Chapter 5

• If I had, I would have kept those summer visits up until Grandpa got ill and moved in with us. Instead, I’d given in to my broken heart and stayed away, throwing myself into university life, pretending this place didn’t exist.
• Now, I had no time to commiserate about what could have been. I was apparently the new owner of The Ivy, and I needed to process what that meant for me.
• Despite what Mum had said, I couldn’t justquit my job. Sure, I didn’t get along with my boss and I didn’t want to be a receptionist at a dental office forever, but I couldn’t just up and leave.
• Could I?
• No.
• That was silly. And financially irresponsible.
• It wasn’t like I’d won the lottery. One hundred grand sounded like a ton of money, but it wasn’t really, not in this economy.
• Jesus. I sounded like Aunt Tess. All she did was complain about the price of everything. I was only on board when we were discussing the price of Freddos.
• I’d almost had a heart attack when I’d seen one for seventy pence recently.
• That was criminal. I bet they were smaller than they used to be, too. Like those tubs of chocolate that you only ever bought at Christmas.
• Wow. That was a mental tangent.
• The point remained: I could not up and quit my job on a whim.
• Not that my boss would complain. He’d been trying to make me quit for weeks, if not months. I was still there out of spite, honestly. I knew he wouldn’t and couldn’t fire me because he had no reason to, and knowing that he hated me as much as I hated him made it almost worth going back to work my notice.
• Then again, he’d probably complain about that just to make my life harder.
• It didn’t change that my whole life was in Bristol, and it wasn’t like it was a stone’s throw away. Then again, if my parents had decided to sell our house, I didn’t havethatmuch of a life there. It wasn’t like I could afford to buy and renting a place and getting a roommate sounded like my idea of hell.
• Thirty million ideas of hell, actually.
• I was overwhelmed.
• It hadn’t sunken in yet that my grandfather had left me his beloved bed and breakfast, the place that had been in our family for two generations before him. I supposed that made me the fifth-generation owner.
• Or was it fourth? What was I since it’d skipped Mum?
• Hmm.
• Things to ponder.
• If only someone had told me this before Grandpa had died, I’d have been able to plan. To process it. Do all the things one could do when they weren’t in a state of insane grief and working partially on autopilot.
• Was that too much to ask? I didn’t think so.
• I slowed as I came to the turn-off point from the main road. I followed it, then took the route as I remembered it. That was one of the good things about this place staying the same—there were no extra roads I had to learn.
• Somehow, perhaps by a miracle, I trundled up the road towards the sign. It declared this to be The Ivy Bed and Breakfast, established in 1864 by the Walsh family, and was decorated with the leaves of the very thing it was named for.
• Ivy.
• The sign had seen much better days. Paint flecked away from the metal, and the ivy had wound itself up around the poles that held up the sign, clinging to the metal in an explosion of green. The sign desperately needed stripping off and repainting, and that meant the ivy would have to go for restoration to be completed.
• Hopefully that was the case for the rest of the building, but looking at the sign, I wasn’t so sure.
• That feeling of uncertainty only grew as I followed the gravel road, driving along it at a snail’s pace. The grass was overgrown and riddled with weeds. Ivy crept up the trees, suffocating the trunks and branches, and loose bits swayed in the wind. One tree was completely down, and I had to manoeuvre around it as it slightly encroached on the road.
• And the building…
• The moment I laid eyes on it, my heart sank.
• I knew the salty sea air would have done damage to it, but it was in worse condition than I could have imagined. We’d neglected it entirely since Grandpa had closed its doors four years ago and boy, it looked it.
• This was not how I remembered it all. The veranda wasn’t supposed to be missing fencing posts. The columns that held up the roof shouldn’t have been flecking paint, and the gazebo wasn’t meant to be covered in thick ivy and other weeds I couldn’t name.
• There shouldn’t have been roof tiles on the ground. Roof tiles were for the roof, not the paving slabs of the pathway that circled the building.
• Windows being boarded up? No. That was wrong, too. So was the overgrown landscaping and all the paint on the cream panels flecking and peeling away. The downstairs windows were all supposed to have blue shutters, but some were on the ground, and I was pretty sure others were missing entirely.
• Spandrels were rough and dusty, and all the decorative items that made the property look so fancy, like the roof details and the weathervane, were rusting and breaking.
• It was dirty.
• Dirty, destroyed, and gut-wrenchingly damaged.
• This did not bode well for the inside.
• I took a deep breath and got out of the car. I didn’t know who’d boarded up the windows, but I was thankful for that, at least. It would give some protection to the inside.
• How much was this going to cost?
• Was the one hundred grand he’d left me even going to be enough?
• I didn’t know how much windows cost, but I’d bet it was expensive. Not to mention tile repairs for the roofing and new fencing and—
• No.
• Freaking out right now wasn’t going to solve this problem. I wasn’t here to solve it; I was here to get the lay of the land and see what sized task lay ahead of me if I was to restore this to a fully working bed and breakfast again.
• Was that even what I was going to do?
• Of course, it was. What else would I do? Sell it? No. That would be an insult to my grandfather and to those before him who’d worked so hard to make this place a success. I simply couldn’t. I would never forgive myself if I let go such a large part of my family history, not to mention a place that had brought me such happiness through the years.
• Yeah, that’s the spirit, Lottie.
• I could barely believe this was what it looked like. I had so many incredible memories here—this place was home to so many of my ‘first’ things. My first birthday party—both actual and the one I could remember—my first sleepover, my first broken bone, my first kiss, my first…
• Well, I’d lost my virginity here, too.
• I just didn’t want to think about that. All of that—and thinking about Noah—was going to send me down a memory lane that probably had ghosts and ghoulies in the shadows, and I was already hurting enough without thinking about the boy who’d broken my heart.
• I grabbed my phone and snapped a few pictures of it like I’d promised Dad, then locked my car and slowly walked towards the building. Was it even safe for me? Would the stairs collapse under my feet? Would the veranda hold my weight, or were the white-painted floorboards rotten?
• I approached it hesitantly. The stairs were a grey brick and looked solid, so I walked up a little further and peered at the veranda flooring. Weeds grew through the floorboards, and they were scratched and scraped, some broken and rotting in the corners, but it looked largely okay.
• I still tested it with a few careful footsteps before I decided to trust it.
• Animals had taken over, it appeared. There was an abandoned bird nest in the corner, and the lower walls bore the same scratches as the floors.
• At least the door was still on its hinges.
• It was a strange thing to be grateful for.
• I’d take it as a win.
• I flipped through my keys to find the one for the bed and breakfast, but it wasn’t there. With a frown, I checked all my pockets and even went back to my car to check for it, but no.
• I closed my eyes.
• I’d left it on the living room table, right next to the box that contained all the other keys for this place. Grandpa had never labelled them as he’d known exactly what they all were, but that wasn’t a skill he’d passed to me, and I’d been a little overwhelmed when Mr. Porter had handed me the Tupperware box of keys.