Chapter Sixteen
Okay, so I’m moving to France.
I’m going to learn French, and I am going to move to France.
Or maybe I’ll move to Japan. I think Japanese would be much harder to learn as a beginner, sure, but it’s a lot farther away than France.
A lot farther away from Callum Dempsey.
Callum Dempsey, whom I can certainly never see again.
I mean, what was that?
What the hell was that?
What was I thinking ?
I stare at the cobweb in the corner of my kitchen. The same cobweb that’s been there for a few months now. The same one I’ve been staring at all morning.
I can never see him again. That’s the only answer.
Because way to think with your vagina, and not your head, Katie.
Way to be a complete idiot .
“You alright?”
“I’m fine.” The words are clipped and a lie, but Gemma doesn’t call me out on it. She came over after her shift at the nursing home to help me with some admin, and I’ve been nothing short of rude to her all afternoon. She knows something’s up. I’m just too embarrassed to tell her.
I click through my email, scrolling through my unanswered pleas to local journalists, begging for scraps of attention.
I’d been bullish about it before, so concerned with getting the venue ready that I didn’t think about the fact we weren’t even selling tickets.
But now it’s all I can think about. Especially after what Jack said yesterday.
The whole point of this was to get attention and we weren’t getting any of it.
Every small town in the country had some sob story about something closing down. Nush was right. We should have gone flashier. “Do you know any famous people?”
“Do you?” Gemma asks dryly, and I look up to see her licking one of the dozens of envelopes she’s been stuffing to mail out to local businesses.
As I watch her reach for the next one, she starts to blur before me, and I blink, rubbing my eyes.
They’re sore and slightly stinging from staring at a laptop screen for the past few hours. And of course, by my lack of sleep.
“My internet is slow,” I say.
“Frank said they’re doing some work in the area today.”
Of course they are.
“We can go to mine,” she offers. “But I don’t think it will be any better. Or maybe Bridget has some—” She breaks off with a curse as a horn suddenly blares outside. “What the hell is that?”
Jack’s revenge. “The traffic started again this morning.”
“But I thought you said Callum—”
“I know.” I doubt it was him, though. All my money was on the brother. “Looks like they changed their mind.”
“That’s just petty,” she says.
And that’s who we’re dealing with.
“You’ll get used to it.” My phone lights up, a local number flashing on the screen. I grab it, and head into the hallway. Granny took Plankton with her to a friend’s house for tea, so I have the front room to myself.
“Miss Collins?” The man on the other end introduces himself as someone from guest services at the Laketon Hotel. “I just wanted to check in and see how the festival was coming along?”
“Brilliantly,” I say. “We’re getting great interest.”
“That’s wonderful.” A polite pause. “It’s justwe haven’t had any bookings.”
“Oh?” It’s an appropriately surprised noise, even though I’m not surprised at all.
“I’m afraid not,” he continues. “And for that reason, we’ll need to release the rooms we have for you.”
“What do you mean release them?”
“Well, when we set them aside for bookings, we do so expecting there to be bookings,” he explains. “If none come in in the next day or two, we’ll need to put them back on general sale. It’s a busy season for us.”
“Butwhere will people go if they need to stay? We had a deal.”
“We had an email,” he says, not unkindly. “But tell you what. You come to me when you have someone, and I promise we’ll give them a good rate.”
We chat back and forth for another minute as I try in vain to keep him on the line, to give me time to think of a way out of this, but this is a man used to working in customer services and he smoothly, and a little impressively it must be said, cuts me off, politely putting the phone down.
“Who was that?” Gemma asks, when I drag my feet back into the kitchen.
“The hotel just wanted to check in.”
Her brows lower, but before she can say whatever’s on her mind there’s a sudden tapping of rain against the window, hinting at an approaching downpour.
“Noah’s at after-school football,” Gemma says with a curse. “I’d better go collect him, or I’ll be the worst mother in the world again. You okay here?”
“I’m fine.”
“I’ll swing by later and we can make a plan for tomorrow. I switched shifts, so I don’t need to go in until the weekend.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“I want to do it. Hey.” She waits for me to look at her. “Chin up.”
I nod, mustering a smile as she leaves, and return to my work.
The room grows progressively darker as the rain continues, and eventually I have to switch on a light, one that flickers once as the electricity cuts out and comes back again, but it’s a warning sign I don’t like.
I know why when, two minutes later, I try to log on to my email and the inbox won’t load.
The internet is down.
Is this my test? This feels like my test. One of those times when I have to prove what I’m made of. Stand up to the challenge.
But I am not up for the challenge.
In fact, I would like the challenge to stop.
Because surely, surely it shouldn’t be this hard. I deserve a bit of luck, right? A bit of divine intervention. A little, hey, that girl needs a break .
The rain falls harder, and I go to the window to look out at it. As I do, I catch sight of the hawthorn tree at the back of the garden. The one I still need to deal with if I can get past Granny first.
Maybe I should give them an offering. Do fairies like offerings? Besides, like, human children? Maybe I could…
I rest my forehead against the glass, watching the world blur.
Something feels wrong.
It’s a deep, heavy kind of wrong, like a rock is weighing down my stomach. Like you know danger is coming, but you don’t know when.
Another truck passes by, making the window frame vibrate, and knowing I can do nothing with the internet gone, I grab my rain jacket and leave the house, heading down the road toward the village.
Usually, the more I move away from the hotel site, the quieter the noises from it gets, but this time I hear different sounds, coming not from behind me, but from somewhere in the distance, and I make a sharp turn, heading through a field that will lead me to the western side of the forest.
It should be a fifteen-minute walk to the barn, but I do it in ten, running through the downpour, as the bad feeling gets worse and worse and worse.
I’m soaked through by the time I get there, and I start sprinting when I see the large tire tracks drawing a dirty path from the road and down the trail, where a crashing noise sounds.
I feel like someone just punched me in the chest.
The barn is half-gone. One side of it has been demolished into nothing but rubble and dust. The ground around it is no better, muddy piles and haphazard holes where green grass once stood.
A large machine lumbers about, moving slowly over the ruins, creating the ruins, and I move faster, almost through the clearing before I’m spotted.
“You can’t come in here,” a man yells, holding up a hand as if to physically stop me. “This is an active building site.”
“It’s not, it’s…you don’t own this land. I’m working in there.”
He frowns at that. “We cleared out all objects we found inside. You can pick them up down the road, but it’s been marked as abandoned and, from the looks of it, has been for a while.” He smiles then, like we’re joking. “Unless I’m about to be fired.”
He clears his throat when I just stare at him and starts flipping through his clipboard before showing me a map. One that shows this part of the forest. This property. Now owned by Glenmill.
“Well…” the man continues, when I just stand there. “If you just keep a good bit away there, you’re grand to stay for a bit.” He nods as if I’ve responded and heads back to what’s left of the barn, his boots squelching in the mud his team has created.
This is what Jack meant when he said I’d had my fun. Adam was right. He really was just playing with me before. He really was just…
“Katie.”
Callum stands a few feet behind me. He has his big orange construction jacket on, but it’s open, and doesn’t have a hood, so does little to protect him against the rain.
“Did you know?” I ask.
“No.” His expression is tight, almost furious. “I came down here as soon as I heard.”
“Bullshit.”
“I swear. Jack didn’t tell me he was doing this. He knows I would have stopped him. It’s because I— Katie .” He follows me as I stride past him, heading to the road. I need to get back to the village. I need to call everyone I know and get them down here.
“We had an argument when you left the other day,” Callum continues. “We’ve had to push back delivery by a couple of months and he’s panicking. That’s all this is. He’s lashing out and—”
“You knew what we were doing to the barn,” I interrupt, barely listening to him. “You said so yourself, you go through these woods every day. You were at the raffle. You knew what we were doing, and you told him.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did!” I tear my hand away when he goes to grab it and turn right, just as another excavator comes trundling around the corner.
The driver flashes his lights when he sees me, but I hold my ground, clinging to my impromptu protest until Callum yanks me back, giving the machine plenty of space to get past me.
“What the hell are you doing?” he snaps.
“I am obviously having a meltdown .” I push the wet hair from my face, watching the digger disappear into the woods.
The rain is easing now, but I’m so drenched through it doesn’t matter.
“It’s just a barn,” Callum says, as if I’m about to chase after it or something. “That’s all it is. Just a barn. You can host the festival somewhere else.”
“There’s nowhere else with any space. That was the perfect spot. We spent weeks on it. We were ready.”
He steps toward me, hesitating when I send him a warning glance. “I already told—”
“I know what you told me,” I interrupt. That he didn’t have anything to do with it.
That he didn’t know anything. But that doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter because Gemma was right.
She was right from the start. I should have waited a year and done it right.
I mean, the hotel is still a giant hole in the ground.
I had time. I had time, but I rushed into it.
I rushed into it because I was upset, and I didn’t think .
And now I was hurt just like she warned me I would be.
“You want to know why it doesn’t matter if you want to see me?
” I ask, repeating his words from yesterday.
“Why it doesn’t matter if you knew about this or not?
It’s because of your brother. Because he’s building a hotel down the road from my house, and I’m terrified my dog will be run over every time we go for a walk.
Because he’s taken away half the land that used to be open to us.
Because he’s knocked down my barn and he’s going to knock down my pub and then I’m going to hate you. ”
“You don’t know that he’s going to—”
“I do,” I say. “I know it. Because I can’t do this.
I give up. We have nowhere to host the festival, but that doesn’t matter because no one’s coming.
We’ve barely sold a handful of tickets, and no one is picking up their phone or answering their emails or paying any attention to us at all. Because we don’t matter to them.”
My throat starts to burn, and I swallow, trying to force down the ball of pressure that feels like it’s trapped there.
“No one’s coming,” I say, my voice rising with each word.
“No one’s booked in and no one’s coming, and I don’t know what to do.
Because I really thought people would care.
I thought if they knew what was happening, they’d come out and support.
Because we’re trying . We’re really trying.
We were going to have fireworks and music and dancing.
We were going to have so much dancing. And it wasn’t just going to be about the pub or about attention.
It was about us. About the village and showing the world who we are.
It was going to be about people falling in love .
They were going to fall in love and meet their soulmate here and years from now, when people asked them how they met, they could say Kelly’s.
They could say Ennisbawn. And no one would want to get rid of us then.
No one would think we were unimportant. But we’re not going to have any of that because everyone who thought I couldn’t do this was right. I can’t.”
The rain has stopped completely now. A hint of blue sky appearing between the clouds.
A little too late. Just like everything else in my life.
“It doesn’t matter what you know or don’t know,” I tell him. “Kelly’s is my home. And if you think I’m going to be able to forget that you’re one of the people playing a part in destroying it, even if you don’t want to, then you haven’t been listening to me. You haven’t been listening at all.”
Callum stares at me, his jaw set, and his eyes intense. His clothes are plastered to his skin, his hair to his head, and I know I don’t look much better. But I don’t have the energy to care.
“I’m going home now,” I tell him. “And then I’m going to have a very large glass of wine and do some stress baking. Tell your brother I give up. He can do what he likes.”
“Katie—”
I don’t wait for him to continue, turning back to the road and spying his green van parked up ahead. Behind that, flashing her lights, sits Gemma. I’d been so focused on the excavator, I didn’t even see her before, but from the look on her face, I know she’s been sitting there a while.
“You want to come to mine?” she asks, and I nod, wiping the curls from my forehead.
She already has a towel in the passenger seat for me, and I grab it as I climb inside, pressing it to my face.
“Hi, Noah.”
“Hi.” He doesn’t look up from where he sits in the back, his thumbs flying across his phone screen.
I sniff, wiping my nose for good measure as Gemma pulls out onto the road. I don’t look at Callum, who’s still standing at the entrance to the lane, watching us go.
“The barn,” she begins, but I just shake my head.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, and Gemma, bless her heart, leaves it at that.