Free 11 The Teashop on the Corner by Milly Johnson Page A

And she didn’t know the answer. Half of her would never have said yes to agreeing to go to the pictures with
him that frosty November night when she had slipped on a patch of ice in the town centre and he’d caught her. Half of her would have given him free rein to all the parts of her heart and her
mind to which she had denied him entry.
    Molly shook her head as if trying to purge it of the vision of her second ex-husband. There was no point in philosophising about him. She would never see him again. He could even be dead and
buried. He smoked, he drank rough spirits, though he was more likely to have been murdered by some husband whose wife he had stolen or by a gambling-house owner to whom he owed money than to die
peacefully alone in a bed.
    Molly carried on with the business of searching for the figurine, but she didn’t find it.

Chapter 14
    Will went out at nine a.m. exactly to catch the train for a meeting with his accountant in Huddersfield, who sighed and shook his head a lot at him, and then he went to pick up
his new vehicle – a battered Nissan white van which his regular car mechanic had bought at an auction and kindly offered him first refusal on after hearing about his troubles. Will was
touched by his thoughtfulness and said yes on the spot. Cosmetically, it looked shot at, but it was still a snip at eight hundred pounds. A very short time ago, eight hundred pounds would have just
about covered the cost of two wheels on his Jaguar, and he wouldn’t have thought twice about the expense. Ironically, his first ever car had been an old Nissan and now he had gone full loop
back to the beginning. Still, it would be a useful runaround with a sound engine and it would get him to where he wanted to go without haemorrhaging petrol and he would just have to get used to
travelling from A to B without turning heads for the foreseeable future.
    By the time he arrived back home, he opened the front door to find that Nicole had returned and gone through the house like a locust. It was stripped. He didn’t mind that she had taken the
dining table and ten upholstered chairs or the swanky Harrods dinner service that had been a wedding present to them
both –
or even the display cabinet that housed the swanky dinner
service. He didn’t even mind that the huge leather sofas were gone, or the baby grand piano that she had insisted she wanted for Christmas but couldn’t even bang out Chopsticks on it.
He even laughed that she had taken the Christmas tree from the garage – and the box of baubles and tinsel. Jesus – she must have had a team of joiners primed to disassemble their ornate
four-poster and the huge French armoire wardrobes and transport them to waiting delivery vans.
    She did have the decency to leave him the double bed in the spare room – and the bedding on it. One bath towel, one cup, one plate, one knife, one fork and one spoon. She also left the
kettle and all the food in the cupboards and the built-in fridge, dishwasher and washing machine. But what he couldn’t – and wouldn’t – stomach was the sight of
his
open safe in their bedroom. When he checked it, it had been wiped clean of the Tag Heuer watch she bought him for Christmas – not surprisingly – but also of the small shell box in which
he kept his mother’s wedding and engagement rings, his dad’s wedding band and his sister’s twenty-first emerald ring, which their parents had bought her two months before she died
of leukaemia.
    Will hadn’t been really angry for a long time. He’d been roused to a few expletives when Yorkshire Stone Homes said they were making an immediate bank transfer which would save his
company, only to find that they’d reneged on the promise and the money never appeared in his account, driving the last nail into his financial coffin; but the anger bubbling through his blood
now took fury to another level. He picked up the keys of his new old van and flounced out of the near-naked house,