LITMIR.BIZ

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looked up at Charity, green eyes holding hers. ‘Now that sounds like my type of coffee. I’ll have one of those. Darling?’ He looked at his wife.

      She shrugged. ‘I suppose that will have to do. And maybe one of those things too,’ she said, flicking her hand towards a tray of shortbread.

      ‘Make that two,’ Dan said.

      As Hope and Charity prepared the order, the hubbub returned to the café and Charity watched the couple out of the corner of her eye. They were laughing about something, Dan leaning close to Lana’s ear as he whispered to her. They looked completely in love.

      She’d felt like that about someone once.

      Hope handed Charity a tray with the coffees on, interrupting her thoughts. ‘You take them,’ she said under her breath. ‘I’ll only pour the coffee over that bimbo’s head for being so disdainful about my shortbread.’

      ‘I don’t think she’s a bimbo. She managed to attract a millionaire, after all.’

      ‘That doesn’t take brains.’

      Charity smiled as she walked towards the couple with their order. Her sister’s view of the world was rather black and white.

      ‘Busby’s famous coffee times two,’ Charity said, placing the coffees down on the table. ‘And my sister’s fantastic shortbread,’ she added, placing their plates in front of them.

      ‘That’s the real reason we came. My staff tell me the cakes here are to die for,’ Dan said. He took a bite of his shortbread and raised an eyebrow. ‘Looks like they were right. You’re very talented,’ he said to Charity.

      ‘Oh, I can’t take the credit. My sister Hope is the cake connoisseur.’

      Dan peered towards Hope, shooting her a huge smile that lit up his handsome face. ‘Divine, thank you!’

      Hope’s face flushed. Charity smiled. She rarely saw her sister blush.

      ‘Do you cater for events?’ Dan asked Charity.

      ‘No, but maybe we should.’

      ‘Well, just shout if you need any financial advice.’

      He held her gaze and she felt herself blushing too.

      ‘I will,’ she said, walking back to the counter and mouthing the word ‘divine’ to her sister.

      Half an hour later, as the last customers trickled out of the café, including the Norths who left an almighty tip, Charity and Hope worked together quickly and quietly, putting dishes away, clearing tables, wrapping leftovers up to take home. They’d been doing this for three months now and it was beginning to work like clockwork. They quickly closed up then started the short walk home. Their house was away from the hustle and bustle of the town, down a lane that sloped away from the promenade and ran through long grass by the sea. There were just three pebbledash houses there, their backs to the sea, wild gardens reaching out to the pebbles beyond. Though the houses had been battered by the salt and the grit, white exteriors discoloured and damaged, they looked charming in the right light, the long green grass and stretch of blue sea in the distance almost giving a picture postcard look.

      But right now, under the fierce glare of the setting sun, they looked old and tired, like the town itself.

      Hope let them both in and they walked down the small hallway into the messy living room with its red patterned carpets and tatty old chairs, dusty books higgledy-piggledy in a tall oak bookshelf, its shelves bending under the weight.

      The kitchen looked just the same as it had when Charity had grown up there with its beige cupboards and dusty glass cabinet filled with old china cups. Even the thick oak table had her name still etched on its surface. Maybe Hope had done that on purpose, keeping it the same after their parents passed away? She’d never left home and had helped her father care for her mother when she got cancer, then her father when he had a heart attack not long after, the heartache from losing his daughter and his wife finally taking its toll.

      She walked to the fridge, shaking the memories away, and reached in for a courgette and some peppers, throwing them to Hope. Hope caught them with a smile, finding an ancient chopping board and knife. Preparing meals had been a big part of their household as kids. One of Charity’s early memories was from when she was five, her podgy hands kneading some bread dough on a speckled old wooden board as her dad stood over her, his bushy white eyebrows sprinkled with flour, his livered cheeks red from the wine he’d been drinking. Nearby, Hope would sit with their mother at the dinner table peeling carrots, the same solemn look she still held now on her face, her mind no doubt conjuring words to describe the orange of the carrot and the spiral shape its skin made when peeled for a poem she was writing.

      And then there was Faith, who usually stood at the sink, singing softly to herself as she made a fruit salad, the orange glow of the setting sun highlighting the outline of her long blonde hair, her neck arched gracefully as she peered out of the window towards the school fields behind the cottage, always searching for something beyond what lay within that family kitchen. Probably one of those submerged forests she’d become so obsessed with.

      Charity glanced now at the old map of the world they still had pinned to the corkboard, illustrated trees marking the location of all the submerged forests Faith wanted to visit. Her eyes settled on the tree Niall had drawn. She wondered where he was now.

      Hope, Faith and Charity had first met Niall as a grubby-faced boy on the beach outside their house when Charity was just nine. He’d told them his parents were never around and he didn’t even go to school; that he could come and go as he pleased. The sisters were in awe. When he taught them to dive, they spent summer days searching for the submerged forest he was so sure existed off the coast of Busby. Faith was the best diver. She’d scoot ahead with Niall, her long legs sweeping gracefully through the water. When Hope wrote a play about the submerged forest, Faith insisted on being the goddess of the sea, Charity and Hope demoted to mere nymph status. But that’s what she was, a sea goddess, completely at home in the ocean.

      In contrast, Niall powered through the water. As he got older, he got stronger from working at the docks. Charity couldn’t help noticing how muscular he was becoming. When Charity was fifteen and he was seventeen, Hope had got into trouble one day when they were swimming. Niall had dived into the sea and saved her, and something had changed in Charity’s attitude towards him. Instead of being the kid she and her sisters played with, he became a romantic figure, a man strong enough to save her sister.

      She’d sought him out at the docks to thank him the next day, and he suggested they meet up after he finished work. She’d pretended to be disgusted at the idea. But of course, she went. They’d both walked to a beach just outside Busby-on-Sea and Niall introduced her to her first taste of oysters – illegally sourced, as it turned out. They talked until it grew dark, finally sharing their first kiss. When Faith met her at the front door coming in later than her curfew, she’d expected a telling off from her oldest sister. But Faith had just smiled. ‘Don’t go breaking his heart,’ she’d said. ‘I like Niall.’

      Hope hadn’t been so happy, she just glared at Charity then shook her head.

      Faith had always been so kind, so understanding. God, she missed her so much.

      That night, Charity pulled the small wooden box she kept full of Faith’s keepsakes from beneath her bed. It was the size of a shoebox, intricate flowers etched around its sides. She opened it and gently lifted out the photos she kept that told the story of Faith’s short life. She looked at each one, trying to control her emotions. One was of the three sisters standing with their parents outside the café the day her mum opened it twenty years ago. Charity was just six, her dark hair frizzy like her mum’s, her knees chubby; an eight-year-old Hope stood awkwardly beside her, just a wisp of a thing with red hair down to her elbows. And then Faith, nine and already so beautiful, smiling directly into the camera, the blonde hair she’d inherited from their grandma shining under the glare of the morning sun like it might evaporate any minute. There were more photos too, one of Faith picking up a swimming

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