausted the topic of being alone forever, her withered corpse being picked over by seagulls and it not even making the Prawle Reporter.

She let herself into the shop, expertly chucking her keys across the room and into an upturned top hat behind the till.

‘Steady!’