Chapter 27
BONNIE
How lovely it was to have everyone here in her garden on this beautiful day, chatting and drinking Pimm’s.
Scout was at her side, although not for long.
She hoped with enough work and training the dog would settle down – Theo had assured her that would be the case.
‘Midas gnawed all my chair legs,’ he’d revealed, painting Midas as no saint when he first came home with him.
‘He peed everywhere too,’ he’d added. So far Scout had done both of the things Theo had warned her about but the dog was great company, always happy to see her, and Bonnie loved her to bits.
Bonnie had never regretted telling the developer who had been sniffing around the bookshop that she wouldn’t be selling to him. Howard would’ve been proud of her.
One wintry day last December, Margot and Faye had gone with her out on a boat to scatter Howard’s ashes.
The cove had been in sight as the girls stood next to her and she finally said goodbye to her husband.
When they’d got back to the cottage, Faye had insisted she give the syrup sponge a go and, while she was making it, Margot wanted to repay the favour and start quizzing Bonnie as if she was in an interview to return to nursing.
That was when Bonnie had made a surprising admission.
‘Going into the bookshop again was something I never thought I would do,’ she’d told them that day.
‘I thought it would be too painful. That’s why I closed it, why I never wanted to see it again.
But going inside with you both that night and being in the place Howard adored, as well as me finding a surprising love of audiobooks, I felt closer to him than I had since the day I lost him. ’
Her admission had been laced with a lot of emotion but ever since she scattered the ashes she’d got braver.
She’d started to go down the hill to Driftwick Bay Books each day and eventually she even started working alongside Iris, who was very organised and very bossy.
Bonnie had settled into a pattern of going in for a few hours each day.
She had Scout to consider now, but it was enough to help Iris and keep things going.
And it had led her to a decision. She was going to keep working there for now, and if and when the time came to sell Driftwick Bay Books she suspected she’d have Howard’s blessing if she sold it on to someone who would keep it as it was, as a bookshop in the heart of the bay.
‘How was work, Bonnie?’ Margot asked as she tried to get Scout to sit.
If her shifts permitted, Margot was one of her dog-sitters when Bonnie was working at the bookshop.
Faye and Theo helped out when they could, and Bonnie also had a professional dog-sitter on hand if nobody could be with Scout, who wasn’t quite ready to take with her to Driftwick Bay Books.
She’d need to be considerably older for that, Bonnie suspected.
‘Busy today now we’ve got more tourists flocking,’ she told them. She’d given Iris the okay to take on an assistant over the summer if it got too much between the pair of them, but for now Bonnie would see how it went.
She left her friends sitting in the garden talking about Margot’s exotic travels while she went inside for more Pimm’s.
On her way back from the kitchen she paused at the painting of the couple in front of the ice-cream van, the couple so in love with their future stretched out in front of them.
She thought of Howard and imagined him right here with them.
After all, when you lost someone, they were never really gone, were they? They were always by your side.
The bookshelves in the cottage were still filled with Howard’s books.
Bonnie wasn’t sure she would ever want to empty them.
But what she had done was got rid of those books about grief – they weren’t for her, but she’d found what was.
These days she was having fun going through Howard’s books and when she came across the titles he’d rambled on about the most, she’d order them as an audiobook.
Sometimes she’d groan out loud that the book wasn’t anything like Howard had said.
She’d disagree with him as if he was right there with her.
She had quite the collection of titles on her iPad now, plus she was on to her second pair of headphones – the nice large kind that sat over her head and didn’t come with the risk of falling out all the time – and what she loved was how she could multitask when she was listening to a story.
She was a long way off doing that on a dog walk though.
Right now, Scout needed her full attention.
It was all part of the training, and Bonnie was enjoying it.
She had purpose again. She had Scout to love, and gone were the days she hid away from the rest of the world.
When Scout came to her side and sat for once, she patted her head. ‘Howard would’ve loved you,’ she whispered to her furry friend.
She went outside again to pour more Pimm’s for her guests and join in the conversation about book club.
Even though she wasn’t a full-fledged member she went every now and then.
The Midnight Book Club still happened every week.
The membership had grown, and no matter whether Faye had work the next day or not, she always ran it.
Because people needed it, not just for the books, but for each other.
After all, it had worked for Howard. And it had worked for her.
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