‘Gran, why don’t you ever leave the house?’
And there it was, the question she’d been waiting for, the question Sam obviously hadn’t answered for her daughter. Instead she’d sent her here to Mapleberry to discover for herself, when Veronica could hide her secret no longer. Her granddaughter was about to find out what kind of misfit her gran really was, how she’d failed her entire family so badly she was surprised they wanted anything to do with her at all.
And she had to live with her mistakes for the rest of her life.
Chapter Six
Sam
Ever since she dropped Audrey off in Mapleberry, Sam had been frantically trying to find work and sell the house that had always been too big for just the two of them. She’d found a buyer for her property quickly and the sale had progressed rapidly, but as the months marched on through July and now well into August, the search for a new place to live was getting even more desperate.
Her first impressions of the rental house she’d come to view today weren’t bad at all. The gate was still on its hinges for a start, and although on a busy main road, the terrace was close to shops and just about walkable for Audrey to get to school come September.
The last four rentals Sam had looked at had been a far cry from what she wanted – the first had been next to a pub and the noise even during the day was intolerable; the second had a brown bathroom suite that looked like it belonged in the 1940s, and a kitchen in similar disrepair, and the third property was so far from the bus route she would have had to drive Audrey to school and back every day.
Surely somewhere along the line, Sam was going to strike it lucky in the rental lottery. She had a good feeling about this one.
A smart navy-blue door opened up into a long hallway with vintage oak flooring, rooms off to the right-hand side. First was a beautiful sitting room with a fireplace surrounded by turquoise tiles. The curtains, thick and luxurious, were cream like the carpet and there were floor to ceiling bookcases that Sam could see housing not only books but photo frames and perhaps an indoor plant. She nodded her approval and it was on to the next. Okay, so not quite as nice: a sparse dining room with nothing in it apart from a dusty light fitting. But she could work with that. Perhaps she’d make turn it into a study.
She followed the estate agent into the kitchen, which hadn’t been put together at all well. The cooker was a slot-in style with gaps either side just waiting for food to fall down. And on closer inspection, it seemed whoever was in this place before had had that very problem. Sam didn’t want to look too carefully and find out exactly what the remnants were and so she moved on to the downstairs toilet, which wasn’t bad, although it had no window and the door didn’t shut fully.
‘I assume there’s a bit of wiggle room with the monthly rental,’ she said. ‘Given the state of repair this place is in, the price tag is rather high.’
He shrugged. ‘No wiggle room at all, I’m afraid, and it’s a fixed-term rental for a year.’
The year wasn’t a problem, but the price was, not to mention the downsides of what she’d seen so far. The rental was top of her budget, which was already looking too generous unless Sam found a job in the next couple of months. She had a third interview right after this, hence why she was wearing a skirt and heels and a silk blouse, which she was careful not to get dirty when she walked past the built-in fridge that looked like it hadn’t seen a cloth in the whole time it had been there.
Upstairs, Sam approved of the biggest bedroom; when it came to the bathroom, she’d seen far worse, but the other bedroom could more accurately be described as a cupboard. ‘Is this really the second bedroom?’ She peered into the room with the salmon pink carpet that she knew Audrey would hate, possibly more than the restrictive space that barely seemed big enough for a single bed, let alone a teen’s paraphernalia.
‘The previous tenants used the dining room as a bedroom instead,’ the estate agent told her as they went downstairs, the grand tour over. There was just enough time for Sam to look out at the what you might describe as a bijou garden. A patch of lawn feeling very sorry for itself was punctuated with paving slabs making a path down to a dilapidated shed and a washing line gathering cobwebs hung limp outside the kitchen window. It made her realise how much she was going to miss her own garden with its planter boxes filled with pink crocuses, the daisy-like hot yellow flowers of the heleniums planted in amongst taller grasses, the rose beds filled with deep reds and creams. There was a patch at one side where snowdrops grew every winter too and the bed she’d planned to plant tulip bulbs in ready to bloom next year. But soon, all of that would belong to someone else.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she told the estate agent.
She tried to leave with an air of positivity and went to possibly her worst interview so far. The first few jobs she’d gone for had been the same as what she was doing before, but then she’d begun to apply for anything in that realm, even if it meant demotion and a fraction of the salary. This position wasn’t even customer service, it was telemarketing. She had no interest in the work itself; it was antisocial hours answering the phone working towards daily targets in an environment with shouty twenty-year-olds.
As she drove home Sam wondered how different her life might have been
