Chapter 3 #2
The pencil keeps moving:
Money needed:
All of it
Time needed:
As long as it takes
Chance of success:
I don’t fill that in.
Outside, a car rumbles past on the lane – unusual up here where the road leads nowhere except to these cottages and eventually the coastal path.
I move to the window, wipe a clear spot in the grime just in time to see a Land Rover disappearing around the bend.
Could be anyone. Lots of Land Rovers in Cornwall.
Doesn’t mean anything that it looked like—
No. Not doing this.
Back to the list. Practical things. Things I can control.
Immediate needs:
Somewhere to sleep tonight
Builder references
Electrician who won’t rip me off
Way to make money fast (Marina? Boatyard? Anyone need a mechanic?)
Miracles, several
The cottage groans around me like it’s commenting on my plans. Twenty years of emptiness have settled into its walls, and I’m here with a notebook and attitude thinking I can bring it back to life.
But I’ve spent twenty years wanting to come home. Grandad spent twenty years wanting me to. That’s got to count, right?
Heading back to the front door, I scoop up the avalanche of mail that toppled as I pushed the door open.
There are countless brown envelopes that my childhood memories of both my grandfather and father tell me are never fun to open.
There’s a handwritten letter to my dad, the handwriting loopy and feminine.
Not from the taxman then. I slide my finger under the edge of the seal, almost unsticking itself, and am about to rip it open when what sounds like the flap of wings from the upstairs of the house echoes down to where I’m hunched in the hall.
Sweet Jesus. Please not bats. I can cope with anything but bats.
I climb the narrow stairs to the first floor, testing each step because falling through on day one would be embarrassing.
They hold – solid wood under the dust. The bedroom that used to be mine is empty except for cobwebs and memories.
The window’s intact though, and through it, I can see down to the harbour.
I find the flapping noise. The window in the master bedroom is open and has been for years, water damage stains the floor, and the curtains are slapping back and forth against the glass panes.
And that’s when it hits me. Not gently. Not gradually. Like a fist to the sternum.
The boats. The nets drying on the harbour wall.
The lobster pots stacked in neat towers.
The morning’s catch being sorted on the dock, gulls wheeling overhead.
The whole machinery of a fishing village going about its business like it always has, like it always will, tide in and tide out, the same rhythm my grandfather built his life around.
That should have been mine.
Not watching from a cliff. Not pressing my nose against the glass of someone else’s life.
But down there, in it, part of it – nets in my hands, salt on my skin, a Trelawney boat in the harbour again.
If we’d never left, if whatever happened between the Hardings and us hadn’t blown our lives apart, I’d have grown up on those docks.
I’d know every boat by name, every current by feel.
I’d be the thing I’ve spent twenty years trying to become by working in other people’s boatyards and fixing other people’s engines – a fisherwoman. Home.
Instead, I’m twenty-seven, broke, and staring through a dirty window at the life that was stolen from me.
Good. Let it hurt. Hurt means it matters. Hurt means I’m not letting it go.
Somewhere down there, Jude Harding is probably telling his father that a Trelawney is back.
Probably using words like ‘trouble’ and ‘problem’ and ‘get rid of’.
Maybe Hardings only make exceptions for Hollywood actresses – Isla Quinn’s triumphant return to Sea Salt Bay was national news last year, splashed across every gossip site I hate-read on my lunch breaks. Funny how that outsider got a welcome.
The setting sun is turning everything golden, and for a moment – just a moment – I can see what this place could be. Fixed up, lived in, mine. A Trelawney house on the cliff again, like a raised middle finger to everyone who thought we’d stay gone.
I add one more thing to the list:
Show them all
Then I grab my holdall and head back down to the Land Rover.
The harbour’s settling into evening when I get there, and I park in the Trelawney spot that Jude Harding thinks belongs to him, windows down so I can hear the water against the stones.
Someone’s cooking dinner nearby – the smell of frying fish drifts across.
Probably The Ship starting evening service.
Twenty years since I’ve smelled that exact combination of salt, diesel, and fried cod. Grandad used to say you could tell the quality of a fishing village by the smell of its chippy. He’d have approved of this one. He’d have sat here with me, window down, eyes closed, breathing it in.
Twenty years of being nowhere.
I’m home.
Whether anyone likes it or not.
The Land Rover’s getting cold, and I’ve already had one concerned local tap on the window asking if I’m all right. Can’t sleep in the harbour car park – too visible, too much like admitting defeat on day one.
Back up the lane I go, armed with a camping lantern, my sleeping bag, and a streak of the stubborn stupidity that’s got me this far. The cottage is different in the dark – softer somehow, like night’s forgiven some of its sins.
The back bedroom faces the moor rather than the sea. There’s furniture – an iron bed frame that might be Victorian, a mattress that definitely needs burning. But the room feels solid. The walls are dry back here, away from the leaking corner. It’ll do for one night.
I drag the mattress off and lean it against the wall. Open the window to let twenty years of stale air escape into the dark. The bed frame looks sturdy enough without the mattress – just springs and iron.
The sleeping bag rolls out across the bare springs. Not comfortable, but manageable. I test it with one knee first – seems stable. Then carefully, carefully lower myself down.
For exactly three seconds, I think I’ve won.
Then the ancient springs give way with a crack like this bed wants nothing more to do than die, and then I’m falling through the frame, metal and rust and twenty years of deterioration all giving up at once.
I hit the floor in a tangle of sleeping bag and tetanus-inducing metal, my elbow catching on a sharp jag of metal hard enough to draw blood.
‘Fucking hell!’
My voice echoes through the empty house and probably out through the dodgy roof for good measure. Somewhere in the walls, a living being with four legs and a tail (hopefully on the smaller side of the scale and not a fox with cubs) scurries away from the noise.
I lie there for a moment, assessing damage. Elbow’s bleeding but not badly. Pride’s taken the worst hit. Even the furniture’s rejecting me. Message received, universe.
But Trelawneys are nothing if not adaptable. Grandad would have been on his feet already, dusting himself off, muttering about the quality of Victorian ironwork not being what it used to be. So that’s what I do.
I drag the sleeping bag free from the wreckage, shake off the rust and probable spiders, and set up camp directly on the floor.
Push the broken bed frame against the wall – it’ll make a good clothes rack if nothing else.
The floorboards are actually more solid than the bed was, wide old planks that have survived longer than most marriages.
The camping lantern throws strange shadows on the walls, making the damp patches look like maps of places that don’t exist. I spread out my belongings like I’m claiming territory: toolbox in the corner – his toolbox, his initials, his legacy – clothes folded on the windowsill, laptop charging from the one working outlet I found (miracle), notebook beside my makeshift bed.
From the floor, I can hear the sea. Not see it – the window faces the wrong way – but hear it, that constant shush and pull that’s been the soundtrack of every dream I’ve had since I was seven. The tide coming in, doing what it always does. Coming back.
‘Not lost,’ I tell the cottage, the sea, Grandad, myself. ‘Not passing through. Staying.’
So why can’t I stop thinking about Jude Harding?
Those green eyes and that bloody surfer’s tan and the way he said You can’t park there like he owned the whole harbour.
I bet he’s planning payback – a complaint to the harbour master, a village petition, some Harding power play to push me back out before I’ve even unpacked.
The boy who pulled pigtails and proposed with Haribo will definitely be making a plan, but my plan is to be there to block him.
The Hardings and the Trelawneys don’t get to be friends. That’s as sure as the tide coming in and ebbing out. But I’m not leaving. Not this time. Not for him, not for his father, not for anyone.
The question isn’t whether I want to stay.
The question is whether they’ll let me.
The floor’s hard beneath my back. I pull the sleeping bag up to my chin, listen to the cottage settling around me – groans and creaks like an old boat finding its rhythm.
Tomorrow I’ll deal with the harbour master. Tomorrow I’ll start fighting for what’s mine. Maybe I’ll check out the old Trelawney boat shed down at the harbour too – see what’s left of what Grandad built. That shed is where it starts. The cottage is where I live. The shed is where I build.
Tonight, I’m sleeping on the floor of a rough-around-the-edges cottage on a cliff in Cornwall, and somehow that feels more like home than anywhere I’ve been in twenty years.
‘Welcome back, Trelawney,’ I whisper to the darkness, and it doesn’t sound like defeat.
It sounds like a beginning.