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me to tell you to leave.”
    Nathan turned sulkily back to his companion and muttered something. Abbey guessed it was probably a derogatory comment about Jack.
    As the crowd around the bar began to disperse, she and Sally took their drinks to one of the tables at the side of the lounge.
    “Your Mum was right,” she said. “About people here working together, I mean. I’d never thought about that.”
    Sally grinned. “So should people here be thanking Jack, instead of criticising him?”
    Abbey sipped her wine thoughtfully. Jack was still standing by the bar talking to Mike, and she wondered what he would have gone on to say if Jeannie hadn’t intervened.
    Turning to Sally again, she went on, “The other night, he said when he wrote the article, he believed more money needed to be poured into tourism.”
    “When he wrote it? Does he not think the same now?”
    “I don’t know. I said there should be a balance between tourists and local interests, and he agreed.”
    “Wonder why he’s changed his mind?” Sally glanced toward the bar. “Oh, seems you’ll have a chance to ask him. He and Mike are coming across here now.”
    Abbey followed her glance to where Mike was saying something to Jack. As she tightened one hand around the other in involuntary tension, she couldn’t decide whether she wanted Jack to join them, or if she was dreading him doing that. She soon had her answer. Jack shook his head, downed the rest of his drink, and raised his hand in a farewell gesture to Mike. Disappointment trickled through her as she watched him leave the pub.
    So be it, he didn’t want to talk to her. Not that she could blame him. First their spat on the valley road, followed by her deliberate coolness earlier in the evening. Those few moments when their eyes had met during Alan’s speech had brought back memories of their close friendship, but that friendship no longer existed.
    Anxious to divert the conversation away from Jack, she turned to Sally again. “Where’s Sam? Have he and his friends gone off somewhere?”
    “They’re in the games room with the CD player on full blast. Good job it’s in the old stable block across the yard otherwise we’d all be deafened by now.”
    Mike sat down beside Sally, and their conversation continued on a general level, with no mention of the earlier argument.
    At the end of the evening, Abbey walked through the village with Jeannie, who had lived in another of the houses at Eagle Croft ever since she and Alan retired to let Mike and Sally manage the pub.
    “Don’t know what it is about that Nathan Garside,” Jeannie said. “He always seems to go out of his way to provoke people.”
    Abbey nodded. “He’s done that for as long as I’ve known him.”
    “But he’s canny. He never went far enough for Alan to bar him from the pub. Or Mike, either.”
    “His mother was sure Mike would bar Jack,” Abbey said, thinking back to Dolly Garside’s comment in the shop the previous week. She turned curiously to the older woman. “Jeannie, were you trying to keep the peace tonight, or did you mean it about something good coming out of what seemed to be bad?”
    “I meant it, because it’s true.”
    “And yet you were as incensed as everyone when Jack’s article first appeared.”
    “Aye, we were all angry at the time, because it seemed to be a direct attack on the village. If he’d written about this area being dependent on the tourist trade, no one would have argued with him, but he made a specific reference to spending money on—what did he call it? A heap of old stones? And he must have known the parish council had applied for funds to restore the gatehouse. That’s why we were all riled up, and even more so when the application was refused.”
    “What about now?” Abbey asked.
    “Sometimes you have to let go of the past and move on.”
    “And you think most people feel the same?”
    Jeannie laughed. “I’m sure Dolly doesn’t, and there are others who won’t