by Fiona Grace
She headed to the boutique clothing store that sat next to the vacant one she hoped would soon be hers.
May as well meet the neighbors, she reasoned.
She stepped inside and found that it was a very minimalist-looking place stocked with just a few select items. The woman behind the counter looked up as she entered, her nose rising snootily up as her gaze traveled across Lacey’s attire. The woman was rake-thin and rather severe looking, but her wavy brown hair was styled in exactly the same way as Lacey’s. Her black dress made her appear like a sort of evil clone version of herself, she thought with amusement.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked in a thin, unpleasant voice.
“No thank you,” Lacey replied. “I know exactly what I want.”
She selected a two-piece suit from the rack, the type that she was accustomed to wearing back in New York, then paused. Did she want to replicate herself? To dress as that woman who she’d been before? Or did she want to be someone new?
She turned back to the store clerk. “Actually, I may need a bit of help.”
The woman’s face remained impassive as she stepped out from behind the counter and approached Lacey. Evidently, she assumed that Lacey was a time waster—what sort of thrift store shopper could afford to be in a boutique like this?—and Lacey was looking forward to the moment she’d be able to flash her plastic in this woman’s judgmental face.
“I need something for work,” Lacey said. “Formal, but not too stiff, you know?”
The woman blinked. “And what is your work?”
“Antiques.”
“Antiques?”
Lacey nodded. “Yup. Antiques.”
The woman selected something from the rack. It was fashionable, kind of edgy, with a hint of androgyny in its cut. Lacey took it into the changing room and tried it on for size. The reflection that stared back at her made a grin burst onto her lips. She looked, dare she say it, cool. The store clerk, as shrew-faced as she was, had impeccable taste and an impressive eye for flattering a figure.
Lacey exited the changing room. “It’s perfect. I’ll take it. And four more in different colors.”
The store clerk’s eyebrows catapulted upward. “Excuse me?”
Lacey’s phone began to ring. She looked at the screen and saw Stephen’s number flashing at her.
Her heart leapt. This was it! The call she’d been waiting for! The call that would determine her future!
“I’ll take it,” Lacey repeated to the clerk, suddenly breathless with anticipation. “And four more in whatever colors you think will suit me.”
The store clerk look bemused as she went out the back—to those ugly gray storage sheds, Lacey thought—to find her more suits.
Lacey answered her phone. “Stephen?”
“Hi, Lacey? I’m here with Martha. Would you like to come back to the store for a chat?”
His tone sounded promising, and Lacey couldn’t help but smile.
“Absolutely. I’ll be there in five.”
The store clerk returned with her arms laden with more suits. Lacey noted the impeccable color palette—nude, black, navy, and dust pink.
“Did you want to try them on?” the clerk asked.
Lacey shook her head. She was in a hurry now, and couldn’t wait to finish her purchase and run next door. She kept looking over her shoulder at the exit.
“Nope. If they’re the same as this one, I trust you that they’ll be right. Can you ring them up, please?” She spoke quickly. Her waning patience was literally audible. “Oh, and I’m going to keep this one on, too.”
The store clerk looked extremely unimpressed by the way Lacey was trying to speed her up. As if to spite her, she took her time ringing up each item and carefully folding it in tissue paper.
“Wait!” Lacey exclaimed, as the woman pulled out a paper bag to put the clothes into. “I can’t carry a store bag. I’ll need a handbag. A good one.” Her eyes darted to the row of bags on a shelf behind the woman’s head. “Can you choose one that’ll go well with the suits?”
From the store clerk’s expression, you’d be forgiven for thinking she was dealing with a madwoman. Still, she turned, considered each of the bags on sale, then took down an oversized black leather clutch with a gold buckle.
“Perfect,” Lacey said, bouncing on her toes like a sprinter waiting for the starting gun. “Ring it up.”
The woman did as she was commanded, and began to carefully fill the clutch with the suits.
“So that will be—”
“SHOES!” Lacey suddenly cried, interrupting her. What a scatterbrain. It had been her crappy boat shoes that had brought her into this store in the first place. “I need shoes!”
The store clerk looked somehow even more unimpressed. Maybe she thought Lacey was pranking her, and that she’d bolt at the end of all this.
“Our shoes are over here,” she said coolly, gesturing with her arm.
Lacey looked at the small selection of beautifully crafted heels she would’ve worn back in New York City, where she’d considered sore ankles to be an occupational hazard. But things were different now, Lacey reminded herself. She didn’t need to wear pain-inducing footwear.
Her gaze fell to a pair of patent black brogues. The shoes would perfectly complement the androgynous quality of her new suit collection. She beelined for them.
“These,” she said, plonking them on the counter in front of the clerk.
The woman didn’t bother asking Lacey whether she wanted to try them on, and so rang them up, letting out a cough into her fist at the four-digit price tag that flashed up on the till display.
Lacey pulled out her card, paid, slid on the new shoes, thanked the clerk, and hop-skipped out the store back into the vacant lot beside it. Hope blossomed in her chest that she was a matter of moments away from collecting the keys from Stephen and becoming neighbors of the unimpressed boutique store clerk she’d just purchased a whole new identity from.
When she entered, Stephen looked like he didn’t recognize her.
“I thought you said she seemed a bit scatty?” the woman beside him, who must’ve been his wife, Martha, said out of the corner of her mouth. If she was trying to be discreet, she was failing miserably. Lacey could hear every word.
Lacey gestured to her outfit. “Ta-da. Told you I knew what I was doing,” she teased.
Martha gave Stephen a look. “What were you worrying about, you old fool? She’s the answer to our prayers! Give her the lease right away!”
Lacey couldn’t believe it. What luck. Fate had definitely intervened.
Stephen hurriedly pulled some documents from his bag and placed them on the counter in front of her. Unlike the divorce papers she’d stared at with disbelief, in a moment of disembodied grief, these papers seemed to glow with promise, with opportunity. She took out her pen, the same one that had signed her divorce papers, and committed her signature to paper.
Lacey Bishop. Business owner.
Her new life was sealed.
CHAPTER SIX
With a broom in her hands, Lacey swept the floorboards of the store she was now the proud lease holder for, her heart fit to bursting.
She’d never felt like this before. Like she was in control of her whole life, her whole destiny, and that the future was hers for the taking. Her mind was racing a mile a minute, already formulating some pretty big plans. She wanted to turn the large back room into an auction room, in honor of the dream her father had never fulfilled. She’d been to a zillion auctions while working for Saskia (admittedly on the purchasing side rather than the selling one) but she was confident she’d be able to learn what it took to do it. She’d never run a store before, either, yet here she was. And besides, anything worth having required effort.
Just then, she saw a figure who’d been strolling past the store stop abruptly and face her through the windows. She looked up from her sweeping, hoping it would be Tom, but realized that the figure standing stock-still in front of her was a woma
n. And not just any random woman, one that Lacey recognized. Rake-thin, black dress, and that same long dark wavy hair as Lacey. It was her evil twin—the store clerk from next door.
The woman stormed into the store through the unlocked front door.
“What are you doing in here?” she demanded.
Lacey rested the broom against the counter and confidently held her hand out to the woman. “I’m Lacey Bishop. Your new neighbor.”
The woman stared at her hand with disgust like it was covered in germs. “What?”
“I’m your new neighbor,” Lacey repeated, with the same confident tone. “I just signed a lease on this place.”
The woman looked like she’d just been slapped in the face. “But…” she murmured.
“Do you own the boutique, or just work there?” Lacey prompted, trying to bring the stunned woman back to her senses.
The woman nodded as if in a hypnotized trance. “I own it. I’m Taryn. Taryn Maguire.” Then, suddenly, she shook her head as if overcoming her surprise, and forced a friendly smile onto her face. “Well, how lovely to have a new neighbor. It’s a great space, isn’t it? I’m sure the lack of light will work in your favor as well, it hides the tattiness.”
Lacey stopped herself from raising her eyebrow. Years of dealing with her mother’s passive-aggressiveness had trained Lacey not to rise to it.
Taryn laughed loudly, as if in an attempt to smother the back-handed compliment. “So, tell me, how did you get a lease for this place? Last I heard, Stephen was selling up.”
Lacey just shrugged. “He was. But there was a change of plans.”
Taryn looked like she’d sucked a lemon. Her eyes darted all around the store, the upturned nose Lacey had already had pointed at her once today seeming to reach even farther toward the heavens as Taryn’s disgust became more and more apparent.
“And you’re going to be selling antiques?” she added.
“That’s right. My father was in the trade when I was a kid, so I’m following in his footsteps in his honor.”
“Antiques,” Taryn repeated. Evidently, the thought of an antiques store setting up next to her swanky boutique displeased her. Her eyes pinned Lacey like a hawk’s. “And you’re allowed to do that, are you? Hop over the pond and set up shop?”
“With the right visa,” Lacey explained coolly.
“That’s… interesting,” Taryn replied, clearly choosing her words carefully. “I mean, when a foreigner wants a job in this country the company has to provide evidence there’s no one British-born to fill the position. I’m just surprised the same rules don’t apply to running a business…” The disdain in her tone was becoming more and more evident. “And Stephen just leased it to you, a stranger, like that? After the shop became vacant all of, what, two days ago?” The politeness she’d been forcing herself to express before seemed to be quickly fading away.
Lacey decided not to rise to it.
“It was a stroke of luck, really. Stephen happened to be in the store when I started nosing around. He was devastated by the old lessee’s abandoning it and leaving him with loads of bills, and, I guess the stars just aligned. I’m helping him, he’s helping me. It must be fate.”
Lacey noticed that Taryn’s face had turned red.
“FATE?” she screamed, passive-aggressiveness turning into straight out aggression. “FATE? I’ve had a deal with Stephen for months, that if the store became available he’d sell it to me! I’m meant to be expanding my store by taking on his!”
Lacey shrugged. “Well, I didn’t buy it. I’m leasing it. I’m sure he still has that plan in mind, to sell to you when the time comes. The time just isn’t now.”
“I can’t believe this!” Taryn wailed. “You swan in here and twist his arm into another lease? And he signs it over in a couple of days? Did you threaten him? Work some kind of voodoo on him?”
Lacey held her ground. “You’ll have to ask him why he decided to lease to me rather than sell to you,” she said, but in her mind she thought, Maybe because I’m a nice person?
“You stole my store,” Taryn finished.
Then she stormed away, slamming the door behind her, her long dark hair swishing behind her as she went.
Lacey realized her new life wasn’t going to be quite as idyllic as she’d hoped. And that her joke about Taryn being her evil twin had actually come true. Well, there was one thing she could do about that.
Lacey locked up the store front and waltzed with purpose down the road toward the hairdresser’s, then marched right inside. The hairdresser, a redhead, was sitting idly flicking through a magazine in an evident lull between clients.
“Can I help?” she asked, looking up at Lacey.
“It’s time,” Lacey said with determination. “Time to go short.”
It was another dream she’d never been brave enough to fulfill. David had loved her hair long. But there was no way she was going to resemble her evil twin for a second longer. The time had come. Time for the chop. Time to shed all of the old Lacey she’d been. This was her new life, and she was going to follow her own new rules.
“Are you sure you want to go short?” the woman asked. “I mean, you seem determined but I have to ask. I don’t want you to regret it.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Lacey said. “Once I do this, I’ll have fulfilled three of my dreams in as many days.”
The woman grinned and grabbed her scissors. “All right then. Let’s score that hat-trick!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“There,” Ivan said, scooching out from the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. “That leaky pipe shouldn’t give you any more trouble.”
He heaved himself to standing, self-consciously tugging at the hem of his crumpled gray T, which had ridden up over his lily-white pot belly. Lacey politely pretended not to have noticed.
“Thanks for repairing it so quickly,” Lacey said, grateful he was a considerate landlord who fixed all the issues that arose with the house—of which there had already been a lot—and in such a timely manner. But she was also starting to feel guilty about the number of times she’d dragged him out to Crag Cottage; that cliff walk wasn’t a breeze and he wasn’t exactly a young guy.
“Do you want to stay for a drink?” Lacey asked. “Tea? Beer?”
She already knew the answer would be no. Ivan was shy, and he gave off the impression that he felt himself an imposition. She always asked anyway.
He chuckled. “No, no, you’re fine, Lacey. I have business admin to do tonight. No rest for the wicked, as they say.”
“Tell me about it,” she replied. “I was at the store at five a.m. this morning, and didn’t get home until eight.”
Ivan frowned. “The store?”
“Oh,” Lacey said, surprised. “I thought I mentioned it that time you were round unclogging the gutters. I’m opening an antiques store in town. I’m leasing the vacant lot from Stephen and Martha, the one that was a home and garden store before.”
Ivan looked stunned. “I thought you were just here for a vacation!”
“I was. But then I decided to stay. Not in this exact house, of course. I’ll find somewhere else as soon as you need it back.”
“No, I’m thrilled,” Ivan said, looking utterly delighted. “If you’re happy here, I’m happy to have you. It’s not too annoying having me fix the place up around you, is it?”
“I like it,” Lacey replied with a smile. “I’m a bit lonely otherwise.”
That had been the hardest part of leaving New York; it wasn’t the place, or the apartment, or the familiar streets, but the people she’d left behind.
“I should probably get a dog,” she added with a chuckle.
“You’ve not met your neighbor yet, I take it?” Ivan said. “Lovely lady. Eccentric. She has a dog, a Collie to round up the sheep.”
“I’ve met the sheep,” Lacey told him. “They keep coming into the garden.”
“Ah,” Ivan said. “There must be a gap in the fence. I’ll see to that. But anyway
, the lady next door is always up for a tea. Or beer.” He winked in a paternal way that reminded her of her father.
“Really? She won’t mind some random American turning up on her doorstep?”
“Gina? Not at all. She’ll love it! Give her a knock. I promise you won’t regret it.”
He left, and Lacey did just as he’d suggested, heading over to the neighbor’s house. Although “neighbor” was quite a loose description. The house was at least a five-minute trek across the clifftops.
She reached the cottage, a single-story version of her own, and knocked on the door. From the other side she heard an instant kerfuffle, of a dog scrabbling around and a female voice telling it to quiet down. Then the door opened several inches. A woman with long curly gray hair and exceptionally childlike features for a sixty-odd-year-old, peered out. She was wearing a salmon-colored woolen cardigan over a floor-length floral skirt. The muzzle of a black and white Border Collie could be seen urgently trying to push its way past her.
“Boudicca,” the woman said down to the dog. “Get your sniffer out the way.”
“Boudicca?” Lacey asked. “That’s an interesting name for a dog.”
“I named her after the vengeful pagan warrior queen who went on a rampage against the Romans and burnt London down to the ground. Now, how can I help you, dear?”
Lacey immediately warmed to the woman. “I’m Lacey. I’m living next door and thought I should introduce myself now that my stay is kind of permanent.”
“Next door? Crag Cottage?”
“That’s right.”
The woman beamed. She threw the door wide open, throwing her arms open at the same time. “Oh!” she exclaimed with pure joy, pulling Lacey into a hug. Boudicca the dog went crazy, leaping up and barking. “I’m Georgina Vickers. George to my family, Gina to my friends.”