Page 7 of Daydreaming at the Boathouse Cafe

Fifteen years ago, it was Ben that had pushed her to move into London to try her hand at making a career out of her baking. But where he had been so successful in the capital, Hannah hadn’t. She found the city streets too busy, too hard and noisy. Only by meeting her friends almost immediately had it become bearable.

It had been a random house share in a very undesirable area of London. However, it had turned out to be the most amazing piece of luck she ever had. She shared the house with three other women of the same age: Lily, Beth and Ella. All four women were fresh out of college and starting what they hoped were going to be successful careers. At that time, Lily was working as an apprentice designer. Beth was an aspiring astronomer working at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and Ella was a social media assistant in Canary Wharf.

The time sharing a house with her future best friends had been the best and happiest four years that Hannah had known. To have true, close friends that she loved and could depend on meant the world to her. Before she had met Sean and trusted him with her heart, stupidly thinking that he was the one.

To her delight, Lily had met and fallen in love with Ben when she had helped with the hotel renovations over the past winter and had smoothly moved on to helping out both on reception and helping manage the hotel as well. But she always tried to sneak in any interior design wherever she could, giving the hotel seasonal décor updates.

Hannah felt much the same way with her cakes and became twitchy if she couldn’t bake. The job in the pub gave her no outlet for her baking so she always enjoyed being in the kitchen at home and trying out new combinations of flavours.

As she washed her hands in the sink, she glanced outside the window to where her grandparents’ cottage was. They had moved into the small single storey home a few years ago but still ate most of their meals in the family kitchen. All around in the forest, the fruit trees had exploded into colour and were now a mass of frothy blossoms of pink and white. Confetti sprinkled the air in the shape of petals as they wafted down to the forest floor.

She had a brief memory of Sean putting the ring on her finger and immediately a dull ache hit her deep inside. The shadow of their relationship hung low over her, even a decade later. She quickly dismissed him from her mind with a shake of her head. Weddings and happy ever afters were for everyone else. Her brother and best friend were a happy couple and she would enjoy watching their relationship instead. Romance was for other people like Lily and Ben, never for her. Her heart would stay firmly protected, away from any more pain.

Half hour later, the macarons were cooling on a wire tray, ready to be filled. Hannah then moved on to decorating the chocolate cake.

‘Mmm,’ said Ben, sniffing the air as he came into the kitchen. ‘Are those ready to be eaten?’

‘No!’ called out Hannah, as her brother reached out to take a macaron.

‘Too late,’ he told her, swiftly stuffing the treat into his mouth. ‘Oh! Hot. But good.’

‘Any news from the hospital?’ asked Hannah, putting a block of chocolate back in the larder. Despite baking keeping her calm, she couldn’t help but worry about Alex.

Ben swallowed before replying. ‘He’s just had the X-ray results. Two small bones broken in his foot.’

Hannah sank down onto one of the stools next to the kitchen island. ‘Oh, no. I was hoping it wouldn’t be this bad.’

Ben nodded. ‘Yeah. Me too, sis.’

‘What about the Commonwealth Games?’ asked Hannah. After all, it was all Alex had talked about, aimed for, for so long.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ben, with a shrug of his shoulders and looking downcast. ‘But given that it’s going to be at least six weeks to recover, even if the breaks are clean it’s going to be pretty tight for him to be ready and fit in time. I’m not sure he’s going to make it.’

‘Poor Alex,’ said Hannah.

She looked down at the completed chocolate cake, her mind racing on other bakes. She immediately reached out to grab a jar of pecan nuts on the counter. ‘I know,’ she decided out loud. ‘I’ll make his favourites.’

‘And what are those?’ asked Ben, looking surprised.

‘Maple pecan plaits,’ she told him. ‘He loves those.’

‘Well, if your baking can’t cheer him up I’m not sure what will,’ said Ben.

‘It really is the least I can do,’ she replied. ‘Considering what happened.’

‘Listen,’ began Ben.

But Hannah held up her hand. ‘I know. It’s not my fault. But let me at least do this for him.’

Her brother nodded. ‘Still, at least the race was a good turnout, despite how it finished.’

‘It was, wasn’t it?’ Hannah knew how tight things still were for the hotel so any successes were to be celebrated.

‘There’ll be a big write-up in the local newspaper as well which will be great publicity. I was going to suggest we make it a monthly race thing but that just seems cruel at this moment,’ carried on Ben, with a frown. ‘I’ll have to leave that idea for a while. I don’t want to upset Alex any further. But now that we’re into the summer months, it’s going to be impossible to hold the light festival to bring in new people from the local areas.’

The light festival had been Dotty’s idea over the winter, in which floating lanterns had been placed on the lake in a show each weekend, in time to music played over speakers on the beach. It had rapidly gained in popularity, so much so that the hotel had become full each weekend that it had been held.

But now that April had arrived and the clocks had jumped forward, the lighter evenings meant that it wouldn’t be possible to hold it over the coming months.