after a year of being hidden away, plus a couple of new items she’d bought from Tilly’s Bits ’n’ Pieces, the shop Tilly had finally renamed because ‘The Candle Shop’ wasn’t an entirely accurate description anymore. Lucy had also carefully unwrapped the special angel before stretching onto tiptoes and putting her proudly on top of the tree. She’d bought it years ago at a Christmas market with her cousin Joanna, who’d bought one just the same to decorate her own tree. Lucy and Joanna had both been only children and, being the same age, they’d grown up practically as sisters right up until the day Joanna died. Lucy missed her all the more at Christmas time and, now, the angel could sit proudly at the top of the gorgeous Fraser fir and offer her some comfort as she remembered how lucky she’d been to have Joanna in her life, if only for a short while.
Lucy changed out of her jeans and ruby roll-neck jumper and pulled on a work T-shirt and accompanying dungarees. She didn’t always work weekends but with Tilly, Celeste and Jade planning a big mulled-wine night at the pub tomorrow, Lucy knew the more she got done now, the less guilty she’d feel about having a sleep-in the morning after if she needed it. One of the perks of running your own business was designing your own schedule to suit you. Some people assumed you did very little if they saw you swanning around during office hours or rejigging your work timetable so that you could have the odd day to yourself here and there. But with your own business, you put in so much more time and energy overall because it was down to you to make it work.
Down in the workshop it was time to make a start on the sign for the Little Waffle Shack. Lucy kept her workspace relatively tidy and well-stocked so there were plenty of materials to use when she got last-minute commissions. Cupboards at one side housed a variety of metals – carbon, steel, brass, copper, aluminium – and the overspill of copper and iron pipes was stacked neatly right in the corner behind a bracket to prevent them rolling out onto the floor and causing an accident. Smaller items were kept either in big buckets against a different wall or in the set of steel drawers.
From her selection she took out a length of wrought iron. She’d use this for the main frame, inside which the lettering would be welded onto either the top, the base or the decorative scrolls she’d have surrounding the words. Sometimes she figured it out as she went along.
A few of the signs she’d worked on previously were really fancy; Daniel was right to notice them and she loved it when a client made the piece so personal it took her a long time to get it right. Their reaction was always worth it. But with limited time and a more basic design, Lucy was confident she’d come up with something that impressed as well as did the job. She measured out the length of wrought iron she’d need, put on her mask to protect herself from flying sparks and cut the surplus with the angle grinder. She heated the metal in the forge until red-hot and in the appropriate places, using the anvil and specially designed holes, she bent it round until the ends met. It took some effort to get the oval shape she wanted, returning the iron to the fire when she needed to, and when at last she was happy with the shape, she set it to cool on the rack. This job she loved was a therapy she needed. The manual labour helped her work out her frustrations with Julian; the heat, the noise, the banging things into the shape they needed to be – it was all a way of dealing with the world around her and its complications.
And now, with Daniel in mind, she hummed away to the Christmas carols playing on the radio station and, at the desk, she stencilled the first of the letters that she’d transfer to the metal ready for cutting out.
*
On Monday morning Daniel was up well before the sun. He’d been desperate to go for a run and hadn’t for days given how flat out he’d been, but today he had headed down to the cove itself, and despite a group of walkers getting in his way near the big village