Ruined By My Brother's Best Friend novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Share

The lid was stiff.

I had to get my nails under it, and Kirsty winced at what I was doing to her work.

There were no biscuits inside.

There were bundles of notes, old ones, held together with the red elastic bands the postman drops.

On top was an envelope in Dad's handwriting.

"For Hollie's shop. Not for bills. C, I mean it."

I couldn't read it out loud.

Freddie read it over my shoulder and had to turn away.

"He put a bit in every Friday," Mum said. "From the age of fourteen you were telling him you'd have your own shop one day. He started the week you said it."

"Mum," I said. "There was a debt. For six years. You paid the interest out of the till."

"I know."

"And you never touched this."

"It said not for bills." She took her glasses off. "I'd have sold the ovens first."

Lev counted it on the counter with Freddie checking.

Nine thousand, four hundred and twenty pounds.

It wasn't sixty.

But it was Dad's, and it was on the counter, and nobody in that shop was going to let it be the only money there.

"Right," Kirsty said, and got her phone out.

The next morning there was a queue outside Haddow's at seven, and it wasn't for custard tarts.

Kirsty had put it on every account she had.

"Own a bit of Ropery Parade. A hundred quid a share. Every share gets a free custard tart every Friday, forever."

They came with envelopes and cash and phones held up to Lev's card reader.

The woman who'd put fifty in the tip jar bought three shares.

The old men in flat caps came in a group and argued about who'd pay for whom.

The girls from Goldsmiths clubbed together for one between six of them and asked whether forever meant one tart or six.

"Six," I said.

The little girl from the night of the window came with her mum and a jam jar of coins.

It had seventeen pounds forty in it.

Freddie counted it twice on the counter, very seriously, and wrote her a receipt for a whole share.

He paid the rest himself when he thought I wasn't looking.

The surveyor sent a cheque from Kent with no note.

Lev tore it up.

Then he sat on the bakery step for ten minutes, and came back in, and taped it back together, and banked it.

"He owes it," he said. "Not to me. To the street."

It took eight days.

On Friday the twenty-fifth of September, at ten in the morning, Ropery Parade belonged to Ropery Parade.

Mum signed first.

Then Kirsty's nan, then the key-cutter, who'd never signed anything that big in his life and pressed so hard he went through the paper.

Then me.

That night the festoon lights went back up outside.

On the pavement. On our pavement.

The chip shop fried under its own sign.

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