Chapter Nine – Meryl
“He’s being completely unreasonable,” Meryl muttered, her arms folded across her body as she watched Spencer leave.
But underneath that thought was the gnawing sense that he was also right.
The beam needed to be fixed properly, not given a quick patch job.
Meryl sank onto the porch step and let her head drop into her hands.
After Spencer’s truck disappeared from view, Pine Cottage felt too empty, and Meryl was irritated to find that she wished he were back here with her now. Sitting next to her on the porch. Their porch.
That’s how she thought of it now, after all the hours they had worked on it side by side. But it wasn’t theirs. Just as this cottage wasn’t hers. Hilda might have loved living here, but Meryl was not the settling-down kind.
Meryl huffed, stood up, and turned back toward the house.
“Okay then,” she muttered to the empty air. “The sooner I get the place fixed up, the sooner I can move on.”
She needed something to take her mind off their stupid disagreement over the wretched beam. Something with visible progress and a clear endpoint.
Her gaze landed on the pile of boxes she had stacked in the corner of the sitting room.
She had been avoiding them since she arrived because she wasn’t ready to sort through the last of Hilda’s personal belongings.
But it was a job that had to be done before the cottage was put on the market. So she might as well get it over with.
The first box yielded nothing but old sweaters and scarves that smelled as if they needed a good airing.
Meryl folded them efficiently, placing them in the donate pile.
The repetitive rhythm helped, though she still caught herself glancing toward the window more than once, half-expecting to hear Spencer’s truck returning.
“Stop it,” she told herself. “He’s not coming back today.”
The second box held random kitchen items: mismatched mugs, wooden spoons with handles worn smooth, recipe cards yellowed at the edges.
She spent a few minutes going through the recipes and then set them aside, determined to cook some of them once the kitchen was properly fixed in honor of Hilda.
Maybe she could invite Frank over for a meal as a way of saying thank you.
The third box was heavier, filled with books and papers. Old novels with cracked spines. A gardening encyclopedia. Seed catalogs from years past. She worked steadily, ignoring the way the house seemed to watch her now, the silence somehow heavier rather than empty.
At the bottom of the box, her fingers touched something different. A leather-bound book, worn soft at the corners.
She pulled it free and opened it carefully.
It was not exactly a journal. More a mixture of sketchbook, planner, and scrapbook, layered together in a way that felt intensely personal.
Hilda’s handwriting flowed across the pages in neat, decisive lines.
But what caught Meryl first were the drawings.
Page after page of Pine Cottage, sketched from different angles and in different seasons.
The porch in summer, with climbing roses spilling over the rail.
The sitting room with the window seat intact, an open book lying across its cushion.
The kitchen with bunches of herbs hanging from the beams.
Meryl turned the pages more slowly.
These were not casual doodles. They were plans. Intentions. Notes on what had been done and what still needed doing. Some pages were marked completed in Hilda’s firm hand. Others held measurements, paint colors, lists of materials, and reminders to herself.
A pressed rose petal slipped from between two pages, its color faded to dusty pink.
Beneath it, a note in Hilda’s hand:
Duchess of Wellington. Third summer. Finally thriving.
The rose by the gate.
Meryl kept turning pages. Here was the window seat, drawn in careful detail with measurements written in the margin. A date in the corner. Installed May 1978. And below it, in a different ink, added later:
Best decision I ever made. Perfect for winter afternoons.
Something tightened in Meryl’s throat.
There were sketches of the garden beds, notes about which plants had thrived and which had not, little fabric swatches taped beside possible paint colors, and shelving drawn precisely to fit into the alcove by the fireplace.
This was a place Hilda had chosen. Shaped. Loved on purpose.
Meryl traced one sketch of the porch railing with the pad of her finger, the same railing that had come away in her hand that first day. Beside it, Hilda had written:
Finally, fixed properly. Worth the extra cost for the joinery.
She turned another page and found more notes tucked between the sketches. Not letters. Just the sort of practical scraps someone left inside a working journal because they meant to come back to them.
Meryl’s fingers tightened on the edge of the paper.
Her mother’s voice came back to her at once, sharp and familiar as ever.
Don’t waste time making it yours. It’ll only make it harder to move on.
How many times had they moved? Twelve? Fifteen? She had stopped counting somewhere around high school. Flats, rented houses, borrowed rooms. Nothing on the walls. Nothing planted in the ground. Nothing that would hurt to leave behind.
Places are just places, her mother used to say. It’s the road that matters. Where you’ve come from and where you are going to.
Meryl looked down at Hilda’s journal again. At the measurements, the lists, the penciled revisions, the small, stubborn notes in the margins. The road had ended, in many ways, for Hilda when she moved to Pine Cottage and made it her own.
Meryl closed the journal and looked around the sitting room with fresh eyes.
At the half-stripped walls. The cleaned hearth.
The battered window seat, almost beyond repair.
She thought of the color schemes she’d chosen for the living room as she stripped the wallpaper.
The colors were close to those Hilda had noted in her journal.
Tears pricked Meryl’s eyes. The journal had given her an insight into the woman Hilda was, and perhaps inspiration too. To become that woman. To paint walls, set down roots, and stop moving forward.
Not that she wanted to stagnate. But moving forward did not always have to mean moving house.
A knock sounded at the door.
Meryl startled, setting the journal aside before wiping quickly at her face.
When she opened the door, Frank Grayson stood on the porch with a bottle of red wine in one hand and a pair of old secateurs in the other.
“Well,” he said, taking in her expression with one quick glance and the tact not to mention it, “either I’ve come at a bad time or an excellent one.”
Meryl let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I’m not sure which.”
“Good. Then I’m not intruding too badly.” He lifted the bottle a little. “Brought this because Hilda always kept one tucked away for emergencies.” Then he held up the secateurs. “And these because that rose by the gate is about to swallow the path whole.”
Meryl felt some of the tightness leave her chest.
“Come in,” she said.
Frank stepped inside and glanced at the half-sorted boxes and then at the journal beside them.
“Found some of Hilda’s things?”
Meryl nodded. “I did.”
Frank nodded as if he understood. Then he looked toward the front path and said, “If you’ve got five minutes, I’ll show you how she used to cut that rose back.”
Meryl followed him outside, welcoming the fresh breeze on her face.
The rose bush was even more unruly up close, canes arching across the path in every direction, all wild growth and stubborn thorns. Frank crouched beside it and pressed one weathered hand to the base.
“She always said people were too timid with roses,” he said. “You have to cut them back hard.”
“Sounds brutal.”
“It looks brutal,” Frank corrected. “But it’s not.”
He showed her where to cut. What to take away.
What to leave. How to open the center so that the air could move through it.
Meryl worked beside him with the secateurs while he gathered the cuttings into a pile, and before long, the tangle had begun to look less like a problem and more like a plant with shape again.
“She loved this one,” Frank said, straightening. “Stubborn thing. Fussy for the first couple of years, then impossible to stop.”
Meryl looked down at the pile of thorny cuttings. “I found notes about it.”
Frank nodded as if that made perfect sense. “Hilda made notes about everything that mattered.”
When the rose was done, they carried the cuttings around to the back of the cottage and then sat on the porch drinking wine from coffee mugs.
The wine was very good. As she sipped it, she closed her eyes, enjoying the velvety richness. Dark fruit, vanilla, and oak lingered on her tongue.
Frank leaned back and looked out over the garden. “I used to sit out here with her some evenings, enjoying a bottle of Thornberg wine. Mostly in summer. She’d talk about the roses, complain about the deer, as we watched the stars come out.”
Meryl smiled despite herself. “She loved it here, didn’t she?”
Frank chuckled. “She did. Not that she and the house didn’t have disagreements. But for Hilda, it was a labor of love.”
They sat quietly for a minute.
Then Frank said, without looking at her, “Sometimes I think the house chose her just as much as she chose it.”
Meryl turned her head. That sounded so much like something Spencer might say that Meryl almost laughed.
Frank glanced sideways at her. “I think that’s why she left it to you.”
Meryl said, “Because she trusted me to find the right person for the house.”
Frank glanced at her over the rim of his mug. “I think she trusted you to know who that was.”
Meryl looked out at the cottage, the porch, the path, and the rose they had just cut back. The house deserved to find its next special someone. And she owed it to Hilda to make that happen.
When Frank left a little later, he did so with the promise that he would return with more tools and help her with the rest of the garden.
After his truck had gone, Meryl stood alone on the porch with her thoughts.
Or one thought in particular. If she chose Pine Cottage, would Pine Cottage choose her?