“Dad?” Daisy croons, her tone the same as the one she usually uses to ask for money.
“What is it, Daze?”
“Did you see his slutty little shorts?”
I roll my eyes. Damn my daughter . . . daughters, because Molly would be doing the exact same thing had she not been a hundred and seventy-five miles away at uni. “No. Nope. I know what you’re getting at, and the answer is aresounding no. He’s too young, he hates me, and well . . . those are reason enough.”
“But the shorts, though?” she whines.
Admittedly, the shorts were . . . fucking delicious, but I wonder if anyone else’s daughters put this much effort into manipulating their father’s love life?
“Mum’s remarried. Mum’s moved on,” she says. It’s what she always says.
“Mum doesn’t have a pub to run, or thirty-five thousand pounds to magic out of the air.”
“True, but Mathias is rich. He owns a Range Rover and a Supra.”
“How do you know these things? I doubt he has that kind of wedge just lying around, though. What are we going to do, plan a heist?”
She’s infuriatingly persistent. “But he must save so much in shorts fabric alone. He could be your sugar baby . . .”
I shoot her my most cuttingcease and desistlook. Mathias is . . . I quickly do some mental maths. His year of birth is nineteen ninety-five. Ninety-five! Fuck me, that was the summer my form tutor Mrs James told me I’d never amount to anything, so I decided there and then to become a professional rugby player.
That makes my new neighbour twenty-nine. There’s a fifteen year age gap between Mathias and me. That’s . . . too much. Isn’t it? He’s closer to the girls’ generation. I shiver.
“Okay, I know what you’re thinking,” Daisy says, as I pick up the food tray. She follows me to the front of the pub and holds the door open for me.
Eyes follow our movement from every corner. Tom and Bryn from their usual seat next to the window. Roger and Ange from the table beside the fireplace. And Viv. Even Will Shakespeare, the laziest Irish setter anyone could ever encounter, lifts his head from his paws and watches us go. Rapt, entertained.
As always.
“WhatamI thinking?” I half whisper to Daisy as I stare up at my old house.
“I’ve seen Mathias’s personal Instagram. He’s single . . . and Lando and I are almost one hundred per cent confident he likes guys. Later, Lando’s going to see if Matty baby’s on Grindr. I bet he is.”
I choose to ignore the last few sentences of her statement, even though they make my heart do a weird wet-fish slap against my stomach. “How have you seen his personal Instagram?”
The public one run by his PR people, sure, everyone’s privy to those. But his personal page? Everything I assume about Mathias leads me to believe he’s not casual about the access randomers have over his life.
Daisy ignores me, starts getting her phone out of her back pocket. “Wanna see?”
Dammit, yes. Yes, I do. Instead, I shake my head and leave The Little Thatch.
Viv yells after me, “Go get him, tiger!”
5
Tuesday 25th March 2025
Owen
The road that cuts through Mudford-upon-Hooke is technically a B road. At its widest point—the crossroad turning into the pub and down the lane beside Fernbank Cottage—it’s just one and a half cars deep, and since the road serves only this hamlet and Hepton, another even tinier hamlet three miles down the hill, before veering back onto the A363 towards Bath, it’s usually pretty quiet. It has no road markings, veers sharply right after the junction, and has a bunch of those curved mirrors to help drivers navigate their way out of the pub’s carpark.
I still checkboth ways before crossing, then cut over the cottage’s gravel drive, up the few steps, and along the path to Fernbank’s porch.
Daisy, Molly, and I had revamped the entire place a few months ago. We painted the front door a pretty sage green and the two bay tree plant pots a dusky rose pink. The girls had promised me those colours would be complementary together, and well, they’d been right. The house looks charming. Idyllic. I feel a pang of something in my chest. Nostalgia maybe, but . . . harsher, sharper, more painful. Like I’m holding back an emotion. I shake the thought, balance the tray in the crook of my arm, and knock on the door.
There’s a deep rumbling sound—Mathias’s voice no doubt—which stops the instant my hand leaves the knocker. Then nothing but silence. I knock again, and then a few seconds later, once more.
