Chapter 23: Maisy and Imogen

On Sunday I cooked in my mother's kitchen for the first time in years.

The stove still worked.

The oven door stuck, the way it always had, and I knew to kick it low on the left.

By six the farmhouse smelled of roast chicken and onions, and I had opened every window to chase out the dust.

Maisy arrived first, in her green cardigan, carrying a pie.

"I made it myself," she said.

"You bought it."

"I bought it myself."

Her father came up the lane behind her at the wheel of the pack bus.

He parked it across my mother's flower bed, got out and took off his cap.

He shook my hand with both of his.

"Good to see you in that kitchen, Luna," he said.

Then he got back in the bus and drove away, because Maisy had told him it was a girls' dinner.

"He wanted to deliver the pie in person," Maisy said. "I stopped him."

Torben came at half past six with a bottle and flour on his sleeve.

He had tried to bake bread at the lodge and given up.

Imogen came last, on foot, from the packhouse, with her hands in her coat pockets.

She stopped at the foot of the porch steps.

"I can go," she said. "I know it's too soon. I only wanted to bring this."

It was a small tin of the lemon cookies I used to keep in the Luna's office.

She had always eaten the broken halves.

I looked at the tin.

I did not forgive her.

I had thought about it all week and couldn't make myself, not yet.

I thought she would rather I was honest.

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