The Waffle House on the Pier - Tilly Tennant Page 0,7

town. Now he was with someone else. For the last three years someone else had had the perfect ten, and that girl wasn’t about to let go of him. Sadie wouldn’t have blamed her either. If she’d had him still, knowing what she knew now, she wouldn’t be letting him go either.

However she looked at it though, that door had closed and that life was out of her reach. Though she often saw him around town and they’d always exchange a laugh and a joke for old times’ sake, she’d never tell him how she sometimes wondered what might have happened had she never given him up, or that sometimes she fantasised that they’d stayed together and now lived in a little cottage on the cliffs, perfectly comfortable and madly in love. She often thought that the woman he’d settled with was completely wrong for him too and occasionally she daydreamt about telling him so. But to say these things would be unfair to them both, and she couldn’t, no matter how she might like to.

‘There’s no point in going on about that now, is there, April?’ Kat said, giving Sadie a sympathetic smile. ‘You know what they say: no point in reliving past glories.’

‘Who says that?’ Ewan asked. ‘I’ve never heard anyone say that.’

‘I don’t know,’ Kat fired back. ‘I’ve heard it so someone does. I’m not exactly going to keep a written record, am I?’

Ewan grinned and Kat’s look of irritation instantly melted.

‘I’m not going on about it,’ April said with a slight look of indignation. ‘I’m saying it as I see it. Everybody in town knows they were meant to be and I still say Sadie was crazy to let him go.’

Henny came back in from the kitchen and retook her seat at the table. ‘In the end it’s Sadie’s business. And I for one am glad she’s being choosy,’ she added, spooning redcurrant jelly onto the side of her plate to go with the lamb Graham had just served up. ‘There’s no reason for her to rush into anything. You don’t settle for second best.’

‘Nobody’s saying she should,’ Ewan said. ‘Nobody else around this table has done that.’

‘Exactly,’ Henny said. ‘When you marry, you marry for love.’

Sadie spluttered, choking on her water. ‘Nobody said anything about getting married!’

‘Apparently everyone is trying to marry you off regardless,’ Lucy said.

‘Alright then,’ Henny said with a slight frown. ‘What I mean to say is that nobody should settle down for anything less. Move in together, cohabit… whatever couples do these days.’

‘Mum,’ Ewan began with a lazy grin, ‘you make it sound like you were born when Victoria was on the throne.’ He slopped a mound of mashed potatoes onto his plate. ‘I’m sure people lived together when you and Dad were young.’

‘Shacked up, we used to call it,’ Graham said. ‘I wouldn’t have minded that but your mum wouldn’t have had it – too posh. Everything had to be proper.’

‘Oh boy, do I remember that,’ April said. She looked at Henny. ‘I recall the first time Graham brought you home – we thought you’d come direct from Buckingham Palace.’

Henny rolled her eyes. ‘For the last time, we were not posh. We were just…’

‘Loaded?’ Ewan offered.

‘Insanely privileged?’ Lucy said.

‘Descended from actual royalty?’ Sadie cut in.

‘Terribly distantly,’ her mother said, waving the comment away, though if anyone cared to look closely enough they’d see a secret, pleased pride in her expression as she turned her attention to cutting a slice of meat on her plate. Her family was probably as closely linked to royalty as the rest of the world were to Adam and Eve, but Sadie’s rather aloof and tedious maternal grandparents loved to tell everyone about the connection anyway.

Sadie was bored of hearing the story. Although the same blood ran in her veins, it didn’t really mean anything to her. She often felt that the fact they kept telling everyone was just a bit needy. Those grandparents, living on a remote estate in Scotland with their butler and cook and groundskeeper, couldn’t have been more different from the grandparents who lived here in Sea Salt Bay, running the little waffle house with a smile and a kind word for everyone who crossed their paths. They couldn’t have been more different from Sadie’s mother, Henny, either. It was hard to know whether she had always been that way or if she’d changed after she’d met Sadie’s dad and because of him. But somehow, her turning into a normal human being