The Second Chance Shoe Shop

by Marcie Steele

  Clara: But at what age do I show the journal to her? Ten, fifteen, twenty? When would a child ever want to know about her dead father?

  Tanya: I think you’ll know the right time. And I suppose he is very much alive in her memory still at the moment.

  Clara: You’re right. I’m scared that poppet will forget him if I don’t do this.

  Tanya: She won’t. You won’t let her. And you’ll be glad you wrote it all down when you do get around to showing her. Although, maybe you should make sure that she doesn’t find your journal when she’s older, before you do tell her!

  Clara: She won’t find it. It’s underneath a plastic box I use to store cleaning products under the sink. Once I fill one notepad, I’ll hide it away in the loft or something. I’ll get a box, I think, maybe put some of his things in it for her.

  Tanya: That sounds a great idea! Something positive to think about, too.

  Clara: Sometimes I hate myself for being so weak, though. But now, I realise that I must have been quite strong to cope with him dying, and getting on with everything to make life as normal as possible for poppet. She was a gem through it all, a very good girl, and I feel so lucky to have her now. I honestly don’t know what I would do without her.

  I guess that’s why I can’t figure out what to do on the anniversary of his death. I want to do something for me and poppet, and I want to do something with Ross’s family too. And then there are my friends.

  Tanya: I think you should make it special for his family as well as your friends. As long as you can deal with the day, do whatever it takes.

  Clara: Yes, it’s going to be painful, but I can get through it. If I can get through Ross dying, I can get through anything life throws at me.

  Sadie logged off Grieve Together and closed down her laptop. Just lately, she’d wondered if being a member of the site was helping her to move on and deal with her grief, or if it was keeping it alive far more than she needed. It was great to have Tanya to talk to, but maybe this was prolonging her struggle to face life without Ross. The first anniversary of his death was playing on her mind. Once she got past that, she would decide whether to stop using Grieve Together or not. She’d probably stay friends with Tanya online, maybe via emails instead, though.

  She really hoped she was doing the right thing by writing her journal. She wasn’t able to keep Ross’s memory alive any other way, so this seemed the right thing for her to do.

  Because now all she had were those memories.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Riley walked home from Sadie’s house. It was a good thirty minutes, but her head didn’t feel any clearer when she got back to her flat.

  She walked across the car park, heard a car door slam and looked up. Her heart faltered. Ethan was coming towards her. His face was like thunder. She wasn’t in the mood for this now.

  ‘What’s going on, Riley?’ said Ethan, flashing his phone at her. ‘Who the hell is this?’

  ‘It’s not how it looks,’ she told him. ‘This is your ex’s attempt to sabotage everything for me, again.’

  ‘She says you’re a liar. What does she mean by that?’

  ‘I don’t have a clue. I didn’t even know her three days ago, so I’m not sure how much she knows about me.’

  ‘But these tweets.’ Ethan held up his phone again. ‘They’re saying you were seeing a married man. Is that the man you were so hurt over?’

  ‘If I was, it was before I met you.’

  ‘That’s supposed to make it okay?’ He shook his head in dismay.

  ‘Look, can we go inside?’ Riley pointed to the entrance. ‘Despite being splashed across social media, I don’t want everyone to know my business.’

  Going indoors gave Riley a little time to compose herself before speaking to him again. From the tone of his voice, Ethan was angry enough to believe that everything was true.

  ‘I didn’t have an affair,’ she started, after she had made them coffee. She sat down and told him what had happened with Nicholas, and what had happened over the past two days.

  ‘When Clarissa took the photo, Nicholas was trying to kiss me,’ she said. ‘What it doesn’t show you is that two seconds later I pushed him away and slapped his face. No one takes advantage of me like that.’

  Ethan had the decency to look shamefaced. ‘I just thought―’

  ‘You just jumped to the same conclusions everyone else did!’ Riley’s tone was sharp. ‘Thanks a million. And aren’t you going to question why it was your ex who took the photo? I had no idea that Nicholas was going to turn up at the shop today. I haven’t seen him since last year. Don’t you find it strange that Clarissa just happened to be around to take a photo of us together? She must have been spying on me.’

  ‘She might not have taken it. She might have had it sent to her.’

  ‘Which makes it even more devious that she should put it on social media! She’s clearly not going to leave us alone. What will she do next? Take photos of us leaving the flat? Or in the flat? I wouldn’t put anything past her.’ She pointed to the window. ‘She could be watching us right now.’

  ‘She won’t be.’

  ‘But even more so, I can’t handle the fact that you were angry with me over something that was out of my control.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Now that you’ve explained everything, I realise how wrong I was.’

  ‘You didn’t believe me.’

  ‘You can hardly blame me. I saw that photo and thought you were kissing him!’

  ‘You’re a photographer! You of all people should realise things can be misrepresented and then blown out of proportion.’

  ‘A bit like you’re doing now?’

  Riley turned to him sharply. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘You’re blaming me for what Clarissa has done.’

  ‘You accused me of seeing someone else.’

  ‘I didn’t know who he was!’

  ‘You should have asked me first!’ She looked at him. ‘I think you should leave.’

  ‘Riley.’ He reached for her hand but she moved away.

  ‘I’ll be fine. I just want to be by myself right now. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  Once she was alone, Riley fell back onto the settee. What a day. Surely things couldn’t get any worse? She hated falling out with Ethan but he shouldn’t have accused her of seeing someone else. He should have tackled Clarissa first, or, if not, asked her who was in the photo rather than jumping to conclusions.

  But she couldn’t put all the blame on Ethan. They both should have been grown up enough to work things out for themselves. Perhaps if they had been seeing each other longer, this might not have happened. But their relationship was new. They hadn’t even passed the lust stage yet. There hadn’t even been a mention of the L-word.

  Riley went over to the window and looked down on the car park. Was Clarissa hiding behind one of the cars? She squinted, trying to see out into the dark. Then she cursed, and drew the curtains shut on the night.

  Although none of this would look okay in the morning, all she wanted to do right now was go to bed and forget about everything.

  As she suspected, nothing looked any better the next morning. Riley had hardly had any sleep, getting up twice in the night to make a drink and sitting on the settee for a while before taking herself back to bed.

  When she got to work everything seemed calm, but she knew it wouldn’t last long. Once Suzanne got wind of the last bit of scandal, Riley would be in for it. She kept looking at the door, waiting for her to burst through it in dramatic fashion.

  Her mind not on her job, Riley stared out onto the High Street and wondered how many of the people were happy. The man with the briefcase, rushing past, not seeing anyone. The woman who had gone into the newsagent’s, who owned a stall in the market. The women who owned the sandwich shop over by the shopping centre.

  Was anyone truly content, or did they all trundle through life thinking things can only get better?

  Something caught her attenti
on. Someone was watching the shop. Her eyes narrowed, then widened in disbelief.

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ she told Sadie and Dan, getting out her phone before leaving the shop.

  Out on the pavement, she put her phone up to eye level and, pretending to take a selfie in front of the shop, took a photo in the opposite direction. She zoomed in and took a few more. As she did so, she realised that the person she was staring at through the lens had looked up from tapping on her phone and had now noticed her. Riley glanced up the street to see no traffic was coming her way, and ran across to the other side.

  ‘Don’t you run away from me, Clarissa!’ she cried, putting a hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘What do you think you were you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Clarissa, trying to look anywhere but at Riley.

  ‘You were taking photos of the shop. What do you do? Loiter around here to see if any opportunities come up?’ Riley snorted. ‘You chose the right day yesterday, good for you.’

  ‘I’m only showing the world how devious you are.’ Clarissa put away her phone and folded her arms. ‘You’re seeing someone else at the same time as Ethan. He deserves to know. He deserves someone better than that.’

  ‘Like you, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, he belongs with me.’

  ‘You’re welcome to him.’

  The remark threw Clarissa and she frowned.

  ‘Yes, you heard me. You wanted to ruin my relationship with Ethan? Congratulations, you did it. Satisfied?’

  Clarissa said nothing.

  ‘Oh, has the cat got your tongue now?’ Riley stepped forward. ‘Leave me alone or I will report you to the police for harassment.’

  ‘You can’t do that!’

  ‘No?’ Riley turned to leave. ‘If you’re still here in five minutes, just watch me.’

  Riley marched back to the shop, head held high. She hoped that was the last she’d see of Clarissa. Bullies were nothing when you squared up to them.

  ‘Was that Clarissa you were talking to?’ asked Dan, when she went back inside the shop.

  ‘Yes, She was taking photos of the shop.’

  ‘Again? She’s bloody mad. What did she say when you confronted her?’

  ‘She said she was showing the world how devious I was.’

  ‘The cow!’ Dan paced the room. ‘Is she gone? Because if not, I’ve a good mind to go over there and give her a piece of my mind. She can’t keep doing this!’

  But Riley had her head down. She looked at the photo that she had taken of Clarissa. She could clearly be seen holding her phone up, looking their way. She flicked on to Twitter, to see if Clarissa had posted anything about her, but the feed was free of her nasty comments.

  Before she had time to think of the consequences, Riley typed a tweet

  There are two sides to every story. #Stalkeralert @Clarissapops

  Then she uploaded the photo of Clarissa watching the shop, clear for everyone to see. Two could play at Clarissa’s silly games.

  And then she froze. With horror, she realised she was logged in to the wrong account.

  She hadn’t sent the tweet from her personal account. She had sent it from Chandler’s’. She deleted it quickly, hoping that not too many people had seen it on their feeds.

  But knowing that it would have been sent to Clarissa, and what she would do when she saw it, a sense of dread enveloped her.

  An hour later, Riley was cursing her impromptu tweet. Clarissa had begun to bombard her with tweets again, tagging Ethan too. She tried to remain calm as more and more came in, hurling abuse at her. If it was left to her, she would have gone home immediately, shut the door on the world and cried her heart out. But she couldn’t leave the shop, nor leave Sadie and Dan to deal with the mess.

  Mess. That’s exactly what it was. She reached for a bag of pound coins and dropped them into the till as she tried to stop the tears from falling. Everything she had done had been out of the goodness of her heart. She’d tried to keep the shop open, keep them all in jobs. How had it all backfired?

  ‘Chin up, Riles,’ said Dan, giving her arm a quick squeeze as he served a customer.

  ‘I was wrong, Dan,’ she replied. ‘I let you all down, and I let myself down.’

  ‘I know it was wrong, but you’re only human. Everyone makes mistakes. You know it will be old news tomorrow. There’ll be someone else to tweet about for the trolls by then.’

  ‘I wish I had your optimism,’ Riley sighed. ‘It’s made our competition just that little bit harder now. All our work down the pan because of other people.’

  ‘Things are never as bad as they seem,’ said a customer.

  Riley looked to see an old lady smiling at them. She was buying slippers. Riley fumed inwardly. Slippers weren’t going to stop the shop from closing.

  ‘That’s what I keep telling her,’ said Dan. ‘Whatever is done, is done. It’s what we do afterwards that counts.’

  ‘I agree,’ said the woman, pressing a twenty-pound note into his hand. ‘Everything happens for a reason, even if we don’t always notice at the time.’

  Riley forced a smile before turning back and muttering under her breath. The woman obviously meant well but she was through with people sticking their noses into her affairs. Why was it that everyone else thought they could offer advice, even when you didn’t need it?

  Then she looked at Sadie, who was staring at her thoughtfully. Sadie smiled, a smile that said she was always on her side, that she would always have her back no matter what.

  She looked at Dan. He caught her eye and gave her a wink before turning back to the woman and giving her his charm.

  ‘She’ll be okay,’ he told the customer. ‘Riley is the strongest person I’ve ever known.’

  Riley smiled, but the tears fell.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, rushing from the shop floor. Dan was wrong. She was weak. She had let herself down by sending that tweet.

  Right now she hated herself.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  That afternoon, Riley’s heart sank when the shop door opened and she looked up to see Suzanne. She marched up to the till where Riley was standing, her face a mask of dark emotions.

  ‘A word in the back, please,’ she said in a clipped tone.

  ‘Stand tall, Riles,’ whispered Dan, as he rushed over to her. ‘We’ve got your back.’

  ‘I don’t have time for this,’ Riley muttered. ‘I can’t leave the shop floor at the moment, Suzanne,’ she shouted at her boss’s disappearing figure.

  Suzanne stopped abruptly and turned on her heels. ‘I can say what I need to right here, so that everyone can hear, or I can say it to you in private. Which is it to be?’

  Riley stared at her. She hadn’t got anything to lose, and anything Suzanne did say could be said in front of Dan and Sadie.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Sadie moved over to the counter with a shoe in her hand.

  Undeterred, Suzanne took the shoe from Sadie and threw a large smile in the direction of a woman who was waiting to try it on in her size. ‘The shop is closing for the rest of the day.’

  ‘But it’s not time yet!’ the woman protested.

  ‘If you’d like to come back tomorrow, I’m sure we can come up with some kind of discount.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t be back. If you can treat your customers so badly, I won’t be buying anything from you.’ The woman picked up her bag and stormed out of the shop.

  ‘Well, that’s yet another customer you’ve lost us, Riley,’ Suzanne said as she locked the door and flicked the sign to ‘closed’.

  Riley still said nothing.

  ‘Just what the hell is going on with you?’ Suzanne rounded on her as soon as she got back to the till. ‘First, you create a ludicrous campaign that goes viral. Then you bring trouble to the shop.’

  ‘I didn’t bring trouble,’ said Riley. ‘It came looking for me.’ Even as she said it, she knew it sounded catty.

  ‘Oh, poor you,’ Suzanne hi
ssed.

  ‘If you hadn’t threatened us with losing our jobs, none of this would have happened. As it is, I’ve been subjected to abuse from all sides.’ Riley tried to swallow down her emotions. ‘All I wanted was to create some well-needed publicity for Chandler’s and―’

  ‘You certainly did that!’ Suzanne pointed in Riley’s face. ‘Bad publicity!’

  ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity,’ Dan said, trying to defend Riley, but he was cut down by Suzanne.

  ‘Of course there is, you idiot!’ Suzanne waved an arm around the shop. ‘There was one customer in here when I came in. One!’

  ‘There were two, actually,’ said Sadie. ‘One was just leaving.’

  Suzanne glared at her.

  ‘It’s nearly closing time!’ said Riley. ‘We were much busier earlier.’

  ‘And I’m not an idiot,’ remarked Dan.

  ‘You’re right,’ Suzanne nodded, taking them all by surprise. ‘I’m the idiot for letting this farce continue. Riley,’ she folded her arms, ‘I’d like you to collect your things and leave.’

  ‘You’re firing me?’ Riley gasped – after all the effort she had put in lately?

  ‘You can’t do that!’ said Sadie.

  ‘Riley is the backbone,’ Dan stated. ‘Without her, there wouldn’t be a shop.’

  ‘This is my shop! And it is going down the pan, whether we like it or not. And now’ – Suzanne pointed at Riley – ‘because of your little escapades, no one is going to take us seriously. I must admit, I’m surprised at you.’ Suzanne didn’t address Riley’s last comment. ‘I would never have you down as a home-wrecker.’

  Riley saw red. She pressed her knuckles down on the counter and leaned forward in confrontation. ‘You might be my boss, but you do not have any say in my private life. For your information, I have never stolen anyone else’s man, and I never will,’ Riley pouted. ‘As for you and this shop, I think Albert would be turning in his grave. Working for you and the invisible Max has been a nightmare. I’ve a good mind to tell Dan and Sadie why I think he’s missing.’