The Happy Home for Ladies: A heartwarming,uplifting novel about friendship and love. Michele Gorman

to be working on a Saturday. We’re the weekday staff. We’ve got night and weekend cover and she promised me no more overtime. She had the nerve to get snappish just because I pressed her on it.

      I pulled into the drive behind her car.

      ‘You didn’t answer your phone,’ my best friend called down the corridor as soon as she saw me come through the side door where the office is. ‘How’s your mum?’

      So she wasn’t going to make it easy for me to bollock her about the overtime.

      ‘As frightful as usual,’ I said, throwing myself down on the extra chair in front of her desk. June’s mind might be ultra-organised, but her office isn’t. There are binders stuffed full of receipts and records teetering all over the top of the cabinets, and her desk looks like she’s been shredding evidence. ‘I was driving when you rang,’ I said. ‘And you were working while I was driving.’

      But June didn’t rise to the top of senior management (also the only management) at the Jane Austen Home for Ladies by caving in at the first sniff of trouble. She ignored me. ‘Frightful is good,’ she said. ‘That means Bev’s back to normal. She’s out of hospital now?’ She stretched her arms above her head and leaned back in her office chair, like she hadn’t a care in the world. The hem of her top rode up to flash a few inches of tummy, but she didn’t notice.

      ‘No, but she’ll be home soon. It doesn’t sound like anything too serious.’ Of course, June knew this already. I’d rung her from the hospital just after I first saw Mum. Was that only yesterday? ‘She sent me home.’

      June nodded. I didn’t have to explain. We’d spent our entire childhood at each other’s houses. She knew all about my parents first-hand.

      ‘Nick’s gone home,’ she said with a smirk. ‘He only came in to do an hour with Laney.’

      ‘Hmm? That’s not why I’m here.’

      It was exactly why I was there. Even though my dreams about Nick were quite hopeless by then, I couldn’t stop wishing. It’s not easy getting over someone when you’re around him every day at work.

      ‘I only came in to get you out of the office,’ I lied. ‘You’re not supposed to be working on your day off.’

      ‘And you’re not supposed to be stalking on your day off.’

      Touché. We should both have been away from work doing better things.

      She closed her laptop. ‘Do you want to do something? I told Callum I might meet him later, but it’s not set in stone. We can get a drink if you like.’

      ‘June, you cannot keep blowing Callum off,’ I said. ‘He’ll get sick of it eventually, and then he’ll dump you.’

      But she shook her head. ‘The less I see of him, the more he likes me.’

      ‘By your logic, he’ll be in love with you if you never see him again. Doesn’t it seem a little bit, I don’t know, unhelpful to your sex life never to see your boyfriend?’

      I could never do that. When I’m mad for someone I can’t keep away from him. Well, obviously, because there I was at work on a Saturday, on the off-chance that I might see Nick.

      And June was mad for Callum. Mad like I’d never seen her before. It was easy to see why. He was gorgeous and fit and loads of fun, and they were really going for it, hot-and-heavy-wise, when they first got together. But then he made one little joke about her trying to handcuff him when she suggested a weekend break, and she started playing so hard to get that he had more chance of winning the lottery than seeing her.

      He was still keen, so far, but for how long?

      ‘Come on, I’ll walk out with you,’ she said.

      I might not have seen Nick, but at least I got her away from work. ‘Go see Callum,’ I urged her when we got to our cars.

      ‘Maybe.’

      Dad rang me around midnight. ‘Phoebe, this is your father.’

      ‘What’s happened?’

      But I knew, even as I asked the question. Mum wasn’t invincible after all.

      The doctors were baffled. None of the tests had shown that cardiac arrest was imminent. But then, Mum always did love to surprise people.

      She left behind pages and pages of notes in her sprawling handwriting. Like she couldn’t get the words on the page fast enough. That’s what she’d been doing on her mobile all the time. Planning her last hurrah, just in case. She’d probably spent her final hours on earth trying to figure out which canapes would most impress their neighbours.

      At twenty-eight, I was half orphaned. I was also stuck with such a confusing mishmash of feelings about Mum that I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with them. All I could do after the funeral was to throw myself back into my life and hope for the best.

       Chapter 3

      Three months later…

      We’ve lost Laney at work. That’s no euphemism, though I can see why you might think so, what with me recently ‘losing’ my mother, plus us being in a care home and all. I’m sorry, madam, we did everything we could, but we’ve lost Laney.

      We actually can’t find her.

      It’s not the first time, but it is the longest that she’s been missing. Even June is starting to get nervous. Not that anyone but me would be able to tell. She’s the most famously unflappable person here. The worse things are, the calmer she gets. That’s how I know she’s worried, when she starts speaking like she’s convincing someone to put down the knife. But I would never let on. Everyone’s got their coping mechanisms.

      Laney was last seen at breakfast, sitting with her usual friends at their usual table. Not the one directly next to the big sash windows in the dining room, because Laney doesn’t like to squint when it’s sunny, and besides, Sophie thinks the light fades her hair colour. Which is already the colour of wholemeal bread, so I don’t know why she’s so worried. Sophie says she and Laney were going to do Zumba together, but Laney didn’t turn up for it.

      That wouldn’t normally raise any alarm bells, since Laney isn’t much of an exerciser. She is a joiner-inner, though, who doesn’t like to disappoint people. Plus, she doesn’t usually go off on her own, so we’re getting worried.

      ‘I didn’t think much of it,’ Sophie continues, pulling her navy-blue legwarmers back up over her sturdy calves. ‘It’s not the first time she’s stood me up. She will skimp on her exercise.’ Her deep brown eyes are huge behind her thick glasses. I can never look at her without thinking of a barn owl. Now I’m tempted to say ‘She whoo?’ It’s as much because she’s owl-shaped and has a beakish nose as because she powders her round flat face with a shade that’s so light that we could use her as a road-marker post at night.

      Sophie has been a Jane Fonda workout devotee since 1982, as she reminds us every chance she gets. Hence the legwarmers. She also makes everyone feel guilty for eating donuts, so she’s that kind of person and we do try to overlook her faults.

      If we weren’t so chronically understaffed and overworked, we might not have lost Laney. It’s a wonder we don’t lose more residents. Max will be furious. He’s edgy about his business as it is.

      Nobody would call him a good boss, except in the sense that he’s not generally around to bother us. When he does visit, he always rings first as a warning. That’s because he knows he’s not popular.

      Not like his mother, the founder and previous owner of the Jane Austen Home for Ladies. That’s its official name now, though everyone in the village calls it Friendship House, because of the plaque beside the front door, from when people named their houses instead of numbering them.