The Sunshine Teashop

Chapter 1

It’s going to be a good day. Usually when people say something like that, it invariably ends up being a bad day, but not today. All the doubts I’ve been having are firmly stamped down, and today is going to be the first day of the rest of my life.

I’m clutching a set of the keys that my best friend, Vickie, and I collected from the estate agent yesterday.

I practically skip up the narrow backroad towards the terraced shop, wedged between a dilapidated tattoo parlour and a laundrette that, ironically, looks like it needs a good clean.

I’m concerned about the positioning… It’s a tad out-of-the-way for a café, somewhere that not many people are likely to walk past, but Vickie swears that foot traffic is nowhere near as important as word-of-mouth, and people will find us based solely on recommendations and good reviews.

Plus, the rent was cheap enough that we could actually afford it, which is the only thing that’s allowed this dream to become a reality.

The estate agent’s ‘For Lease’ board still stands outside, making me think that surely someone should’ve been along to take it down by now, and that niggle of doubt tries to rear its head again.

Do so few people walk past that even the estate agent knows that no one is going to see their forgotten sign?

I stamp the niggle down again. The Nostalgia Café is actually happening.

Vickie and I have both left our sensible office jobs, where we met three years ago, and we’ve pooled our entire life savings to put down a tenancy deposit on this tiny building in the backend of Sevenoaks, a little town in Kent on the outskirts of London, where I’ve lived my whole life.

The morning sun catches the grimy windows, making them sparkle with potential rather than dead flies, which is what they’re currently sparkling with.

I can already picture it. Mismatched vintage china, fairy lights everywhere, the smell of tea, coffee, and good old-fashioned home baking.

We’ll serve nostalgic food that people remember from their childhoods, and the café will be somewhere people can come to remember a time when the world felt simpler and a cup of tea could fix anything.

Jared thinks I’m mad, of course. ‘You can’t throw away a steady salary, Dolly,’ he said last night, using the patronising tone he usually uses when I suggest we watch something other than Top Gear. ‘The place is a hellhole.’

‘Hellhole’ is a bit strong, although it certainly needs some work.

He’ll understand when he sees the vision that Vickie and I have for this place, which is why I’ve asked him to get out of work for an hour this morning and meet us here to celebrate getting the keys.

It took a bit of persuasion, and the complete lack of interest in my massive career change has only added to the ever-increasing distance between us that I’m trying not to think about.

I’m a little bit late and I’m surprised they’re not already here, actually.

We’d agreed on 9 a.m., and it’s already quarter past. I go to put my key in the lock, but it doesn’t fit because there’s already a key in the other side, so I push the handle and the door swings inwards.

Vickie must have arrived already and gone inside without me.

Sure enough, there’s a bottle of champagne on a wonky table near the door.

‘Vick?’ I call out as I walk through the empty café. ‘Champagne for breakfast? I always knew I liked your styl—’

The words die in my throat as I push open the creaky door to the kitchen.

There, pressed against the wall where we’d planned to hang framed vintage baking posters, are two people. Two very familiar people who are definitely not admiring the mouse-chewed skirting boards.

Vickie’s red hair is unmistakable, even when it’s tangled in Jared’s fingers.

Jared’s hands, which I thought would be here to help us with any handiwork given how bad a state the shop is in, apparently are actually here to slide up my best friend’s bare back where his fingers are lifting her top while his tongue plunders her mouth.

One of her legs is wrapped around him as they rut against each other, both moaning in a way that’s truly indecent, especially at this time of day.

I want to look away, but it’s like staring at a car crash.

You know it’s going to haunt you forever, but you’re powerless to stop watching.

They’re so caught up in each other that they haven’t even heard me come in.

I am comically invisible. I could have come dressed as the back half of a pantomime cow and neither of them would have noticed.

For a long moment, I don’t know what to do with myself.

This answers so many of the questions that have been nagging at me lately.

I’ve known my relationship with Jared has lost its spark.

I’ve known Vickie was hiding something. I didn’t know it would be this, obviously, but it’s a strange, almost liberating sense of relief.

This is why everything has felt off lately, and I never saw it coming.

My arms go numb as I stare at them. The keys I’m holding hit the floor with a loud clatter, and Jared and Vickie spring apart like they’ve been electrocuted, but it’s too late. The damage is done. The image is burned into my retinas like I’ve looked directly into the sun.

‘Dolly!’ Vickie’s face crumples and goes so red that she turns almost purple while frantically pulling her top back down. ‘We didn’t hear you come in!’

‘Clearly.’ The word comes out sounding like an invisible hand is squeezing my throat.

Jared straightens his shirt and has the audacity to look annoyed. Not guilty. Not apologetic. Annoyed, like I’m the one who’s done something wrong by catching them. ‘Look, Dolly, this isn’t how we wanted you to find out.’

‘Find out what, exactly?’ Even as I say it, I know. Of course I know. In the past couple of minutes, everything has slotted into place.

This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing that’s just happened this morning.

The way Vickie’s been checking her phone constantly during our planning for The Nostalgia Café.

The way Jared’s been ‘working late’ more often.

The way he’s been distant for a while now, uninterested in my life and the plans I’ve been excited to share with him.

The way Vickie and I have argued about our visions for The Nostalgia Café when we’d never had a single disagreement before, and I’ve convinced myself it was just nerves about quitting our jobs and jumping headfirst into business together.

‘How long?’ I change my pointless question for a better one, although I’m not sure I want to know the answer because it’s like prodding a bruise to see how much it hurts.

They exchange a look. One of those wordless conversations couples have, the kind Jared and I stopped having months ago.

‘Six months,’ Jared says.

Six months. Six months of planning this café and daydreaming about our future together.

The business partnership of a lifetime. Six months of Jared avoiding so much as a goodnight kiss while he’d secretly been having it off with the best friend I thought I’d ever had.

I should have known. I should have realised the most likely reason for the unease that’s been haunting me lately.

The room suddenly feels too small and too full of their guilt and my humiliation.

The fairy lights I’d imagined stringing up seem ridiculous now, like everything else I’ve been planning.

Did I really get so caught up in my dreams of the café I’ve always wanted to open that I missed this happening right under my nose?

‘Right,’ I say, wishing my hoarse voice sounded just the slightest bit steadier. ‘This changes things rather substantially, doesn’t it?’

Vickie steps forward, her hands outstretched like she’s approaching a wounded animal. ‘Dolly, please, we can still make the café work. We can still be business partners. This doesn’t have to change anything with us.’

I let out a loud laugh, because the alternative is hysterical screaming, and I refuse to give them the satisfaction. ‘Doesn’t have to change anything? You’ve been shagging my now ex-boyfriend for six months while we planned our dream business together. That does change everything quite a lot.’

‘You’re overreacting,’ Jared says. ‘We’re all adults here.’

‘Adults, right. Because adults sleep with their girlfriend’s best friend while basically ignoring said girlfriend, but really looking for any given opportunity to shove a tongue down aforementioned best friend’s throat.

You both knew I was coming this morning, and you couldn’t even keep your hands off each other for one teeny-tiny minute or have the presence of mind to lock the door behind you. ’

‘I thought it was locked.’ Vickie’s cheeks are still a shade of burgundy and she won’t meet my eyes. ‘The lock’s old, you think it’s clicked but it hasn’t.’

‘Well, aren’t I lucky that it didn’t? Otherwise, who knows how much longer you’d have kept this up while I blundered on in blissful obliviousness…

’ I can feel the hysteria creeping in, and the talk of locks reminds me that my keys are still on the floor, and I bend to pick them up and the metal cuts into my palm where I’m gripping them too tightly.

Vickie tries again. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Dolly. I know that doesn’t fix it, but you’re my best friend. I didn’t want to hurt you.’

I give her such a look that she shrinks back like I’ve actually thrown something. The satisfaction is fleeting, because the main thing I feel is the hollow, sucking ache of loss. I turn to Jared, hoping he’ll have something to say to make this right.

‘I’m sorry too, Doll,’ he tries, but it lands with all the impact of a wet teabag.

They both stand there, shuffling their feet and avoiding eye contact, and I realise that it’s over.

Not just the dream café, but everything.

I can’t open this place with her. The Nostalgia Café will never be, and neither will the future I thought I had with Jared, or the friendship with someone I thought would be in my life until we were old, wrinkly, and still reminiscing about our happy memories of growing up in the nineties.

This is too much. It’s all too much, and I have to get out of here.

‘I hope you’ll be very happy together.’ I hear myself saying the words like an out-of-body experience. ‘You deserve that.’

I meant to say ‘each other’. You deserve each other in a bad way.

But it comes out sounding like I accidentally wished them the best, and I use their combined confusion as a cover to back out of the door I came through, what feels like hours ago now, even though it can only be ten minutes in reality.

Outside, the street looks exactly the same as it did earlier, but everything has changed.

The estate agent’s sign mocks me now. The time and dreams I’ve funnelled into this, and the hope as well, with a friend who I thought was infinitely trustworthy, and a boyfriend who wasn’t perfect, but I convinced myself that we could work it out.

I stand there for a moment, breathing in car exhaust fumes and the faint smell of bleach from the tattoo parlour, trying to work out what happens next.

My phone buzzes with a text – probably Vickie, or Jared, or both of them trying to explain why this is all perfectly reasonable and doesn’t have to change anything.

I don’t look at it. Instead, I start walking, one foot in front of the other, with absolutely no idea where I’m going.