Love at the Little Wedding Shop by the Sea - Jane Linfoot
Chapter 1
Friday, Valentine’s Day.
The Harbourside, St Aidan, Cornwall.
Early birds and aftershocks.
It’s a boy!
There are certain significant moments in life you know you’re going to relive again and again. As those three small words bounce off my phone screen and resonate around inside my skull, I’m on the edge of a huge crowd of people with one of my oldest friends, Poppy, at my elbow, but I couldn’t feel any more alone. It’s the sting of the salty wind on my cheeks that’s being etched on my memory, the blackness of the water lapping against the quay, the dark lines of boat masts etched against the sky. The curve of lights out around the bay edge.
Even when you know a metaphorical tidal wave is coming your way, it’s still hard to predict how it will demolish you. I expected this would blow my heart apart, but it actually hits way lower. It’s nothing like the thousand tiny glass shards in my chest I was braced for, more a boot in my bowel.
All the same, I’d still rather know than not.
When your closest friend and business partner accidentally hooks up with your fiancé – well, my fiancé – then they decide that’s how it should have been all along. And then seal the deal with a baby.
This baby.
Let’s just say, this text from Lucy, our maternity-cover office assistant, is the latest in a year of seismic shocks.
In case you hadn’t already guessed, this is all playing out in tiny St Aidan on the furthest edge of Cornwall where the land meets the sea. Where the higgledy-piggledy cottages that start at the edge of the cobbles stack up the hillside in shadowy lines behind me. It’s somehow ironic that we’re out on this freezing February night waiting for a firework display to begin; that this tiny baby who’s turned my life upside down for the last few months has now claimed the Brides by the Sea Valentine’s Day celebrations as his own too.
Poppy is next to me, pulling her Barbour jacket closed against the slice of the wind, stamping her feet as we wait. ‘Everything okay, Milla? You’re lucky to find a signal down here.’
I’m watching the strings of lights in the distance along the prom being lashed by a gale. Pushing my phone back into my pocket, I say, ‘Phoebe’s had a boy.’
‘The baby’s here already?’ Poppy’s eyebrows shoot upwards in horror the same way they have ever since we played together as kids growing up in Rose Hill village, a few miles inland from here. ‘But first babies never arrive on time! The last two weeks waiting like a beached whale are what prepares you for everything ahead.’ She had her son Gabe two years ago, so she’s an expert. She’s also enjoying a rare night out on her own, but seeing as she’s Brides by the Sea’s cake baker, this counts as work rather than pleasure.
‘Phoebe won’t put up with lateness, especially not from a baby.’ Realistically she was never going to let herself get to the size of an elephant. Even with something as unpredictable as childbirth, she’s the kind of person who plans scrupulously and always comes up smelling of roses. And she’s good at it too. Like popping her baby out on Valentine’s Day, exactly a year to the day after she and my ex, Ben, got together – it takes a special kind of very dedicated control-freak to pull that off.
‘Christmas effing crackers, that wasn’t in the plan was it?’
I’m shaking my head at Poppy. ‘I haven’t even turned the bed down at my Airbnb yet.’ Okay, admittedly I’ve been at the wedding shop catching up with everyone since I arrived earlier this afternoon. But somehow, I’d counted on having more time to settle in. Get myself ready. Put my hard hat on.
It’s odd to think that this time last year I still had a fiancé and the flat we shared. Then, somewhere around midnight, my whole life plummeted to oblivion – in a Titanic-hits-the-iceberg kind of way. I’ll save the goriest details for later. But, just like the iceberg, I did not see this one coming. I’d been Phoebe’s head bridesmaid when she’d got married six years earlier and our business had sprung from us organising her wedding, so it was natural that I’d support her when her husband Harry walked out. And when she was suddenly left without a partner for the black-tie Valentine’s ball we’d paid a fortune for her to go to, I