Chapter One
Sally Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Tearing apart a life was so much easier than building one up. Well, other than the vast amount of rubbish it created. Sally sighed. She should probably have hired a skip.
The box of napkins was the first thing she found. Red and white checked, with little Eiffel Towers in the corners and "Café Parisienne" printed across each one in a font that had seemed charming three months ago and now just looked slightly tacky.
She remembered ordering them. Two hundred napkins, rush delivery, because she'd decided at half past midnight that the café needed a French bistro theme and by morning she'd already designed new menus and was looking into accordion music for the weekends.
She'd even found a supplier for proper French butter, the expensive kind that came wrapped in gold foil.
The theme had lasted two weeks. The napkins had lasted considerably longer.
Sally dropped them into a bin bag and kept going.
The espresso machine sat in the corner like an accusation.
She'd meant to fix it. She really had. But fixing things required tools and patience and probably YouTube tutorials, and by the time she'd gotten around to researching it, she'd already found something else to worry about.
A seasonal menu, maybe. Or the idea for outdoor seating that never quite materialized.
Or the loyalty card scheme she'd sketched on the back of a receipt and then promptly lost.
A rattle at the front door made her jump.
A face pressed against the glass. A woman, middle-aged, squinting past the CLOSED sign.
She pointed at the door handle. Sally ducked behind the counter, then realized that was ridiculous, then stood up and mimed an apology through the window.
Sorry. Closed. Gone. The woman looked personally offended, as though Sally had promised her coffee and then snatched it away at the last moment.
She rattled the door once more for good measure before finally wandering off.
Sally exhaled and slumped against the counter.
This was always the worst part. Not the starting, which was brilliant, all possibility and excitement and the giddy certainty that this time would be different.
Not even the middle, when the cracks started showing and she could still convince herself they were character rather than structural damage.
No. The worst part was the cleanup. The bin bags and the empty shelves.
The door rattled again. But this time, Sally saw who it was and opened it.
"Don't tell me you've actually started packing up," Robin said, appearing with two bottles of wine and no apparent intention of helping. "I thought we'd have at least another hour of you staring dramatically at things before any actual work got done."
"I found the napkins," Sally said.
Robin perched on a stool at the counter. "The French ones?"
"The French ones."
"Tragic." Robin pulled a corkscrew from her bag.
She always had a corkscrew. It was one of the many reasons they'd been friends since school.
"Though I did tell you at the time that putting tiny Eiffel Towers on everything wasn't going to make the coffee taste any better. And isn’t French coffee notoriously bad anyway? "
"It was a vision," Sally said, with as much dignity as she could muster while holding a bin bag full of failures. "An aesthetic experience."
"It was a theme that lasted less time than most of my highlights."
"Your highlights are professionally done. This was handcrafted authenticity."
Robin poured wine into two mismatched mugs, because of course all the proper glasses were already packed. "Speaking of handcrafted disasters, wasn't there also a tanning salon?"
Sally took her mug and drank deeply. "We don't talk about the tanning salon."
"And the mobile pet grooming thing."
"That was a solid concept."
"You're allergic to dogs, Sally."
"Only some dogs." She took another sip. "And I took antihistamines."
Robin raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
She didn't need to. They both knew the pattern by now.
Sally would find something that excited her, throw herself into it with the kind of enthusiasm that could light up a room, and then quietly walk away when the shine wore off.
Usually somewhere around the point where spreadsheets got involved.
The café hadn't failed, exactly. That was the frustrating thing.
Business had been decent, even good some weeks.
She'd built up regulars, learned their orders, started recognizing the particular rhythm of the morning rush.
But decent business meant early mornings and stocklists and having to think about things like supplier contracts and health inspections and whether the milk delivery was coming on Tuesday or Wednesday.
It meant the grind. And Sally had never been very good at the grind.
"The thing is," she said, scrubbing at a spot on the counter that had probably been there since before she'd taken over, "I don't think I'm built for the boring bits.
Some people are. Some people love spreadsheets and schedules and knowing exactly what's going to happen next. I'm just not one of them."
"Some people also stick with things past the initial fun part."
"Harsh."
"True, though." Robin refilled both their mugs. "You know what your problem is?"
"My sparkling personality?"
"You're scared of the work part. The bit between starting something and being good at it. The bit where it stops being exciting and starts being, well, work." Robin tilted her head. "How much longer do you have on the lease?"
Sally shrugged. "A few months. I'll use it for storage while I figure out what's next." She dropped the scrubbing cloth. "Maybe I'll… teach music."
"You don’t actually play any instruments."
"I could start."
"Seems time consuming." Robin swirled her wine. "So. What actually is next? And don't say pottery again."
Sally shrugged again. "Something will come up. It always does."
Robin's expression softened slightly. "Dylan wants to finalize the table centerpieces this weekend. He's been looking at Pinterest boards for three hours a day, minimum. I'm fairly sure he dreams in floral arrangements now."
Sally seized the change of subject. "Has he landed on a color scheme yet?"
"Dusty rose and sage green. Or possibly champagne and eucalyptus. Or, as of this morning, something he's calling 'modern rustic botanical' which I think just means expensive."
"At least he's enthusiastic."
"He's insufferable." But Robin was smiling when she said it.
The wedding was still almost a year away but Robin had been gradually transforming into someone who actually cared about seating charts and save-the-dates, which Sally still found slightly alarming.
Robin had never cared about anything that involved calligraphy before.
"We’re going to have to discuss bridesmaid dresses at some point. "
Sally narrowed her eyes. She had suspicions about bridesmaid dresses.
"It’s no use looking at me like that. You’re not walking down the aisle in jeans and a hoodie."
"We’ll see."
"Hmm." Robin downed the rest of her wine and stood, brushing down her jeans.
"Right. I've got to get back. Early client tomorrow, highlights and a complicated balayage situation.
" She paused at the door, looking back at Sally surrounded by half-packed boxes and empty shelves.
"You know you could always help out at the salon. Just until you figure out what's next."
Sally's chest tightened. "I'm not really a hair person."
"You literally come in every month to change your color."
"As a customer. That's different."
"The offer stands." Robin pushed the door open, letting in a gust of evening air. "Try not to stay here moping all night, yeah?"
"I'm not moping. I'm productively dismantling."
"Sure you are." The bell jingled as she left.
Sally stood alone in the empty café.
The wine sat warm in her stomach. She should be used to this. She'd done it enough times. Walk away, start over, find the next thing. That was how it worked. That was how she worked.
She remembered closing the tanning salon.
That one had actually failed, properly failed, because it turned out that convincing people in Oakguild to pay for artificial sunshine was harder than she'd expected.
Also, as it turned out, fake tanning was quite bad for people.
But she'd felt fine about closing that. Relieved, even.
At least it had been a clear ending, a door that closed itself.
So why was this so different?
Maybe it wasn’t, she thought. Maybe she was. Maybe that was the point. Maybe she was thirty-two instead of twenty-five and maybe she was watching her best friend in the world get ready to get married and maybe… Maybe she was different. A little, at least.
She leaned on the counter and fished her phone out of her pocket, opening a job site, scrolling without really seeing.
Barista positions. Retail management. Something called a "brand ambassador" that seemed to mostly involve standing in shopping centers and smiling.
An admin role that required "excellent organizational skills" which was almost funny.
Her thumb hovered over each listing but she didn't click. Couldn't click.
Outside, the street was quiet. Most of the other shops had closed for the night. Sally could see her reflection in the darkened window, blonde hair streaked with the purple she'd added last week on a whim, face half-lit by her phone screen. She looked tired. When had that happened?
Thirty-two years old and she still didn't know what she wanted to do when she grew up.
Robin was getting married. Half their school friends had kids now, mortgages, careers with actual progression.
And Sally was still here, cleaning up another ending, telling herself that next time would be different.
The black bin bag glared at her accusingly. Fine. With a sigh, she picked it up and kept packing, because that was what you did when something ended, and surely sooner or later she'd figure out what came after, and the restless feeling in her chest would quiet down, and everything would make sense.
Any day now.
Well, that or she’d come up with another madcap plan to fill the space.
Maybe something with less snacking this time.
She could never look a carrot cake in the face again.
What about a travel agency? Did people still use those?
Or a co-working space, she could handle that, surely?
She started to hum as she filled the black bag.