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CHAPTER1
ELLIE
OCTOBER
“I’m afraid it’s not good news.”
“Wh—what?” Ellie Davies stared at her sister-in-law, trying not to show how nervous she felt. She’d been delaying this financial reckoning of the inn for a couple of months, it was true, but she hadn’t expected Sarah to sound quite sogrim. Admittedly, they’d all known more or less that the finances of the place weren’t tip-top, but they weremanaging. Mostly. Weren’t they?
“The books,” Sarah stated, thumping the ledger that she’d placed on the kitchen table in front of them like some sacred tome, “they don’t balance.”
“They… don’t?” Ellie took a sip of tea as she avoided Sarah’s censorious gaze, looking out the window of the Bluebell Inn, into the garden beyond. A few chickens pecked in the long grass, under the low-hanging boughs of a gnarled, old apple tree, a wooden swing hanging from one of its thick branches. It was a lovely sight, encompassing exactly the kind of quaint coziness that this inn had to offer the discerning guest. Could Sarah really be implying it might all be at risk? “Are you sure?” Ellie asked Sarah, turning back to look at her, hoping for some caveat or consideration, but her sister-in-law looked down her long, patrician nose as she pursed her lips.
“Yes, I’m sure, Ellie. The inn has been operating at a loss basically since it began, as everyone should know, since it’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning—”
“Yes, I know, but we’ve stillmanaged,” Ellie cut across her, trying to smile, as if she could simply jolly her sister-in-law along. “We were always going to be on a shoestring, weren’t we?”
“Well, we’re now running out of string,” Sarah replied flatly. She flicked her long, auburn braid over one shoulder as she flipped open the ledger to show Ellie exactly what she meant.
Two years ago, Ellie and her husband Matthew, along with their four young children, had moved from suburban Connecticut to the tiny village of Llandrigg in South Wales, to help Matthew’s mother, Gwen, renovate the family bed and breakfast, known as the Bluebell Inn. The move had been prompted by Matthew’s redundancy, which had hit him—and the whole family—hard. They’d needed a change, a chance to reset, recalibrate, re-everything.
Life in the little village had been challenging at first, trying to make ends meet, but also, more significantly, learning to adjust to an entirely new way of living, so different from the comforts, conveniences, and familiarity of life back in the United States. Matthew might have been born and raised in Wales, but after twenty years in the US, he’d become used to American living, and it had been all Ellie or any of their four children had ever known.
Two years on, Ellie could acknowledge thatshemight have been the one who’d had the most trouble adapting at first, but they’d all managed to learn to embrace life here, and even to love it, and they’d transformed this ramshackle, rather homely inn. Now, instead of your common-or-garden B&B, it was a “family inn,” offering families of all shapes and sizes a unique getaway, and an opportunity to experience all the aspects of rural, community life—from weeding the veg patch and collecting eggs, to family-style meals, craft afternoons and game nights. Ellie had thought it had been, if not a roaring, then at least a modest, success, with solid bookings throughout the summer and most holidays. But it appeared she’d been wrong, based on what Sarah, who was the company’s accountant as well as her husband’s sister, was now saying.
“Look, Ellie,” Sarah indicated, running a finger down the ledger, but as Ellie leaned forward to scan the neatly written columns, the figures simply swam before her eyes. Math had never been her strong suit.
“Can you explain it to me?” she asked. “Because I’m not sure I can make heads or tails of all that.”
Sarah sighed and closed the book. “I can explain it easily enough,” she told her as Ellie’s gaze moved inexorably back to the window and the comforting view. The wooden swing six-year-old Ava loved to play on moved gently in the autumn breeze. They’d built somethinggoodhere, she thought, taking refuge in that. It couldn’t slip away from them simply because of figures in a ledger. “But can you pay attention, please?” Sarah continued, an edge of impatience sharpening her voice. “This is important, you know.”
“I’m sorry.” Ellie turned back once more, repentant. They might have built something good here, but it appeared now to be at risk. She needed to understand why, and her sister-in-law certainly seemed to think so, too.
When she’d first moved to Llandrigg, Ellie and Sarah had rubbed each other the wrong way. Sarah had seemed so confident and accomplished, striding through life with elegant aplomb, while Ellie had felt more of a mess, mired in doubts about the move, as well as her own potential place in Llandrigg—and in the family business. Sometimes she’d felt as if Sarah had been turning her nose up at her, and Sarah, in turn, had felt excluded from the goings-on with the inn.
They had come a long way from those first uneasy months, but the truth remained that they were very different people, as evidenced right now by the way Ellie was tempted to avoid this conversation, while Sarah was grimly determined to have it. If only Sarah could sound a little moreoptimistic, Ellie thought as she took a reassuring sip of tea to steady herself; over the last two years, she’d come to love the quintessentially British drink.
“I’m listening,” she assured her sister-in-law. “So, explain it to me, please. Why don’t the books balance, exactly?”
“Because they generally don’t when you’re spending more money than you make,” Sarah replied rather tartly. “That’s how it works. Moreoutthanintends to be a recipe for eventual bankruptcy, whether it’s in a few weeks, or months or years.”
Bankruptcy? Ellie’s stomach hollowed at the thought. The move to Llandrigg had been prompted, in part, by their own family’s brush with bankruptcy, after Matthew’s redundancy. They’d had to sell their home in a fire sale and money had been very tight for a while. The last thing Ellie wanted was for her family to experience that kind of disappointment and upheaval again.
“But are we, really?” she pressed, still unable to believe it could be as cut and dried as that. “I mean, I know money has been tight, of course I do, and we’ve always had to cut things pretty close to the bone, but we’ve been fully booked nearly every—”
“Holiday, yes,” Sarah cut her off, her tone gentling yet still intractable. “But there are only about thirteen holiday weeks in a year, and thirty-nine that aren’t. It’s those thirty-nine weeks we need to worry about.”
“There have beensomeschool-term bookings,” Ellie protested.
Not nearly as many, it was true; for the month or so on either side of a school holiday, the inn might be half or even fully booked, but for the rest of the year, it tended to be pretty sparse. Ellie hadn’t actually minded that much; the truth was, life was busy enough, and when you had a house full of guests, many of them young and noisy, and your own family besides, she’d enjoyed having a bit of a break in between. Maybe sheshouldhave minded, all things considered.
Sarahhadbeen asking to go over the books with her and Matthew since the end of the summer, Ellie acknowledged uncomfortably. Matt would normally have been at this meeting, but he’d had a last-minute opportunity to scout out some Welsh blue slate roof tiles at a reclamation yard in Abergavenny. She didn’t think he’d been all that worried about the inn’s finances, but maybe he should have been. Maybe they all should have been.
“So… what are you saying?” Ellie asked, adopting what she hoped was a cheerfully pragmatic tone. This was a solvable problem. At least, it could be. Ithadto be. “We need to increase our bookings? Maybe up our marketing budget a bit, get the word out again?” She raised her eyebrows in expectation, only to have Sarah sigh and shake her head slowly.
“Ellie, it’s not that simple. We haven’t got the money to do any of that. The truth is, we never really did. You’re right when you say we’ve been running this place on a shoestring. It doesn’t give us anything to play with now, I’m afraid.” She paused before stating resolutely, “Running the inn as it is is just about all we can manage, and even then not for very long.”
Ellie reached for her teacup once again and took a much-needed sip. She wasn’t liking the sound of this, at all.
