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‘It’s kind of you to check in.’ Hazel quickly picked up Lucy’s sketch and put it beneath the brown envelope on the side as James sat at the table. She didn’t really want to answer questions about why she had a hand-drawn picture of a naked man and why she had obviously been looking at it over her breakfast. ‘What time is your train?’
‘Trying to get rid of me already?’
‘You know what mornings are like around here.’ She was glad he’d come now and not once she’d got going with the morning routine. As if on cue, the rumble of a truck announced the hay delivery.
When she put a mug of coffee in front of him, he thanked her, blew across the liquid, and braved a sip. ‘You seem stressed.’
‘No more than usual,’ she said, her standard response. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You always say that. I worry about you.’
‘I know you do, I appreciate the concern. But I’m still standing.’
James didn’t look too sure. ‘I don’t want to see you stressed or running yourself into the ground with too much work.’
‘If Arnold heard you say that, he’d flip. He’s still doing more than his fair share.’
‘I’m sure he’s coping, don’t let him give you a hard time.’
She resisted the urge to leap to Arnold’s defence. She shouldn’t have bothered mentioning Arnold’s workload, as all James saw was the problems she was having. She supposed that was his caring side, the supportive partner role, but it also showed that despite his job and all his worldly experience, when it came to her and her family business, James rarely understood the bigger picture.
‘Running your own business is never easy,’ he added with another slurp of his coffee.
‘I knew that going into it.’ All true, but what she hadn’t realised was that one event could turn everything upside down when you least expected. She and James had been dating for less than a year when an accident happened at the riding school and well and truly left its mark. James had been there for Hazel through the terrible times and every day since. They’d been engaged when getting married felt like the appropriate next step. Or at least it had until Hazel, confused and all over the place, began to wonder whether she’d clung onto something solid and reliable because everything else was falling apart. She began to be critical of her relationship with James; not about him specifically, but more about what they each wanted in life. And try as she might, she couldn’t make their goals align. He wasn’t a horse person, not that that mattered, it was good to have different interests, but horses were a major part of her life and when she and Arnold took on the business from their parents, it became even more so. James had never really seemed on board, even though he insisted he was.
‘You did know it wouldn’t be easy, but did you ever predict it would be this hard?’ he asked her now.
And she honestly couldn’t answer with anything other than no, so she moved the conversation on to talk about her parents and how they’d settled well into life in the West Country before asking how his parents were and whether they’d given any more thought to retiring from the law practice.
‘I can’t see them ever giving it up,’ James told her as he finished his coffee.
‘Funny how careers run in the family, isn’t it?’
‘It doesn’t have to be that way, not if you need a change.’ He put a hand over hers and she knew she’d walked right into that one. ‘You have options – sell your share, get outside help in.’
But when she simply smiled before looking at her watch again, he picked up on the hint, taking his cup to the sink and rinsing out the dregs. ‘I’ll get going then, let you get on.’
‘Thanks for stopping by.’ She knew he did it because he cared, and it was nice to have people on your side. Hazel walked him to the door and when they got there, he pulled her into a hug.
‘I’ll see you again soon.’ He kissed the tip of her nose as though they weren’t taking a break from one another at all and added, ‘Think about what I’ve said, Hazel. I don’t want this place to break you.’
All she could do was wave him off and then close the door behind him before leaning against the wood. This placehadalmost broken her, but she wanted to fight back, she wanted to push through to the other side, and his words didn’t help, even though they came from a good place.
Hazel rushed upstairs to clean her teeth, then back in the kitchen, she pulled on her boots, only just remembering to take the sketch with her when she left the house.
As Hazel hurried past to the office, drawing in hand, Arnold was unloading hay into the barn behind the stable block. She unlocked the office, found one of her notebooks from the shelf above the desk, and slotted the drawing in there. Arnold wouldn’t find it there, nobody would – her slightly naughty secret should be safe.
She was still grinning after one last appreciative glance at the drawing before she checked the office voicemail for messages. There was one from a man who was interested in stabling his horse here. Hazel did a little clap. They’d been advertising vacancies at the Heritage View Stables for a while, trying to fill the last remaining spot. With capacity for ten horses, they’d only had eight at the start of the year when one owner moved to Wales and another retired and was able to keep the horse on his own land. One spot had been filled last month but the other had remained vacant. Livery was an important source of income for them, though they made most of their income from the riding school. Arnold would be happy too, especially as the owner had said he would stop by today, so they could get things moving sooner rather than later.
Hazel headed to the stable block to say good morning to the horses, her favourite thing to do. They stabled their horses overnight and it was reassuring to know they were safely tucked away. It was a nicely renovated block, having had a makeover recently, and now, rather than ten separate stables facing each other and blocked in on either side, each stable was separated with bars positioned on the upper portion of the walls. Horses were highly sociable animals and this way they could see one another. It also meant that the stables were well ventilated.
The first task of the day would be to turn out the horses from the stables to the paddocks. Hazel opened up and folded back the main doors to the stable block. She fixed each door out of the way using the sturdy hooks to leave a nice wide entrance all the way down the middle. There were five stables on either side as well as a dedicated wash area and a space opposite that to keep supplies including shampoos, brushes, buckets, wheelbarrows, and a selection of shovels and pitch forks. There was a hay bale there right now; the surplus they hadn’t needed for the nets last night but rather than put it back in the barn, they’d left it here for the next top-up.
After she put her basic grooming kit outside the stable block, she called out, ‘Good morning, guys and gals,’ and started with Sherbert, the liveliest horse of the bunch, and the one who already had her nose poking over the stable door, anxious to get her day started properly. She wasn’t daft, none of the horses were, they all knew this was coming the second those stable block doors opened in the mornings. Hazel ran a hand down the Palomino mare’s golden nose and felt the horse’s breath on her face as she opened up her stable door. ‘You always have to be first, don’t you?’
She fitted the horse with the halter and led Sherbert out into the morning sunshine, where she fixed the halter loosely to the wall with a rope, close enough so Sherbert couldn’t go running off anywhere but with room for movement should the horse want to turn her head. She picked out Sherbert’s hooves and gave her a quick brush before leading her over to the paddock, the familiar clippety-clop sound a simple part of life here at Heritage View.
Hazel closed the gate to the paddock. Sherbert had already stretched her long neck towards the ground to nibble at the grass. Hazel repeated the turnout process with every horse until it was time to go back for the last. She greeted Jigsaw, a gelding who had done well to be so patient, his long face looking at her over his stable door as if to ask when it would be his turn. ‘Last but not least, Jigsaw,’ she smiled before running a hand down from the area between his eyes to the tip of his nose, her cheek against his for a moment. ‘You’re a handsome boy.’
