The Matchmaker’s Cottage

Chapter 1

Hi Julia, it’s Ethan.

Those words, the last ones Julia Schaeffer had expected to see on that rainy Monday evening, ran through her mind on sadistic repeat.

Hi Julia, it’s Ethan. Hi Julia, it’s Ethan. Hi Julia, it’s Ethan.

She tried to pinpoint what it was about those words that bothered her so much, but it was difficult to distinguish between all the feelings swirling around in her chest like a cyclone of emotional debris.

Maybe it was the politeness of it. His use of her full name—Julia. It struck her like a slur, the formality of it, when he’d been the only person in her life to not call her that, preferring to use the nickname he’d given her all those years ago.

And as if those four excruciating words weren’t bad enough, it continued from there.

I know it’s been a while.

Excellent deduction, Sherlock, she thought, anger finding its way out of the whirlwind.

Have you been tracking based on the Gregorian or Julian calendar?

Counting the tallies etched into the stone wall of the prison cell you’ve obviously been confined to, with no phone privileges, for eight agonizing years?

Taking a deep inhale and slow exhale, she recentered herself. Anger was not helpful or necessary. It also distracted from the last line of the text, which was the one that had ultimately given her pause.

But I really need your help. Please call me when you get this.

For as long as she had known Ethan, he had never admitted defeat, and asking someone else for help would have been doing exactly that in his mind. For him to reach out to her after so much time with no contact meant that he must seriously be in trouble.

In another lifetime, she would have been worried.

A lifetime in which they were still friends who saw each other practically every day—all throughout elementary school and high school, again through every summer.

They’d even applied to the same college, their dorm rooms only minutes apart.

As adults, they’d been friends who shared keys to each other’s apartments, made plans that always involved the other, had dreams that they’d wanted to follow together.

Friends who knew everything there was to know about each other.

Until everything blew up. Spectacularly.

But that was old news. This Julia—the one living her current life, the one who hadn’t seen Ethan Duchamp’s name pop up on her phone in nearly a decade—this one didn’t have the luxury of adding Ethan to the list of her worries.

The list was full, to be quite honest. Even if she had the inclination, she simply didn’t have the bandwidth.

The question still remained, though, as to how she was going to respond.

Should she ignore him completely? Seemed fitting, considering how they’d left things.

Should she reply with a simple but direct Sorry, Ethan, I can’t? Or better yet, Sorry, Mr. Duchamp—since they were so formal now and all.

Or should she go the truly unhinged route, writing a novel-length diatribe of all the ways he’d upset her and how she never, ever wanted to see or hear from him again? Just to really drive the point home.

Sighing, she tossed the phone across her desk, watching as it pushed aside everything else she wanted to ignore or forget, like the spreadsheets of dwindling profit margins, property tax bills, invoices for repair and maintenance, and all the other things she needed to pay for these days.

Chewing on her thumbnail, she allowed her mind to go carefully blank, a practice that she had mastered for when things got too difficult to bear.

It had been happening more frequently lately as her pile of burdens got higher and the need to escape from reality became more pressing.

This text from her former friend was just another millstone to add to the ones currently hanging around her neck.

After a moment or two, when her heart rate had settled and her feelings had been pushed down deep enough as to be almost nonexistent, Julia picked her cell phone back up, quickly swiping out of the text she had yet to reply to, and checked the clock on her lock screen.

Perfect. Just late enough that she could wrap up “office hours” and brush aside the paperwork until tomorrow.

She stood up and stretched, feeling the tension that consumed her body release with every overtaxed limb and muscle reaching toward the sky.

She mentally got herself into after-hours mode and started the familiar walk toward the kitchen.

Passing the dining area, she noted that the dinner service had ended and the plates had been cleared from the tables.

The room was empty despite the residual presence of people—a skewed chair, a cloth napkin on the floor—and she could hear voices coming from the parlor around the corner.

There were only three guests tonight, occupying two of the four upstairs bedrooms.

The old place looked nothing like it used to—she’d made it a point to wipe it of all familiarity.

She’d turned kitchens and living rooms into dining areas while carving out a small space for an office, built a mudroom into a parlor, and then converted the cellar into her own quarters, with a modest bedroom tucked beside a gleaming new kitchen.

What had been cramped and dim before now carried the low hum of life—pots clattering, coffee brewing, the faint warm scent of sourdough drifting up the old stone steps.

Upstairs, fresh paint brightened the narrow hallways, wildflowers that were picked every few days softened the windowsills, and the worn beams had been polished enough to catch the light in a way that transformed them into something fresh and new.

She’d sought to make it unrecognizable. To make it hers.

And still, for all her reinvention, the cottage carried its history in quiet ways.

Little reminders she couldn’t quite scrub out no matter how hard she tried.

Reminders of what had once existed here—and what she had lost.

Continuing down the hall, she walked through her somber thought clouds as though they were a thick fog she could dissipate with her stride, then headed down the stairs.

Stepping through the open archway into the main area of the kitchen, she immediately saw Maggie—her dinner chef and newly minted housekeeper—washing up the last of the dishes from the dinner service.

When Julia had decided to start offering an evening meal option along with the traditional breakfast service of a bed-and-breakfast, she had needed to hire someone for the job, as her personal specialty lay solely in baking and breakfast foods.

And she was adamant about finding someone who could do it well.

Unfortunately, hiring someone to join her already paltry crew—plus launching a whole new dinner menu—had almost felt impossible once she’d crunched the numbers. The only way it worked was if the new hire could handle both the evening service and the housekeeping.

After all, there were only so many hats Julia could wear: owner, breakfast cook, front desk clerk, accounts manager, marketing manager…the list went on. Housekeeping was the one thing that had continuously made it feel like her tower of hats was about to fall over.

For a long time, she’d just sucked it up. If she wanted to be successful, it took perseverance, a good work ethic, and approximately forty-five minutes of sleep every night. Right?

But when the little sleep she’d been getting started to be interspersed with fun middle-of-the-night panic attacks, Julia realized a change needed to happen—and fast.

“Hello, Maggie,” Julia greeted the earnest younger woman, bypassing her to gather some of the onion scraps and potato peels off the large butcher-block island.

“Hi, Jul— Oh, I was just about to do that!” Maggie said, waving a soapy hand in Julia’s direction. “I just wanted to finish the guest plates first.”

“It’s not a problem at all.” Julia threw the scraps into the compost and began to scrub the maple wood surface of the counter to clear off the rest of the food debris. “Why are you washing the dishes by hand anyway?”

It had cost an arm and a leg to install a professional-grade dishwasher in the kitchen, but Julia had insisted on operating at the highest commercial level possible. Still, without fail, when she came into the kitchen and found Maggie cleaning up, she was always hand-washing the dishes.

“Oh, I put them through the thing after,” Maggie promised, waving her hand toward the thing—Julia’s very expensive dishwasher—even as she set the plates on the drying rack.

“For sanitization purposes.” She hazarded a sidelong glance at Julia.

“But there’s so few of the plates as it is, I don’t mind cleaning them by hand to get most of the gunk off first.”

Julia felt the sting of Maggie’s words, even as she acknowledged that it hadn’t been intended as criticism. Still, she didn’t exactly need a reminder of how business was so slow that her cook was able to wash all the dinner plates by hand.

Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, she placed the flour and yeast from the pantry onto the now-clean wooden countertop.

“Ooh,” Maggie breathed, moving beside Julia. “What are you making for tomorrow?”

“I think I’m going to do a nice multigrain,” Julia mused, dipping her fingers into the bag of flour and dusting a small amount lightly over the countertop. “And then maybe some blueberry scones. Oh, and of course the cinnamon rolls, which is what I’m doing now.”

Maggie eyed her skeptically. “You’re going to stay up tonight to do it?”