Page 52 of The Do-Over

She sighs. ‘It is a good idea, I suppose. I haven’t been to Drusillas since Mum and Phil took us when we were teenagers.’

‘What is it?’ Rebecca asks.

‘It’s a zoo,’ I explain. ‘Well, it’s a conservation place really, but as far as the boys will be concerned it’s a zoo. They’ll love it, and I have another idea brewing as well.’

As Saffy and Rebecca go off to marshal their children, I pull out my phone and call George. Spending an hour or two with him is bound to push any residual thoughts of Alasdair firmly out of my mind.

My prediction was correct; the boys are absolutely enchanted by Drusillas. It was a bit of a trek to get here, but we’ve seen all sorts of different monkeys and lemurs, although the boys’ absolute favourite was the meerkats. Saffy and I are very taken with the penguins, so graceful underwater and so comical on land, but Rebecca has been unusually quiet.

‘Are you all right?’ I ask her gently as we head into the café to get out of the rain and have something to eat before unleashing the boys on one of the indoor play areas.

‘Yes, just thinking. How big do you think this place is?’

‘No idea. Why?’

‘Nothing.’ She pulls out her phone and seems engrossed, so I turn to Saffy and the boys.

‘We’re going to have a little detour on the way home,’ I tell them. ‘A friend of mine called George is restoring a traction engine, and he’s very kindly said we can stop in to see it.’

‘What’s a traction engine?’ Rollo asks, looking completely nonplussed.

‘It’s a big steam engine that they used on farms, years ago,’ Saffy explains. ‘It’s probably nearly as old as Thea and Rebecca’s mill. Let me show you.’ She finds a YouTube video of a traction engine and hands over her phone so the boys can see.

‘Wow, that’ssocool,’ Rollo exclaims as the video shows the engine powering a huge saw that’s currently making mincemeat of a tree trunk. ‘Does your friend George’s engine do this?’

‘I don’t think it does anything very much at the moment,’ I tell him. ‘But I expect it will, one day.’

There’s definitely something up with Rebecca, I decide as we make our way over to the soft-play area after lunch. I’ve pretty much given her an open goal to tease me about making such a blatant excuse to see George, but she’s still totally absorbed in her phone and the conversation seems to have bypassed her completely. In fact, nearly an hour goes past before she lifts her gaze from her phone and, when she does, her eyes are shining.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ she tells me excitedly. ‘It’s a bit off the wall, but hear me out.’

‘Uh-oh.’ I raise my eyebrows at Saffy, who clocks the expression on Rebecca’s face and suddenly decides she needs to go and check that the boys are OK.

‘Go on,’ I tell Rebecca, who looks like she’s about to burst.

‘You know I asked how big this place was?’

‘Yes.’

‘I found out. Do you want to guess?’

‘Not really.’

‘Ten acres. The same as we’ve got.’

‘Right.’ She’s not making a lot of sense. It can’t possibly have taken her this long to find that piece of information, and I can’t see why she’d be so excited about it either.

‘So, you know our plan has always been to do up the mill and sell it on.’

‘Yes.’

‘What if we didn’t do that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What if, instead of trying to find the one person in the world who probably always wanted a watermill and sell it to them, wekeep it and develop it ourselves? We could turn it into something like this.’

I stare at her, waiting for her to tell me the punchline of the joke. She’s joking, she must be. The more I look, the more I see that she’s serious and my heart begins to sink.

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