Page 2 of Breaking the Ice

“My… eggs?”

“Sure. If you listen closely, I bet you’ll hear them cheeping.”

Cheeping? Crap. That was all she needed – noisy eggs. “I don’t have time in my life for cheeping eggs, Bec. How do I make it go away?”

“Find a man and have some babies.”

“Impossible. I’m overseeing the Adams account until 2029.”

Bec laughed. “They can be demanding critters. Might be hard to sleep over the noise.”

Samantha could hear her nieces laughing in the background and was hit by a sudden desire to hug them close and kiss their sweet faces. They’d grown up so much, but she could still remember holding them as newborns, marveling at their fingers and perfect bow mouths.

“I suppose I could rejig my schedule. Get Adams done earlier, say, 2027.”

“Cheeping eggs wait for no man,” Bec insisted. “Not even Mr. Adams. And you can’t slot love and babies around a career that consumes your every waking moment.”

“Why not?” If she must be afflicted with mutinous eggs, why couldn’t she have both? “Plenty of women hold down jobs and have babies. I’ve worked too hard to sacrifice my career because my eggs have taken temporary leave of their senses. I mean, I’m organized and efficient. I regularly juggle multi-million-dollar accounts. It can’t be harder than that, surely?”

Bec snorted. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Babies don’t fit in well with work schedules. In fact, they throw up over your Donna Karan suit just before you leave the house.”

“I’ll get a nanny.”

“Babe, you’re a perfectionist who sucks at delegation. You won’t want a nanny.”

Sam heard the conviction in her sister’s voice and knew she was right – she hated delegating because no one could do her job like shecould. “Why didn’t you tell me being thirty was this hard?”

“I thought you were fine with turning the big three zero.”

“I am. I just didn’t know my ovaries were going to revolt. This wasn’t in my plan.”

“Maybe it’s time for a new plan?”

Samantha blew her nose. “I like the old one.”

“Well… life has a way of throwing egg in your face when we least suspect it.”

Sam groaned at her sister’s bad pun. “Is it too late to become vegan?”

The second blow came a week later. Birdie died. Samantha stood outside the bookshop in total disbelief. This morning when she’d passed by, it was business as usual and Birdie had waved at her. This afternoon an ambulance, a police car and a coroner’s van had greeted her as she’d rounded the corner. And Birdie was gone.

“What happened?” Samantha asked Dulcie Reardon, her arm automatically going around the stooped old shoulders of another of Birdie’s faithful customers.

“Heart attack,” Dulcie whispered.

Dulcie, no spring chicken herself, leaned heavily into Samantha, her hand over her mouth, and they stood and watched as two official-looking men pushed a trolley loaded with a black body bag and slid it into the back of the waiting vehicle. Samantha’s regulation cup of hot chocolate from Starbucks grew cold, completely forgotten.

Just like that, in a flash, life could be over.

What was she going to do without Birdie? Every morning, every afternoon, every weekend for five years, the old lady had been a part of her life. But more than that, Eddie Hawke – Birdie to her friends – had been an institution around the Glassworks area of Tetworth for over fifty years.

The Glassworks – so called after the old glass factories that had once sprawled and thrived here – was one of the older, more socio-economically flatlined areas of the city. But the residents didn’t seem to mind. Many had never lived anywhere else, harking back to an era where entire neighborhoods were employed by the one company.

Today the once grand aesthetics had faded, the boulevards now pockmarked and the buildings erected to support a flourishing industry were now scruffy around the edges. But the people remained the same – resilient and pragmatic.

Like Birdie. Who had operated her beloved second-hand romance bookshop from the corner of the now shabby arcade that occupied the ground level of the apartment building both Birdie and Samantha called home.

How many Sundays had she spent in Birdie’s combing the shelves for her favorite romance novels? Who else but Birdie knew or even cared about her passion for Rita Summers books and her pirate heroes? Who else but Birdie would keep them aside especially for her as customers traded them in?

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