Chapter 4

• “If you’re sure. I think your mum would like that.”
• “She’ll feel better after some sleep, no doubt,” I said, buttoning my coat. “I’ll take some pictures of anything I think needs to be immediately addressed.”
• “Good thinking, kiddo. Perhaps we should consider getting a surveyor in to really see the damage.”
• I wrinkled my nose up. “Please don’t scare me any more than I already am.”
• Dad grimaced. “Sorry. But it’s an old building, and it’s been a while since anyone was really in it. At the very least, we should get it surveyed for structural issues. I’d be surprised if there was anything majorly wrong, though.”
• “I know. I guess I’m just hoping that it’s not going to be as bad as we think it is,” I said, a little wistfully. “Older houses tend to have better bones than new ones, so maybe it’s just cosmetic.”
• “I do appreciate your optimism, Lottie.”
• “You meant to say naivety, didn’t you?”
• “Oh, you weren’t supposed to hear that.”
• I laughed and dropped a kiss on his cheek. “It can’t be that bad, right? It’s only been four years since it closed, not forty, and I’m sure someone would have said if it was really awful.”
• Dad wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know. It is pretty out of the way, and down by the dunes it can be rough in bad weather.”
• “It’s not that close to the dunes.”
• “No, but it’s rural enough at that end of town that there’s a good chance nobody has even been by there for two years. Wildlife, unruly youths…”
• I waved my hands and picked my car keys up off the table. “Right, that’s enough. Stop scaring me. I’m just going to go, take a look, and think about the rest of it later.”
• He raised his mug of tea in my direction, and I skipped out of the house. We’d only been here for a few days, and we’d been so busy with the funeral that none of us had been able to go to the old bed and breakfast yet.
• Heck, we’d barely been into town. Today was the first time I’d actually driven through Fox Point properly, and now I was about to drive the entire length of town and see if I could remember where the turn-off was for the bed and breakfast.
• I was going to get lost. For all the years I’d spent here as a child, I’d never actually driven myself. Everyone knew that directions as a passenger were vastly different to directions as a driver.
• Unfortunately, I was good at neither.
• Fox Point was a small seaside town in Norfolk that spanned several miles of coastline from chalk cliffs, through a sandy beach, up into wild dunes, and eventually down onto some marshland. It was the epitome of Victorian seaside town with an impressive promenade along the beach, vibrant beach huts, and a long pier that seemed to reach out to the horizon.
• Unlike a lot of the towns surrounding it, Fox Point had managed to reject the need to expand into the green areas around the town, instead sustaining its crown as the number one staycation spot in the county. Even multimillion-pound building projects were wholeheartedly rejected by the local council for the most part, preferring to keep it all as the quaint little town everyone knew and loved.
• It would lose its charm, and boy, did Fox Point have charm by the bucketful.
• With under two thousand residents during the months of October to April—thirty thousand during the summer months, it felt like—it was like a strange little pocket of an England lost.
• A true enigma.
• Not only was it surrounded by rich, lush farmland, the high street was one of the few in the area that hadn’t fallen prey to richer corporations. There were a couple of chain clothing and shoe stores off the main street, and of course the bank was a national one, but everything else was small, independent, family owned.
• It set Fox Point apart.
• And as I drove away from that bustling high street, down the hill from the cliff area and onto the promenade, I was struck by a small sense of longing.
• I missed Fox Point.
• My dad’s enrolment in the army meant we moved a lot when I was a child, and summers here were the one constant in my life until I was twelve and Dad got a more permanent position. Then we’d bought our house in Bristol and settled, but the summer trips never changed. Six weeks every single year until I’d turned eighteen.
• And, as every eighteen-year-old will tell you, a verifiable adult who knew absolutely everything.
• Spoiler alert: I had not known everything.