Clara wasn’t used to making bad decisions. She had only ever made one significantly bad decision before the cottage but she didn’t like to think about that. And choosing Giles could arguably have been a bad decision but this cottage was the worst decision she could have made.
This is what happens when you drink and buy property, she told herself as she stepped out of the car and walked towards the cottage. Why did she do something so rash? She was like the customers at the bank she had tried to protect. She had made a rash decision and it was giving her an anxiety rash, she thought as she scratched at her neck. She had spent her savings on this sad, lonely cottage that looked slightly lopsided.
There was a wooden gate, the paint long washed away, with a sign reading Acorn Cottage. She pushed open the gate and it promptly fell onto the overgrown path.
It had been two months since she had bought the property. For two months she had spent every weekend crying in the flat, knowing Piles was over with Judas, probably laughing about her and her sad life.
And Petey… she wondered what happened to him. He had moved out, according to Piles, but Clara didn’t ask for more details. It was just all so awful and tawdry. Clara had tried to live a life with no surprises and now she had been sucker punched again by this cottage.
She had lost her mother and her relationship in the space of a year and now she had a derelict house to live in.
The agent told her the roof needed work, and he had given her the number of a man who was a thatcher. She had emailed the thatcher to come and look at it today, and wondered how bad it could be. Now she wondered if she wanted to know how bad it actually was.
The cottage was dated back to the 1800s according to the title. The last owner had died in the 1990s and since then it had gone to seed, as it were. The garden was wild, with climbing roses reaching out with long thorny stems grabbing her on her top as she passed them.
Clara slapped them away as she tried to make sense of the images she’d seen online and what she was looking at now.
The grass was long like a meadow, filled with dandelions. The lavender bushes were stringy and leggy, with a few bees hanging around the flowers in hope.
Weeds were everywhere through the garden beds, thistles and other grasses and huge trees surrounded the cottage, which was more spooky than charming. It was a mess. A huge mess of huge proportions with a huge task to make it liveable.
This wasn’t what Clara had hoped for. The agent had told her to come and see it but she’d said she was too busy – which she was as she finished her role at the bank and her relationship with Giles. Perhaps she didn’t want to admit she had a gnawing feeling she had made a huge mistake, so she had avoided her decision and this was the outcome.
It had seemed like such a good idea when she was trying to prove to Giles that she would live her life without him, but now she felt like an idiot. She hadn’t done the due diligence on the investment, and here was her reward.
There was a stand of oak trees circling the front of the property and an outlook over green land with a white fence that belonged to the farm a long way down the lane.
The grass was overgrown on her property, with dandelions waving obnoxiously as though laughing at her poor decision-making.
What had the estate agents thought when they listed this property?
She’d had no time to come and see it before, not with moving out and leaving the bank and finalising her mother’s estate. The agent had promised it was liveable. He had used the word charming. More like disarming.
The sound of a car on the unmade road made her turn from the rural nightmare.
But it wasn’t a car, it was a van of some sort, with a little mini cottage on top, complete with a thatched roof. Oh God, it was a mobile Snow White and the Seven Dwarves roadshow, she thought in horror.
‘God help me,’ she muttered to herself as the van stopped and a man stepped out of it, smiling at her.
‘Oh shit,’ she whispered. He was as handsome as anyone she had ever seen in her life, even with the beard, which to his credit looked well-tended – unlike when Piles had tried to grow a beard and she’d asked him if he had dirt on his upper lip, and he hadn’t spoken to her for a week.
‘Clara?’ the handsome bearded man asked.
‘Hi.’ She tried to wave back like she had seen Carrie Bradshaw do on TV, casual, cute, sexy, but then decided at the last minute she would do a casual nod and stick her hand up like she was on roll call at camp, but it ended up being a combo she was sure looked like she was pretending to yank a chain on a toilet or the emergency brake on a train.
He was getting something out of the van, so hopefully, he hadn’t seen her weird callisthenics move. She put her hands into the pockets of her jeans and finding a G-string she had shoved in there last-minute when she had left Piles’s flat.
‘Henry Garnett,’ he said as he walked towards her, carrying what looked to be a large sack of clothing until the sack lifted its head and peered at Clara.
‘It’s a child,’ she said.
‘Yes, this is Pansy, my daughter.’
It made sense a man like this had
