Read Chapter 2: First Light, First Fight

The light through the lobby windows was grey and thick with salt spray when Imogen woke. She was still on the settee in the office, a stiff wool blanket her grandmother had knitted draped over her, the storm having finally exhausted itself sometime after three. Her neck ached. Her mouth tasted of dust and resentment.

She lay still a moment, staring at the water stain spreading across the ceiling like a continent on a map, and let the facts settle into her bones. Gull's Rest was hers. For a price—a whole summer, if she understood her grandmother's letter correctly. And somewhere out there, Elias Penrose was waiting to take it off her hands.

She rose, pulled her hair into a fist-tight knot, and found the kettle in the small kitchenette. The power had stayed on through the night, which was something. The plumbing gurgled but held. She made coffee so strong it could stand a spoon in it, drank it black, and began to catalogue the damage with an architect's eye.

The lobby offered up its wounds without complaint. A swollen floorboard near the front desk. A gap where the front door met its frame, letting in skeins of damp air. The window to her right had a hairline crack running diagonal from corner to corner, and the wallpaper near the radiators was peeling in curling, rust-brown tongues. She made notes on her phone, thumb moving fast, because noting things was easier than feeling things.

The knocking came when she was measuring the sag in the porch beam. Three firm raps, the knock of someone who expected to be answered immediately. Imogen set down her phone and opened the door.

The man on the step wore a waxed jacket over a tie, and carried a battered leather satchel that had seen three decades of use. He was seventy if he was a day, with a face like a well-kept ledger and white hair combed straight back. Behind him, the car park was empty save for a gleaming black Audi. She felt a pulse of irritation. The buyers were early.

"Miss Renfrew," he said, not quite a question. "I'm Arthur Pemberton. Your grandmother's solicitor."

The irritation banked, replaced by something colder. "You could have called."

"I did. Several times. Your phone has been off or out of range since you left London." His smile was thin, apologetic, professional. "May I come in?"

She stepped aside, and he entered the lobby with the careful tread of a man who noticed failing floorboards. He set his satchel on the front desk and unclasped it with practiced ease, drawing out a document folded in thirds, secured with red ribbon.

"Before we begin," he said, "I want you to understand that Margaret knew exactly what she was doing. She was, in her own way, a precise woman. Especially about this."

Imogen crossed her arms. "She left me a wreck with a letter attached telling me to run it. That much I know."

"Ah." Pemberton's mouth tightened. "You haven't read the full instrument, then."

"There was no full instrument. Just the letter and the keys."

"No. The letter was the invitation." He placed the document on the desk, flattened it with a dry palm. "This is the contract. It's been registered with the National Trust, the Cornwall planning authority, and the bank that holds the mortgage on the property. Your grandmother was nothing if not thorough."

Imogen picked up the document. The legalese swam before her eyes for a moment, then resolved into something stark and ugly. She read the whole thing twice before she let it drop back to the desk.

"This says I have to operate as a bed-and-breakfast."

"The property is currently licensed as such. The license lapses if the business does not trade for three consecutive months. Your grandmother's condition is that you must trade for the entire summer season—from the first of June to the first of September—before the property can be sold to any party."

"Any party," Imogen repeated.

Pemberton nodded. "Including Mr. Penrose."

"Which is why he made the offer. He knew I'd be stuck here. He knew the terms. He's circling like a vulture."

"I couldn't comment on Mr. Penrose's intentions."

"Can you comment on how I get out of this?"

Pemberton folded his hands. "The condition attaches to the property itself. It isn't a matter of trust or probate. It's a restrictive covenant, registered with the land registry. You can't sell before September. You can't lease before September. You can't transfer the property to a company that would then sell before September. Margaret was . . ."

"Ruthless."

"I was going to say thorough." He allowed himself a small, unreadable smile. "She had the documents drawn up two years ago, when she first fell ill. She amended them three times. Each revision made the condition more difficult to circumvent. She genuinely believed you needed to be here."

"She's dead. She doesn't get a vote."

"She gets exactly the vote she wrote for herself." Pemberton tucked the satchel under his arm. "I'll leave the full copy with you. My advice is to make the most of the summer. The property is structurally sound for its age. It needs love, but it doesn't need resurrection. And the village has been—"

"The village can keep its love to itself." Imogen was already moving toward the door. "Thank you for coming."

"If you intend to contest, you'll need a solicitor who specializes in probate disputes. I can recommend—"

"Not yet." She pulled the door open. Outside, the morning had burned off the worst of the clouds. The sea, beyond the dunes, was a grey-green carpet stitched with whitecaps. "I need to think."

Pemberton stepped past her, paused on the porch, and turned. "One more thing. Margaret left a box in her private rooms. Upstairs. She asked me to tell you it's for when the inn is trading, not before. I'd respect that, if I were you."

He didn't wait for a reply, just crossed to the Audi, folded himself inside, and drove off, leaving tyre tracks in the wet gravel.

Imogen stood on the porch, the wind pulling strands of hair loose from her knot, and listened to the emptiness of the inn behind her. The condition was ironclad. Pemberton hadn't even blinked when she'd raised the idea of contesting it. He'd had answers ready, and that meant her grandmother had anticipated every move she might make.

Which was just like Margaret Renfrew, who had never lost a game of chess in the village hall for thirty years, until they'd had to stop holding tournaments because nobody else wanted to play.

She turned to go back inside when the sound of a bike engine turned her head. A battered Royal Enfield rolled into the car park, trailing dust from the coastal road. The rider killed the engine and pulled off a helmet, and the world shifted its axis.

He'd been all elbows and long bones at sixteen. Fifteen years had filled in the gaps. Toby Carrick swung off the bike with an ease that belonged to someone who spent his life on the water, and his face broke into a grin that was somehow both unchanged and entirely new.

"Immy Renfrew. I heard you were back." His accent was full Cornwall, honeyed and slow. "And I heard you got the Penrose fly buzzing around already. Some things don't change."

"Toby." She heard her own voice come out flat, harder than she'd intended. She hadn't seen him since the summer after her grandmother had thrown that farewell party—the one where she'd told everyone she was going to London to be an architect, and Toby had pulled her aside to ask if she'd ever planned to come back. She'd said no. He'd nodded. That had been the whole of it.

"Come to offer help?" She crossed her arms. "Or just here for the show?"

Toby's grin didn't waver, but something in his eyes dimmed. "Both, if I can get away with it." He walked over, the gravel crunching under his boots. "I run a boat repair business now, out of a shed on Cariad Cove. Heard from Malcolm in the post office that Gull's Rest had a rough season last winter. Roof, some of the timbers. Thought you might need hands that know their way around a hull and a joist."

"I don't need hands." Imogen heard how sharp it sounded and watched his face take the hit. "I need the property sold and my life returned to me. The same life I left when I was seventeen and never once regretted walking away from."

Toby stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, looking up at her. The height difference hadn't changed—she still had six inches on him, even on the boards of the porch. He didn't seem to mind the angle.

"Your gran used to say something," he said, quiet now. "'Better to be anchored in a storm than adrift in calm water.' I don't know what she meant by it, but she said it often enough. Usually when you were visiting. Usually after you'd gone back to London."

Imogen felt a splinter of something in her chest, sharp and unwanted. "My grandmother is gone. She can't anchor anyone anymore."

"No," Toby agreed. "But the inn's still here. And so are we."

He stood there a moment longer, waiting. When she said nothing, he gave a small nod, walked back to his bike, and swung a leg over it.

"If you change your mind, the shed's on the cove. You'll know it when you see the hull of the *Merryweather* propped up out front. I'm repainting her next month. She's a beauty."

He raised a hand, then settled the helmet over his head and kicked the engine to life. Imogen watched him ride off down the lane until he was a speck against the thorn bushes and the sea.

Then she turned and went back inside, shut the door against the wind, and stood in the dim quiet of the lobby she now legally could not abandon.

The registry documents sat on the desk where Pemberton had left them. The letter from her grandmother was in her jacket pocket. The box upstairs—whatever it held—stayed closed.

Imogen walked to the front desk, pulled open the top drawer, and found a leather-bound ledger marked with a brass clasp. She opened it. Inside, in her grandmother's neat, upright hand, were columns of names and dates and numbers. The guest register. Fallen into disuse, the last entry dated eleven months ago.

She ran a finger down the page, reading the names, the town, the addresses. And she began to plan a summer that she had never wanted, for reasons she could not yet bear to name.

The first guest would arrive in four days.

She had no idea how to run this place. She was learning anyway.