Page 14 of A Spot of Tea
“Thanks. They’re Granny’s, for personal use only. She got them when she was living in Japan.”
“When did she live in Japan?”
Eliza led the way to a table and Joey followed, carrying the teacups. “She lived all over the place growing up. Her dad was in the army.”
“Have you been?”
She took a seat and looked up at him. “To Japan? No. Have you?”
He nodded. “I worked in a factory in Tokyo for six months.”
“What? When?”
“When I was young and dumb.” He smiled and rolled his eyes. “I wanted to see Japan and I thought I could get hired as a pilot. Turns out it’s not that easy, so I ended up at the factory.”
“Did you like it?”
“It was awesome. Japan, I mean. The factory, not so much, but I got to travel a lot. Osaka, Sapporo, Niigata, Kyoto – there’s so much to see.”
“But you didn’t stay.”
“I missed flying.” He shrugged. “Missed it so much I took a sketchy job in Ghana.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, right. You mentioned that.”
“Yeah. I played pilot for this guy who ran a bunch of cocoa farms. I’m not a hundred percent sure he wasn’t a criminal. He seemed to like bribing people.”
Eliza poured tea into his cup, then her own. “You’ve led a more exciting life than I have.”
“I just get a lot of bad ideas. The worst ideas, actually.”
“Like trying to catch a bank robber.”
Joey squinted at her, a smile on his lips. “That’s not one of them.”
“Luckily, we aren’t going to find him.” Eliza took a sip, the cinnamon filling her cheeks, then held the cup in front of her. The cup and saucer were tiffany blue with tiny pink roses bursting from the handle and inside the rim.
“We’re going to,” he said. “I believe in us.”
She stared at him. He seemed, at least, to be sincere.
Why wouldn’t he be? While he was off exploring the world, she’d been locked in her bedroom, going over all the things she should be doing but was completely unable to do, trapped in a cycle of doubt and anxiety, dipped in self-hatred.
It wasn’t even like she’d failed at one thing. That wouldn’t have been so bad. Lots of people failed at something.
But Eliza had failed in a much bigger way. She’d failed to becomeanything.All these years, all this promise, and she was nothing. No one.
Steam rose from the teacup sitting in front of him. He met her gaze and kept it.
He was better off searching for the bank robber on his own, and she might’ve told him that if she didn’t find it so hard to look away from that smile of his…
“Where would you start?” she asked.
He took a deep breath and pulled out a pen and a notebook. “Okay, so first, tell me everything you remember about the robbery. No detail is too small.”
“Are you sure? The ATF agent got annoyed with me when she asked for my story.”
“Why?”
