Read Chapter 5: Salt on the Windowsill

The first guests arrived at half past ten, which was forty-five minutes before Imogen had finished wrestling the smoke alarm into silence and an hour before she’d planned to nail the refurbished "GULL'S REST BED & BREAKFAST" sign above the door. She heard the car before she saw it—a battered people-carrier crunching up the gravel drive, its exhaust coughing like a smoker with a chest infection.

She wiped her hands on her jeans, left the toolbox on the front step, and summoned a smile as the car doors opened like a clown act at a circus. Two adults, three children, and a grandmother who immediately began fanning herself with a folded map of Cornwall.

"Welcome to Gull's Rest," Imogen said, her voice carrying a brightness she did not feel. "You must be the Hendersons."

The father, a red-faced man in a golf shirt that had seen better days, looked past her at the inn's façade. His eyes snagged on the peeling whitewash, the cracked window frame on the second floor, the crooked chimney pot that had been mocking her since she'd arrived. "A bit more... rustic than the photos," he said.

"The photos were taken in good light," Imogen said, and immediately regretted it.

The children, twins of about eight and a younger girl who might have been five, had already discovered the garden and were chasing each other through the hydrangeas with shrieks that scattered the seagulls from the roofline. The grandmother shuffled past Imogen without a word and vanished into the lobby. The mother, whose name Imogen learned was Sharon, offered an apologetic smile and followed her mother-in-law inside.

Imogen took a breath. Salt and damp and paint fumes. She thought of her London flat—clean lines, a concierge, no peeling anything—and felt a pang that was almost physical. It had been four days since the storm. Four days of scrubbing, patching, cursing Elias Penrose's name, and lying awake wondering what her grandmother had been thinking.

"Breakfast is at eight," she called after them. "We have—"

"Continental or full English?" the man asked, already fishing a golf club out of the boot.

"Full English," Imogen said. "Cooked to order."

She had no idea if that was true. The chef she'd hired from Truro—a man named Derek who'd responded to her desperate advertisement with a text promising he was "very flexible"—had quit that morning. His message, which she'd read while elbow-deep in bleach, had been three words: *Found other work.* No apology. No notice. Just a breadcrumb trail of self-respect leaving her with a kitchen full of supplies she didn't know how to cook.

She'd spent the rest of the morning reading the "Breakfast Principles" section of her grandmother's dog-eared copy of *The Good Housekeeper's Companion,* which had told her more about the correct temperature of lard than she ever wished to know.

---

By noon, the Hendersons had pronounced the rooms "quaint but musty," the twins had discovered that the hallway floorboards creaked in a satisfying rhythm when jumped on in unison, and the grandmother—who had not spoken a single word—had established a permanent position in the lobby armchair, from which she stared at the guest book with undisguised suspicion.

Imogen had been in the kitchen for ninety minutes, attempting to make preliminary scones for tomorrow's afternoon tea, when the knock came at the back door. She opened it with flour up to her elbows and found Toby Penrose on the step, holding a casserole dish wrapped in a tea towel.

"Peace offering," he said, his smile uncertain. "I figured you'd be in over your head by now."

Her first instinct was to slam the door. The Penroses had taken enough from her. But Toby looked harmless—he always had, with his soft eyes and the cowlick that had refused to lie flat since primary school—and the smell drifting from the dish was undeniably magnificent.

"I don't need charity," she said.

"It's not charity. It's a condolence casserole. You inherited a dead grandmother and a dying building. That's worth at least one decent meal."

She stared at him. "You heard about the chef."

"Everyone's heard about the chef. Truro's three hours away, but gossip travels at the speed of light down here. Derek's already bragging at the Aggi that he's moving to Newquay for a hotel job." Toby shrugged. "I'm at The Old Coastguard now. Kitchen de partie, but I do the brunch menu on weekends. I thought—"

"I don't need your pity, Toby."

"It's not pity. It's lasagna." He shifted the dish in his hands. "And maybe a little pity. But mostly lasagna."

Imogen's stomach chose that moment to growl, loud enough that Toby's eyebrows rose. She hadn't eaten properly since Tuesday. The bread she'd bought had gone stale, and she'd been surviving on tea and the last of the biscuits she'd found in her grandmother's pantry, which tasted like regret and 1998.

She stepped aside. "Put it on the counter. You're not staying."

"I wouldn't dream of it." But he crossed the kitchen with an easy familiarity, setting the dish down and looking around at the chaos—the unwashed mixing bowls, the collapsed scone dough, the open copy of *The Good Housekeeper's Companion* propped against the kettle. "You've been busy."

"Busy failing, mostly."

"Mrs. Henderson loves a project." He said it gently. "She and my grandmother were in the WI together. Mum said she's been looking forward to this weekend for months. She doesn't care about the peeling paint."

Imogen turned to the sink and began scrubbing the flour from her hands. Her knuckles were red from the bleach, and there was a smear of something she didn't want to identify on her sleeve. She looked, she imagined, like a woman who had been defeated by a small Cornish guesthouse should look: exhausted, flour-dusted, and out of her depth.

"They're checking out Sunday," she said. "If I don't have a proper breakfast menu by then, I'll be serving cold cereal and apologies. The booking for next week is a couple from Bristol who specified 'gourmet provisions.' I don't even know what that means."

"Small plates," Toby said. "Lots of little things. Cornish crab, pickled vegetables, good bread."

"I don't have any of those things."

"You have a market ten minutes away, and a fishmonger who'd deliver if you asked. And you have"—he gestured at the casserole—"a chef who owes you a favor from the time you didn't tell the whole school that he wet himself on the year six trip to Tintagel."

Imogen couldn't help it. She laughed. It came out rusty and surprised, like a drawer opening that hadn't moved in years. "You were nine. I'd just moved here. I was too scared of everyone to tell anyone anything."

"Still counts." He was looking at her with an expression she couldn't quite read—something softer than pity, more careful than friendship. "Look, I'm not offering to solve your problems. I'm offering to help with breakfast. Just until you find someone permanent. A few hours in the morning. I don't cook at The Old Coastguard until lunch service."

She dried her hands on a towel that smelled faintly of mildew. Outside, one of the twins shrieked something about a crab, and the grandmother could be heard demanding that someone fetch her a sherry.

"Why?" Imogen asked.

Toby tucked his hands in his pockets. "Because my brother's an arsehole, and I'm fairly sure you're only here because of something he did years ago that neither of you will talk about. And because"—he glanced toward the back window, where the sea was a grey sheet today, drenched in low cloud—"my grandmother would haunt me if I let you sink. She loved Dorothea like a sister."

Imogen thought of the warning in the guest book. *Don't trust the Penroses.* But the casserole smelled like garlic and rosemary and Sunday lunches, and Toby Penrose had never once broken her heart. That had been Elias—Elias with his easy grin, his promise to meet her at Pencarrick Cove before she left for London, his silence that followed.

"There's a spare key in the drawer," she said. "If you're serious. Breakfast shift starts at six."

Toby smiled, and it was like watching the sun break through the cloud over the sea. "I'll be here. Bring you some eggs from—"

"Don't push it."

"Right." He backed toward the door, hands raised in mock surrender. "See you at six, boss."

He was gone before she could tell him not to call her that. The kitchen felt quieter without him, but the casserole sat on the counter like a promise, and for the first time in four days, Imogen thought she might be able to do this. Feed the Hendersons. Survive the summer. Keep her hands busy enough that she didn't have to think about Elias and the letter and the grandmother she'd never really known.

---

That night, after the Hendersons had retreated to their rooms and the grandmother had been escorted to hers with the promise of hot cocoa, Imogen sat alone in the dining room with the lights dimmed. She'd eaten two helpings of lasagna. She'd washed the dishes. She'd written a list of what she needed for tomorrow's breakfast—eggs, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, decent coffee—and she'd taped it to the fridge.

She should go to bed. She was exhausted. Instead, she found herself climbing the stairs to the second floor, past the guest rooms with their flowered wallpaper and brass beds, to the door at the end of the corridor. Her grandmother's private rooms. She'd been avoiding them for four days.

The door was locked. Of course it was. Imogen rattled the handle, then paused. The lock was old—a simple brass mechanism with a keyhole so worn it looked like it might give at a nudge. She pulled a hairpin from her hastily bunched hair, bent it, and slid it into the lock. Her hands knew what to do from years of childhood mischief, from the summer she'd spent exploring locked cupboards at Gull's Rest while Dorothea dozed in the garden.

The lock gave with a soft *click.*

She pushed the door open. And the smell hit her first: lavender and beeswax and something older, like paper and dust and secrets kept for decades. Her grandmother's bedroom was neat as a pin, the bed made with hospital corners, the windows shut tight against the sea air. On the dressing table sat a silver hairbrush and a photograph in a tarnished frame—a young woman with Imogen's own sharp cheekbones, standing on the cliffs at Pencarrick, laughing at someone off-camera.

Imogen crossed the room and picked up the photograph. There was another figure in the corner of the frame, half-cut off by the edge: a boy, maybe ten or eleven, dark-haired, with a grin she knew from another era entirely. Behind them, on the far edge of the cove, a sailboat bobbed at anchor.

She turned the photograph over. On the back, in her grandmother's precise handwriting: *Elias and me. Last good summer.*

The floorboards creaked behind her. Imogen spun, the photograph clutched to her chest. But the doorway was empty, and the only sound was the distant roll of the sea and the wind rattling the windowsill, where a thin film of salt was already gathering like snow.