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I also wanted to check the cameras I’d set up late last night. Grandpa had rented this house out once he’d moved in with us, and one of the things he’d purchased after his tenants had left six months ago was chargeable cameras.
They even had solar panels to charge them.
I wasn’t sure they were much good in England for at least six months of the year, given the propensity the UK had to attract rain, but one of the bonuses of a small town was that the neighbours were a bit, well, neighbourly, and Stan next door had often unscrewed them to charge them for Grandpa.
Therefore, I’d swiped one of those battery-operated security cameras, its solar panel charger, and loaded the corresponding app onto my phone before I’d spirited it away to the B&B after the wake last night.
Declan Tierney had scared me a bit.
I hadn’t admitted it to anyone, but his brazen approach and pushy demeanour had unsettled me a little at the bar. What kind of a heartless knobhead approached someone at their grandfather’s wake to buy the property they’d just inherited? How cruel and cold-hearted did one have to be to do such a thing?
Arseholes who exploited the emotional pain of others, that was who.
Either way, I knew the number one rule of grief: don’t make any big decisions for at least six months.
Okay, so I wasn’t exactly following that rule by uprooting my entire life to Fox Point, but that wasn’t really under my control. It was one of those things that just made sense, and I knew the housing market was insane and moved quickly, so it wasn’t like I’d have time to stay in my parents’ place once they listed it, either.
And, sure, okay, fine.
I’d never really lived without them, either, and I didn’twantto. Losing Grandpa had reminded me that we didn’t have as much time as we thought we did, and I wanted to spend mine close to my parents.
Besides, I wasn’t even sure I liked living in a city. Even if I couldn’t settle here, I could at least get the B&B up and running, and if I couldn’t run it, then that was okay, too.
Like Ash had said last night—it was a house, if nothing else.
It was a dry roof.
Or… you know. It would be.
I hoped that it already was, and there’d been no sign of water damage inside that I could see, but I was preparing myself for the worst.
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Something like that.
My first mission today was to go over there, load any footage onto the app, and make sure nobody had stopped by to cause trouble. And by nobody, I meant Declan Tierney.
I didn’t trust him.
My unsettled feeling at the bar had been correct, because I’d done a bit of research on his company when I’d finally gotten home last night. Mum and Dad had both already been asleep, and I’d nestled on the sofa with my laptop to look into him.
I knew a little, of course, but it was mostly what I’d read from news articles about people complaining about their new build houses from his company having no end of issues. Leaking windows, bad pipes, one person even had their housesinkinginto the ground because he’d built on an old flood plain and not fully prepared the land. I’d really paid attention to those articles and discovered that he was a truly horrid man, only caring about his bottom line, and was in several legal battles with buyers of his houses all across England.
One conveyancing company was even attempting to sue him.
So, no. I would not be selling to that scoundrel, thank you very much.
I pulled up outside the bed and breakfast and sighed. It looked the same as it had yesterday, which meant two things. Declan Tierney hadn’t been there, and I still did not have a fairy godmother who was willing to come and turn my dilapidated inheritance into a castle overnight.
Pity.
That would have made my life much easier.
With a yawn that made my eyes water, I walked over to the fence I’d attached the camera to so the connection would be in range and opened the app. Nothing downloaded, so I reset the app to see if it was just a dodgy connection, but nope.
Nothing.
I stared at the camera.
