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If I had, I would have kept those summer visits up until Grandpa got ill and moved in with us. Instead, I’d given in to my broken heart and stayed away, throwing myself into university life, pretending this place didn’t exist.
Now, I had no time to commiserate about what could have been. I was apparently the new owner of The Ivy, and I needed to process what that meant for me.
Despite what Mum had said, I couldn’t justquit my job. Sure, I didn’t get along with my boss and I didn’t want to be a receptionist at a dental office forever, but I couldn’t just up and leave.
Could I?
No.
That was silly. And financially irresponsible.
It wasn’t like I’d won the lottery. One hundred grand sounded like a ton of money, but it wasn’t really, not in this economy.
Jesus. I sounded like Aunt Tess. All she did was complain about the price of everything. I was only on board when we were discussing the price of Freddos.
I’d almost had a heart attack when I’d seen one for seventy pence recently.
That was criminal. I bet they were smaller than they used to be, too. Like those tubs of chocolate that you only ever bought at Christmas.
Wow. That was a mental tangent.
The point remained: I could not up and quit my job on a whim.
Not that my boss would complain. He’d been trying to make me quit for weeks, if not months. I was still there out of spite, honestly. I knew he wouldn’t and couldn’t fire me because he had no reason to, and knowing that he hated me as much as I hated him made it almost worth going back to work my notice.
Then again, he’d probably complain about that just to make my life harder.
It didn’t change that my whole life was in Bristol, and it wasn’t like it was a stone’s throw away. Then again, if my parents had decided to sell our house, I didn’t havethatmuch of a life there. It wasn’t like I could afford to buy and renting a place and getting a roommate sounded like my idea of hell.
Thirty million ideas of hell, actually.
I was overwhelmed.
It hadn’t sunken in yet that my grandfather had left me his beloved bed and breakfast, the place that had been in our family for two generations before him. I supposed that made me the fifth-generation owner.
Or was it fourth? What was I since it’d skipped Mum?
Hmm.
Things to ponder.
If only someone had told me this before Grandpa had died, I’d have been able to plan. To process it. Do all the things one could do when they weren’t in a state of insane grief and working partially on autopilot.
Was that too much to ask? I didn’t think so.
I slowed as I came to the turn-off point from the main road. I followed it, then took the route as I remembered it. That was one of the good things about this place staying the same—there were no extra roads I had to learn.
Somehow, perhaps by a miracle, I trundled up the road towards the sign. It declared this to be The Ivy Bed and Breakfast, established in 1864 by the Walsh family, and was decorated with the leaves of the very thing it was named for.
Ivy.
The sign had seen much better days. Paint flecked away from the metal, and the ivy had wound itself up around the poles that held up the sign, clinging to the metal in an explosion of green. The sign desperately needed stripping off and repainting, and that meant the ivy would have to go for restoration to be completed.
Hopefully that was the case for the rest of the building, but looking at the sign, I wasn’t so sure.
That feeling of uncertainty only grew as I followed the gravel road, driving along it at a snail’s pace. The grass was overgrown and riddled with weeds. Ivy crept up the trees, suffocating the trunks and branches, and loose bits swayed in the wind. One tree was completely down, and I had to manoeuvre around it as it slightly encroached on the road.
And the building…
