The Waffle House on the Pier - Tilly Tennant Page 0,4
told a soul, thinking it would make her look strange and mad, and she hadn’t wanted the responsibility of that kind of gift or curse or whatever it was. Thankfully, nothing like that had happened in all the years since and Sadie had almost forgotten it had ever happened at all. Until now.
And then the truth crashed over her, the confirmation of the horrible, prescient thought that had only seconds before occurred to her, icy cold and breath-sapping. She watched, numb and stunned as the paramedics went into the waffle house.
Dropping her bag, Sadie broke into a run.
Chapter Two
From the vast windows of Henriette and Graham Schwartz’s conservatory, Sadie’s gaze wandered to the sea as it churned into little rolls of milky foam that crashed against the distant rocks of the bay. It was easy to take for granted how lucky Sadie and her parents were to live in a house that had such an incredible position on the cliffs with such glorious views. Sadie’s mother, Henriette, had said often enough that if it hadn’t been for the (grudging) help of her own parents, she and Sadie’s dad certainly wouldn’t have been able to afford such a spectacular house by themselves. Henriette – Henny, as her friends called her – had turned the conservatory into a casual dining space and, summer or winter, they ate most of their meals in there, the drama of the bay a backdrop most people could only dream of. Henriette didn’t allow televisions or phones at the dinner table, but then, they hardly needed those kinds of distractions when the beauty of the Dorset coastline was distraction enough for anyone.
The sun was hidden today, struggling to break through low cloud, though it was still warm. Summer was coming into its height and the busiest time of the tourist season was upon Sea Salt Bay. The full Schwartz family, including Sadie’s sister, Lucy – who had only come over briefly for their grandfather’s funeral and was due to fly back to New York where she now lived – her brother Ewan, his wife Kat, and their children Freya and Freddie sat around a rare shared lunch. Someone was usually missing – there were extracurricular activities, hobbies, regular meetings, volunteer posts and, of course, as both Henny and Graham and Ewan and his wife Kat ran their own businesses, work rarely stopped. None of them kept the more forgiving office hours that other people did.
That was just another reason that Sadie had decided to train for a job where she could at least get some time off, even if it she might often have to do extra work during it. Ewan and Kat ran a diving school, and would go out with a client whenever it was required of them, no matter what day of the week it was, because business was business and they couldn’t afford to turn it away. One of them needed to be there in case they got a booking, and they got plenty. Henny and Graham had to run trips every day during the summer months, especially on Saturdays and Sundays because most people who visited Sea Salt Bay came for the weekend. Today, they’d decided the sea was too rough to go out, and Ewan had come to the same conclusion – if it was too rough to sail on, then it was most certainly too rough to dive beneath. So they were in the fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on how you viewed it) position of having a rare Sunday to get together. Only one member of the family was absent: Sadie’s beloved Gampy, Kenneth.
It had been a month since the day Sadie had seen the ambulance on the pier and her grandfather’s absence was still a gaping hole in the heart of the family, threatening to stop its beating, just as his had done that day. Her thoughts were carried back now like flotsam on the tide, and she recalled running blindly down the pier, the paramedics trying to stop her from gaining access, April’s cries for Kenneth that he couldn’t hear. She had finally forced her way in and caught just a glimpse of him as the ambulance crew fought to save his life, then wished she hadn’t seen it after all. When she thought of her grandfather now, it was hard to separate that vision from the happier memories of the man she’d grown up with. They felt forever tainted.