For Now and Forever (The Inn at Sunset Harbor-Book 1)

CHAPTER SIX

Emily woke late on the third day. It was almost as if her body could tell it was Monday morning and that she would usually be rushing to work, shoving past commuters to get onto the metro, squeezing in beside bored, half asleep teenagers chewing gum and businessmen with their elbows protruding as they refused to fold up their papers, and had decided to let her have a well-earned lie-in. As she peeled off the covers, groggy-headed and bleary-eyed, she wondered when the last time had been that she'd slept in past 7 a.m. She probably hadn't done so since her twenties, since before she met Ben, a time when hitting the town with Amy had been her modus operandi.

Down in the kitchen, Emily spent a long time brewing coffee in a coffee pot and cooking up pancakes using the ingredients she'd bought from the local store. It filled her heart with pleasure to see the now overflowing cupboards, to hear the buzz of the fridge. For the first time since leaving New York, she felt like she'd gotten herself together, at least enough to survive the winter.

She savored every bite of her pancakes, every sip of her coffee, feeling well-rested, warm, and rejuvenated. Instead of the sounds of New York City, all Emily could hear were the distant lapping waves of the ocean and a gentle, rhythmic dripping sound as more icicles melted. She felt at peace for the first time in a long time.

After her relaxing breakfast, Emily cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom. She wiped all the tiles, revealing the intricate William Morris design beneath the grime, then buffed the glass in the cupboard doors, making the stained-glass motifs sparkle.

Empowered by having gotten the kitchen into such great shape, Emily decided to tackle another room, one she hadn't even looked in yet for fear its decayed state would upset her. And that was the library.

The library had been by far her favorite room as a child. She loved the way it was divided in half by white wooden pocket doors so that she could shut herself into a reading nook. And of course she loved all the books it contained. Emily's dad hadn't been a snob when it came to books. His thinking was that any written text was worth reading, and so he had allowed her to fill the shelves with teenage romance novels and high school dramas, with tacky front covers depicting sunsets and silhouettes of hunky males. It made Emily laugh as she wiped the dust off their jackets. It was like an awkward piece of her history had been preserved. Had the house not been abandoned for so long, she surely would have thrown them out at some point in the intervening years. But because of circumstance they had remained, gathering dust as the years passed by.

She placed the book in her hands back on the shelf as a sense of melancholy settled over her.

Next Emily decided to heed the advice of the electrician and go up into the attic to check the wiring. If they were indeed damaged by mice she wasn't sure what her next move would be—spend the necessary money on repairs or just tough out the rest of her time in the house. It didn't seem sensible to invest in the property if she was only going to be there for a fortnight at the most.

She pulled down the retractable ladder, coughing as a cloud of dust cascaded from the darkness above her, then peered up through the rectangular space that had opened up. The attic didn't freak her out as much as the basement did, but the thought of spider webs and mildew didn't exactly fill her with enthusiasm. Not to mention the suspected mice...

Emily climbed the stairs carefully, taking each one slowly, ascending into the hole an inch at a time. The higher she went, the more of the attic she could take in. It was, as she suspected, filled to the brim with items. Her dad's trips to yard sales and antiques fairs often yielded more items than could be feasibly displayed in the house, and her mom had banished some of the more unsightly ones to the attic. Emily saw a dark wooden tallboy which looked like it could have been a good two hundred years old, a sewing stool in faded green leather, and a coffee table made of oak, iron, and glass. She chuckled to herself, imagining her mom's face when Dad had hauled all this stuff home. It was so far from her taste! Her mom liked things modern, sleek, and clean.