A beautiful day in Avonwick.

The next morning Spencer dropped Amy off at school. He had a look around for Darcie but instead saw Tony dropping Kimberley off. He waved friendly when he saw Spencer. Waving back, he couldn’t help but still find it strange how calm and accepting he was with what Spencer was doing with his wife. It couldn’t be easy what he had gone through and then to be unable to perform his husbandly duties. Still, Spencer respected the mature outlook he had taken on life and for wanting Darcie to go out and seek her happiness.

From the school, Spencer went to the Corner Coffee House to pick up his morning caffeine fix. He made sure to grab an extra takeaway coffee for Danielle along with a pastry. Danielle had always offered him something to drink and a doughnut whenever he visited the bank, it felt only right to do the same for her when he had the chance.

Spencer made it to the bank just as the doors were being opened to the public by Earl. Earl was the bank's security guard and must have worked at the bank for almost as long as it was open. He was an African-American gentleman in his seventies and knew every customer by their first name as they walked in. An old pistol revolver in his hip holster that had likely never been drawn and, God willing, would never have to be.

“Good morning Spencer,” Earl greeted Spencer as he came through the door.

“Good morning Earl. How're the knees?”

“Oh, bad in the mornings, worse in the evenings,” he said with a smile.

Earl had a cushioned chair in the foyer that he was well known to have a nap in the afternoons. Work hours or not.

Danielle was already in the lobby when Spencer walked in. Seeing him, she finished talking to an older lady. Squeezing her warmly on the shoulder as she walked away.

“Spencer. Lovely to see you,” she said.

They had a brief awkward moment where they each went to hug and then shake the others hand but in the wrong order before Danielle hugged herself to him as Spencer kissed her on the cheek.

“Creamer and sweetener?” Spencer said holding up the take away cup and brown bag with the desert.

“Now what’s the point of a sweetener if you’re just going to fatten me with afterwards?” she joked.

Spencer laughed as Danielle wasn’t in any danger of putting on weight, she was tiny. Spencer found himself looking her over with a fresh pair of eyes. Up until just a few days ago, he hadn’t looked at a female in a sexual way in so long. Being physical with Darcie seemed to have flicked a switch in him that he took in Danielle’s body with a man’s appetites. Shorter than Spencer by a full foot, Danielle still had all the curves of a taller woman. He couldn’t help himself but stare at her curvy rear in her form-fitted pantsuit as she led him to a passkey encoded door. The way her slightly wavy hair trailed down her back, from burnt red to lighter at the end, Spencer found his mind wondering if she was also a redhead where it counted.

Putting such thoughts out of his mind when they got to Danielle’s office, Spencer took the customers chair while Danielle went and sat behind her desk. Danielle pulled up some information on her computer before she pulled a manila folder out of her desk drawer with the required paperwork already near completed.

“So how much did you want to move and where?” Danielle asked as she held her pen poised to fill in the numbers.

Spencer told the Customer Manager that he had an invoice for $30,000 due to be paid this week as well as two smaller ones for around $10,000 each coming soon too. He wanted another fifty thousand added to Amy’s college fund which would then be enough to pay for a complete five-year degree at any of the Ivy-league schools.

After that, he told Danielle that he wanted the bank’s stockbrokers to start buying $100,000 of shares in $10,000 increments in three small technology companies that stood to go big if the lobbying work he had been advising on proved fruitful.

“That’s a lot of money in really small companies, Spencer,” Danielle warned him. She wasn’t used to a customer taking out what seemed to her to be a very risky investment.

Spencer told her about the work he had been doing and gave Danielle a stock tip on one of the companies he thought would do best.

“It’s not illegal is this? Like insider trading?” she asked.

“My entire career was built on lobbying being legal and as you can see, I did it well,” Spencer told her to which she agreed he had done magnificently.

“Spencer, can I ask you a personal question?” Danielle said, a line of questioning entering her mind that wasn’t anything to do with her job but something she always wondered since Spencer had moved to Avonwick.

“Sure. We’re friends. Go ahead,” Spencer told her.

Danielle smiled that Spencer considered her one of his friends. “What is it you intend to do with all this money?” Spencer’s net worth was more than she could hope to achieve in a dozen lifetimes.

“I don’t know. Give it to Amy, of course,” Spencer said as if that was the only logical thing to do with it.

“I get that and of course you should but that could be way more than she’s ever likely to need. What is it you really want to achieve in life? I know you came to Avonwick to get away from the awful thing that happened but you’ve still got your whole life ahead of you. How do you want to live it?” Danielle pressed Spencer.

He thought deeply and hard for a minute before answering, “with Amy. Doing something I love with my hands. Building something. And maybe…. with another woman beside me…”

“Well, when you know what that something is let me know. I want to help,” Danielle said. “God, if I hadn’t just been talking about you having too much money, I’d say let that woman be me!”

Spencer and Danielle both laughed at her joke but they were suddenly unable to meet the other’s eye as an undercurrent of tension entered the room with them. If Spencer hadn’t been woken from his six-year slumber by Darcie he might have not known that there was a lot more to the offer from Danielle then than a joke. He knew within himself that Danielle had just opened herself up for proposition from Spencer that had nothing to do with the Avonwick Bank.