Fionnuala immediately noticed I was wearing someone else’s shoes when I arrived home, but the bunch of flowers briefly distracted her.

Luckily, she wasn’t a huge adherent of the Valentine’s Day circus – she once told me that whoever invented it should have been locked up in a dungeon and the key fed to a bear – but she appreciated the gesture nevertheless: “It’s a good example to the children.”

She was busy getting the dog into the car with the gang of little ones, as we were going to the forest park nearby.

I told her about the strange shoe shop with the lovely stove and the curious man who reminded me about the flowers, but no matter how many times I described where I remembered the shop to be, she couldn’t figure it out.

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“Are you sure it was at the bottom of that street, not the top?”

“Positive.”

“And was there a launderette beside it?”

“Not sure.”

“The street with........

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