Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 92668 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92668 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
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.
I leant against my car and dialled my dad’s number, staring sadly at the house.
How had we let it come to this?
Had we been so wrapped up in our own lives that we’d forgotten about this part of it?
I knew the answer to that one.
“Hello,” Dad said. “Is everything okay?”
“Uh, I left the keys on the coffee table,” I replied.
He barked out a laugh. “Do you want me to bring them down to you?”
“If you can. You wanted to come anyway. But only if Mum’s okay.”
“Mum’s fine. She’s still sleeping. I think that sleeping pill knocked her right out,” Dad said. “Give me fifteen minutes, Lottie, and I’ll be there.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Christ. You’d think this place had been abandoned for four hundred years, not four.”
I took the keys Dad held out with a grimace. “I’m kind of scared to go inside, honestly. I’m worried it’s not all cosmetic and that those loose tiles are going to mean a roof repair.”
He backed up a few feet and looked up at the roof, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. You’ve got a couple of loose ones that have come down, but I think your biggest issue up there is going to be broken tiles. Looks like more broken ones than anything.”
“I hope you’re right. They don’t need fixing right away, do they?”
“No. And if we can find any of the fallen tiles intact or mostly intact, you can save money by having those put back.”
I blew out a breath. “Okay, that helps.”
“I bet you’re glad I’m here now, aren’t you?”
“Well, if I’d known it was this bad, I never would have come alone,” I reasoned. “I don’t even know where to start out here.”
“The grass. Let’s get rid of that fallen tree, cut the grass, and trim back these bushes. That won’t be a lot of work, and we can probably find a pair of hands or two to help us out,” Dad said. “That’ll help a lot. Right now, you’re trying to see through overgrowth, and that’s hard. You’d be surprised what mowing a lawn can do.”
I nodded slowly. He was right. Now that the initial shock of seeing the state of this place had worn off, I was able to look at everything much more rationally. Part of that was the landscaping.
Or, rather, the lack of it.
If we cut the grass, removed that fallen tree, and trimmed the bushes back to a regular size, it might not look quite so overwhelming.
Maybe.
It couldn’t look any worse than it did right now.
I unlocked the front door and took a deep breath as I pushed it open. It smelt old and empty, like a strange mix of stale rainwater and dead grass, and there was an underlying bitterness that told me there probably was something actually dead somewhere in this place.