Chapter 4 #2
She should’ve sensed the change coming. Not doing so saw her blindsided when a few weeks ago Grant closed the doors at The Cocoa Cupboard in Camden for the final time.
She turned the chocolates out of their moulds.
They were perfect. She could still do it and do it well.
When Grant closed the business he’d offloaded equipment, including the moulds she’d just used, bags of couverture chocolate and all the packaging materials he had left.
It was as if all of it was a form of consolation prize.
She packaged up another couple of boxes for her parents to add to those she’d already set aside.
She was taking them to Switzerland with her, finally visiting for Christmas again after all these years.
When The Cocoa Cupboard had closed, she’d thought about the path that had led her there in the first place.
Her passion for chocolate had started at her part-time job at a chocolate shop in Winterbruck, surrounded by all those wonderful creations and the intoxicating smells.
Thinking about the shop had her yearning for the little town in Switzerland that she’d never really considered home, but now desperately wanted to see.
And so, she’d called her mum and told her she was coming home for Christmas.
Her happy bubble of carefully packing up more chocolates between specially coated paper before they went into the gorgeous little pink boxes disappeared when she heard the buzzer to her flat.
A sense of dread ran through her. Grant.
He’d said he’d stop by today to pick up the last of his things.
He’d taken most of them already and every time he came back for more the pain at what had happened returned tenfold.
The crazy thing was, she should feel the most pain at her relationship breakdown, surely.
Except she didn’t. For her, it was the loss of The Cocoa Cupboard. And she sensed it was the same for him.
She’d already bagged up the summer clothes he’d totally forgotten about, given they’d been shoved in vacuum bags under the bed. They were waiting by the door as soon as she answered it when he knocked.
‘Meg.’ He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, even though she had the bags ready to go.
‘I’m a bit busy,’ she said.
‘I can tell.’ He smelt the air. ‘Can’t stop yourself?’
‘I’m making chocolates for my parents.’
He harrumphed. He would. Her dad had never liked Grant and the feeling was mutual.
Meg had taken Grant over to Switzerland shortly after they started dating.
It was only a short three-day break given their commitments at The Cocoa Cupboard and she’d thought it would all go well, that Grant would blend in, even though he didn’t like big gatherings, let alone those of the family variety – he kept his own at a distance, so she should’ve known it wouldn’t go that great with hers.
She could tell from the moment Grant had a beer in his hand at the chalet and started talking about his business that her dad wasn’t enamoured.
Meg had noticed before that Grant liked to talk about himself, but she’d put it down to pride, and he should be proud to have got a business off the ground and kept it going.
The problem was Grant wasn’t all that good at listening to other people talk unless it was Meg, and it was obvious he was bored when conversation at the chalet that weekend changed to other topics, and he didn’t try to interact.
Grant wasn’t a terrible person; he just wasn’t the sort of person Earl and Astrid were used to.
At the airport in Bern, waiting for their flight back to London, Grant had blurted out to Meg, ‘Your dad doesn’t like me.
’ He’d grunted then. ‘But that’s fine. I don’t like him much either.
’ He’d actually said those words to Meg’s face, but it turned out it was one of the few honest things he’d said from the day they met.
The truths had come out slowly ever since he announced he was closing down The Cocoa Cupboard.
The first truth was that to start The Cocoa Cupboard in Camden he’d not got a full bank loan – he’d borrowed a substantial chunk of money from his brother and never paid him back.
That was probably why he didn’t have much to do with family rather than not having anything in common with them like he claimed.
And the real reason he’d sold his property in Hertfordshire and moved in with her was to pay a gambling debt, not because he wanted to plough funds into the second chocolaterie.
Grant had a gambling addiction that she’d somehow never picked up on.
It was the reason he’d ended up losing the second business in Buckinghamshire, and when she’d asked him how he’d managed to even get the finance for it he told her about a loan shark he’d borrowed from, the loan shark who wanted payment, and the only way to do that was to close down The Cocoa Cupboard in Camden.
This sorry excuse for a man standing here now in her flat, the last of his bags at his feet, had ruined everything.
‘I’m going up to York to stay with—’
She put a hand up. ‘I don’t need to know.’
‘There’s no need to be like that.’ He raked a hand through hair that needed a damn good comb. He looked like he was living rough, but she knew that wasn’t the case because he’d been sleeping on a friend’s sofa since the day he closed the business and put her and everyone else out of a job.
‘You lied to me. Those times you said you were in Buckinghamshire at the other premises, you were playing cards and losing your money.’ And she’d lent him plenty she knew she would never get back. ‘You stole from me.’
‘Oh, come on, it was just a bit of cash.’
‘Cash that wasn’t yours to take.’ She could barely look at him.
‘I got you started in the industry.’ Affronted he added, ‘You should be thanking me, not judging me.’