Chapter Two
Now
W hen I woke up on Friday morning, there were a few hazy seconds when I knew I had something important to do, where I could feel excitement and apprehension mingling together, but I couldn’t remember why.
Then my sleep fug cleared, and the open house event at Tyller Klos slid to the front of my consciousness.
I had kicked the thin summer duvet off in the night, and – as I picked it off the floor – I saw Connor, the cuddly turtle that still sat on my teenage desk, staring at me.
I ignored him, went into the bathroom and set the shower on a cooler setting than usual, letting my thoughts flow with the water.
I had to frame tonight as a job, a piece I was writing for the Star , nothing more.
That way it would lose some of its significance and I wouldn’t be so nervous.
I just hoped that spending the morning with Spence wouldn’t completely ruin my approach.
She had a tendency to turn everything upside down with a casual aside or pointed comment, and that was something I could really do without today.
‘Here you go.’
I put Spence’s coffee on her table and sat in my usual chair, the large window to my left, the view of Alperwick village sloping down towards the sea always distracting, but especially when it was dusted with morning gold like it was right now.
‘I have something for you.’ Spence sipped her drink and tipped her head towards a glossy magazine lying on her footstool. The cover was a photograph of a quaint Cotswold cottage swamped by wisteria, below the title Home Style written in a cheery yellow font.
‘What’s this?’ I picked it up and flicked idly through it.
‘Research,’ Spence said. ‘Try page fifty-two.’
‘I don’t need to be an expert in architectural design to go to one open-house event,’ I said. ‘I’m the ignorant journalist, asking all the questions with a bland smile on my face. They’ll want to impress me with their boundless skills and knowledge.’
Spence didn’t reply, so I sighed and turned to page fifty-two, pressing the magazine open on my lap.
My first thought was familiarity – I knew that house and had seen it recently – and my second thought was …
nothing. My mind was wiped clean, replaced by a whooshing sound between my ears and the distinct sensation that I was tipping sideways.
‘It seems tonight’s event isn’t just important for Alperwick,’ Spence said, her words reaching me through my brain fog, ‘if the house is featuring in magazines like this.’
‘How is … how is this happening?’ I wasn’t sure if I’d spoken out loud, and if I had, I didn’t expect an answer. I started reading, the truth thudding into me with every new, horrifying sentence. I gripped the magazine, which felt tacky beneath my fingertips.
‘A Spark of Heaven on the North Cornwall Coast’ read the headline, and for a moment I had to stop, because of course. Of course. I should have realized .
The first photograph was a wide shot of Alperwick House, showing off the huge stretches of glass that had replaced the smaller, older windows.
The elegant path was made up of large, biscuit-coloured paving stones running up to the wide front step, the generous open porch embedded with spotlights that lit it from every angle.
Everything was sharp lines and soft tones, stylish but in keeping with the original shape of the house; its sloped roof and its sturdy, been-here-for-hundreds-of-years demeanour.
The word ‘sustainable’ jumped out at me , but that wasn’t too specific – everyone was building sustainable houses now: you couldn’t really say you were going back to the olden days, putting in coal fires and F-rated appliances just to be quirky.
The pull quote, on the other hand, was like a punch in the stomach.
It mentioned Sparks, the Smart System that ran the house.
Everything about the article was a shock, and yet it was also completely, thoroughly inevitable.
‘Why?’ I ran my finger over that one word: Sparks.
‘This doesn’t change anything,’ Spence said, the glint in her eye unmistakable. ‘Just follow the plan. Go to the open house, take photos of the rooms and ask polite, probing questions. Have a proper nosy; absorb all the ways the house is different, find what you need and get out.’
‘It changes everything.’ I shook my head. ‘Did you know about this?’
‘The magazine only came this morning. A friend sent it to me, said I might like to see one of the articles.’ She waggled an A4 Jiffy bag, as if to prove she wasn’t responsible for bringing this world-altering publication into our lives.
‘At least now we know who’s behind the project.’ I glanced at my rucksack, desperate to take out my phone and call Kira.
‘We know who the architect is,’ Spence corrected.
Beneath my flood of panic, irritation bloomed like Japanese cherry trees in springtime because, one, I really could have done without her pedantry right then and, two, she wasn’t going to let me use this as an excuse not to go.
‘You’ll be all right,’ Spence said, confirming it. ‘Even if he’s there, with that gorgeous thick hair and his familiar smile, the one that promises you’ll have his undivided attention when you’re alone together.’
‘I should never have told you about him.’ I pressed my fingers to my lips, as if the memories might slip out of my mouth.
They had started as soon as I’d seen his name in print, his eyes staring out at me, slightly wide as if it was a two-way thing – as if he was experiencing shock like I was, and the camera hadn’t captured him weeks ago.
Thick, conker-coloured hair, the reddish hue more obvious in the sunshine, and lips that were so often pressed together, pensive or thoughtful.
His laughter was hard won, but wholly precious because of that, and his brown eyes had always been warm, especially when they met mine.
It was over a decade since things had ended badly, and I had hoarded those memories, thinking that they were all I would have – apart from my stalking sessions on Instagram, which never made me feel better.
Thirteen long years of not seeing him, of not having my resentment or anger to sustain me in his absence because they had lasted a laughingly short time.
Spence tutted. ‘Of course you should have. You think I’d be full steam ahead with writing Amelie and Connor a new chapter if you hadn’t told me about him? Not your recent ex Rick, but the one who got away, who’s the definition of unfinished business.’
‘This isn’t for me, though,’ I rushed out. ‘This book, it’s—’
‘It’s fired me up,’ Spence cut in. ‘All the things you’ve told me. You’re a natural storyteller, Georgie. It’s a good thing.’ Her soft smile sharpened into a grin. ‘You know, in all their decades apart, Amelie and Connor must have written some beautiful letters.’
I rolled my eyes, hoping that would hide the effect her words were having on me.
The Cornish Sands series was full of letters: love letters between star-crossed lovers declaring their intentions, between members of the Rosevar family discussing secrets that really shouldn’t have been written down, except that the plots would have been thin without them; notes passed between children sitting at school desks, and dropped through unsuspecting letterboxes in the fictional Cornish village Spence had created.
There was something about having the stories partly told in those scribbled monologues, when the characters had nobody to interrupt them, and no immediate judgement on what they were saying.
It meant they could be more honest. The letters between Amelie and Connor in The Whispers of the Sands had been my favourites, and I’d been gearing myself up for their perfect happy-ever-after, then completely blindsided when it didn’t happen.
‘I can’t wait for the letters,’ I admitted.
Spence laughed. ‘My dear, you’re going to be writing them with me. A true collaboration. Your name on the cover alongside mine. And all you need to do, before we start, is get inside and see the house.’
I folded over the corner of the magazine’s cover, pressing it hard so the crease was permanent. ‘Not every architect would bother attending the sales event of their project, would they?’ I so badly wanted this to be true.
‘What utter piffle,’ Spence scolded. ‘Have you seen the photos, Georgie? Read the piece? It’s a feat of sheer magnificence. A modern marvel. Of course he’s going to be there.’
I wanted to open a window to let the breeze banish the close air in the bungalow.
I needed to help Spence with her correspondence, and make a list of all the things I had to get done at the open house, so that I could get enough information to satisfy Spence and to write my piece for Wynn.
Then I could leave it all firmly behind me.
‘It is beautiful,’ I said grudgingly, and looked at the magazine again, a master of my own punishment.
There he was, in all his handsome, stern deliciousness.
That conker hair, long on top and untamed as it always would be, every single day of his life.
His arms were folded across his chest, the action pressing the simple blue shirt tight against defined biceps, and showing off the strong shape of his shoulders, as if his body was a walking advert for his architectural prowess.
The photo had a plain black background, and there was something stark about the way he was looking straight at the lens.
His face was impassive unless you knew him well, and I had done.
I knew, for example, that there was a spray of freckles over his nose that the harsh light had bleached out – I couldn’t imagine him caring enough to ask them to be airbrushed away, and why would the editor bother?
The freckles had softened him, a dot-to-dot that I’d once completed with a biro while he’d protested weakly, a corner of his mouth lifting.
I’d known him well, and I’d tried to forget him, after everything that had happened.
But now, here he was, in black and white and glossy colour: the person who had converted Tyller Klos from a deserted shell into a modern masterpiece.
I forced myself to read the paragraph, written in bold, the one the editor was drawing every reader’s eye to, the one they wanted you to notice even if you skipped over the rest.
Alperwick House has been reimagined by up-and-coming architect Ethan Sparks, who has returned to the village where he spent some of his formative years to give the house on the cliffs a second chance.
This isolated, luxury mansion has a long history, an association with the famous writer S.
E. Artemis, whose fictional family pile Tyller Klos was undoubtedly inspired by it.
Now it has been renamed Sterenlenn, which in Cornish means ‘blanket of stars’, imbuing it with the romance of the remote, clifftop setting.
‘The house is a part of the landscape,’ Ethan says, leaning forward, his focus sharpening.
‘It’s a landmark along the coastline, a building seen and admired from land, sea and sky, and I wanted to keep that sense of it being organic alive in my redesign.
The name, well …’ He pauses, nodding to himself.
‘It was never going to be called anything else.’
I stared out of the window, at the view of Spence’s manicured garden, then a tight cluster of rooftops down to the blue of the Atlantic, a soft haze over everything as the June sun rose steadily in the sky, banishing the dew.
It was almost the longest day of the year, the light would be slow to fade, and I knew the evening – this specific evening – would be never-ending.
A shiver ran up my spine as the full realization hit me: everything I had to pull off, now that I knew the truth; the fundamental fact that, after so many years without him, I would be in the same room as Ethan.
Because those words printed in the magazine, definite and un-smudgeable, confirmed that not only was he behind Tyller Klos’s transformation and would, in all probability, be at the event, but also that – even if he’d been trying as hard as I had – he hadn’t been able to forget about me, either.