Chapter Eighteen
The Story Worth Telling
Sitting on the inn’s lounge sofa, Eva found herself entangled with Charlie, Tilly at their feet.
Cosy and comfortable, she snuggled into his chest, before reality rudely awoke her.
The two must have dozed off on the sofa last night after their epic search for Charlie’s four-legged friend.
Florence had covered them in a blanket. Eva thought, how sweet of her to—“Crap, Florence! Charlie, wake up!”
Eva burst into Florence’s office without knocking, her hair still wild from the spooning session she’d just awoken from. Still, she clutched her journal like a weapon.
“Don’t you dare sign anything,” she announced.
Florence jumped, sending a cascade of bills sliding across her desk. Her reading glasses slipped down her nose as she blinked up at Eva. “Good Lord, you nearly gave me a coronary. It is half five in the morning, what are you doing up? I—”
“The papers. From Aidan. Whatever legal nonsense he’s wrapped in a bow and delivered with his snake-oil smile.” Eva collapsed into the chair across from Florence, her breath coming in puffs. “Promise me.”
Florence carefully realigned the scattered papers, a gesture Eva recognised as buying time. “The deadline on Aidan’s safety net offer is midnight tonight, love. The bank won’t accept righteous indignation as collateral on the twenty-fourth,.”
“No, but they might accept this.” Eva slapped her journal on the desk between them, pages fluttering like moth wings. “Margaret’s real story. Not the tragedy Aidan will peddle to his journalist friends when he tries to give this place a sellout story.”
“Ah. Morning love,” sighed Florence as Charlie’s frame entered through the doorway.
He still appeared to be shifting the sleep from his eyes after Eva’s rude awakening.
Florence’s fingers found the manila folder from Thornfield Development, its corporate logo gleaming like a threat.
“You heard about how he does that, then. Believe me, he’s already briefed me on how he’s going to share: ‘The Tragic Romance of York’s Lost Nurse. ’ I wanted to throw my teapot at him.”
“Did you?” Eva questioned, insulted even hearing it.
“I considered it. But it’s good china.” Florence’s mouth twitched up. “Besides, assault charges would complicate the bankruptcy proceedings.”
Charlie leaned forward, accidentally crushing an invoice for plumbing repairs that looked older than he was. “What exactly is Aidan planning? The truth, Florence.”
Florence sighed, casting her eyes between the two of them and suddenly looking ancient.
“He’s got that journalist friend of his ready to run a feature.
Tomorrow’s edition. ‘The Heartbreak Behind The Riddle and Quill Inn.’ Complete with artistic photos of empty rooms and dramatic quotes about love lost.” She pushed her glasses up her nose.
She tried to say it casually, but Eva could hear the pain and embarrassment behind the words.
“He’s betting the threat of the sensational story will either force us to sell immediately to avoid the attention, or drive up interest so he can flip the property for twice what he paid. ”
“That manipulative little—” spat Charlie.
“Quite.” Florence’s smile was sharp. “His exact words were ‘Everyone loves a tragic romance. We’ll have tour buses by New Year’s.’”
Eva felt something fierce and protective rise in her chest. “Not if I write the real story first.”
“You? Write? Eva, love, you said you hadn’t written anything since you were a teen, do you really think you ca—”
“Yes, and I will.” Eva stood taller, energy crackling through her like lightning before a storm. “I’m going to write Margaret’s real story right now. All of it. Not the tragedy, but the triumph. I’m calling it ‘Margaret’s Trail of Magic’.”
Florence raised an eyebrow. “The whole thing?”
“Every damn word. Time is of the essence Florence, we have to perform magic!” Eva’s hands were already itching for her keyboard.
“The Christmas funds, the reading programs, the lives she saved. The veterans she housed, the children she fed, the love she multiplied across this entire city. And yes, I’ll include Walter—but as one chapter in a full life, not the defining heartbreak.
” She turned to Charlie, searching for his approval.
“That’s a lovely thought, but how does one day of writing combat Aidan’s media machine?”
“Because truth is more interesting than tragedy,” Eva said. “Always has been. People think they want the dramatic story, but what they really want is to believe that broken hearts can still do beautiful things.”
Florence opened her desk drawer—the one that stuck and required jiggling—and pulled out Margaret’s wooden box.
She must have retrieved it when Charlie called her over to tell her Tilly was missing.
“She wasn’t perfect, you know. Had a tongue like a whip when crossed.
Once poured a pint over a man’s head for suggesting nurses were just failed doctors’ wives. ”
“Even better,” Eva grinned. “Perfect people make terrible stories.”
“Then you’ll need this.” Florence pushed the box across the desk. “Charlie here has the rest, but … be gentle with her memory, love. She wasn’t a saint. She was just a woman who made a choice.”
“That’s what makes her extraordinary,” Eva said softly, taking the box. “Saints don’t have to choose.”
Box in hand, she turned to Charlie. Talking to him with her eyes only, she begged him to let her do this.
Back in her room, Eva transformed her desk into command central.
Photos fanned across the wood like tarot cards telling a life.
She’d stolen Florence’s Scotch tape and now Margaret’s timeline decorated her wall—1944 on the left, early 2000s on the right, five decades of quiet kindness mapped in yellow sticky notes.
Both she and Charlie stood back and looked at their creation in awe.
While he was hesitant at first, he’d tried his best to hear Eva’s plea to tell his grandmother’s story as it should be told.
He’d tasted the bitter fear of losing Tilly just yesterday and there was no way he could risk that feeling with the inn, Florence or especially Eva. He had to at least let her try.
With Charlie vacating the room to give her some space to get in the writing mindset, Eva made herself a cup of tea using the room’s miniature kettle, cracked her knuckles like a pianist before a concert, and began to type:
“We love our tragic heroines best when they’re beautiful corpses. Catherine Earnshaw wasting away on the moors. Juliet in her marble tomb. We want our broken-hearted women aesthetic and finite, their pain wrapped up neatly with a bow.
Margaret Wells refused to give in to a tragedy. She lived.
Eva thought about it all as she typed. Margaret lived through rationing and rebuilding.
She lived through marriage to a good man she respected but didn’t burn for.
She lived through raising children and burying a husband and watching the world change around her.
She lived, and in living, she loved—not with the desperate passion of youth, but with the steady, transformative love of someone who understood that hearts, like bones, grow stronger at the broken places.
Eva wrote all through the day, fuelled by Florence’s tactical tea deliveries (the room kettle just couldn’t fill the epic sized mug she needed) and her own desperate desire to get this right.
She wrote about the library where Margaret had worked, slipping notes into books to tell people ‘You matter’, ‘Tomorrow can be different’ and ‘Someone believes in you.’ Simple phrases that became lifelines for damaged soldiers learning to live again with shaking hands.
She wrote about Christmas 1952, when Margaret had noticed children pressing their noses against toy shop windows.
By Christmas Eve, mysterious baskets had appeared on doorsteps throughout York—oranges and walnuts, hand-knitted mittens, and small toys.
The Christmas Angel, they’d called her, never knowing it was the head nurse who’d organised it all, encouraging shopkeepers into donations with surgical precision.
When she got to Walter, she paused. This was the tricky part—how to tell a love story without making it the only story.
She thought of her own failed relationships, how she’d tried to build her entire identity around loving men who couldn’t love her back the same way.
The difference was, Margaret had chosen to love anyway—just differently. She flexed her fingers and typed:
In 1945, Margaret Wells fell in love with an American soldier named Walter Lorne. They wrote notes in library books, planned a future on a Pennsylvania farm, dreamed the dreams of eighteen-year-olds who think love conquers everything.
He left without saying goodbye—deployed in the night, no warning, no explanation, just gone. She waited. He never came back.
Although this is where other stories would end, Margaret had over sixty more years to live.
Eva continued to inform the reader of how she spent them at bedsides and Christmas markets, in council meetings and charity drives.
She spent them teaching children to read and veterans to hope.
She spent them proving that love isn’t just what happens between two people in the dark—it’s what happens when you decide the world deserves better than your broken heart.
She kept writing, her eyes burning, her back aching.
The radiator clanged its evening song. Her tea went cold, then colder.
At 7 p.m., she opened Margaret’s box and found a photograph—Margaret in her forties, surrounded by children at the library, every face turned towards her like flowers to the sun.
On the back, in spidery handwriting: ‘Tuesday story time, 1973. My favourite hour of the week’.
Eva taped it to her wall and kept typing.