Chapter 32
Present
Shell-shocked. Those were the two words that Blythe thought best described how she felt in the aftermath of Rae’s bombshell about the hotel. They rolled around in her brain, as if they might make sense of the fact that she felt as if the only way to move forward was on some sort of automation.
Rae had broken down and cried when she told her, but what good were tears? The Hope Square Hotel – on its knees, worse, in pieces. It was unthinkable.
She’d even had that squirmy Cathal Regan in to value the place.
Photographs of the hotel were splashed all over his social media accounts.
Price on Application, indeed. Oh, Blythe knew his game well enough.
Hadn’t he come up here, a few years earlier?
He’d had the nerve to ask if she’d sell Still Water to someone who’d dropped in to his office to see if there were any doer-uppers around the village they could buy.
A doer-upper – that’s what he’d called Still Water House!
Well, she’d given him his marching orders and he had the good sense to give her a wide berth for a long time afterwards.
Her stomach churned when she pictured him, parading around the hotel, measuring tape in hand, a greedy look in his eye. Oh, God. She couldn’t bear it.
Kip had tried to make light of it when she told him. But what did he know? It was all very well saying the hotel would still be there, but this was her heritage. It was Siggy’s future.
Blythe made no secret of the fact that she had always dreamed of Siggy one day stepping up to run the hotel.
Who else was there? They all knew, the hotel was always meant to be Blythe’s.
Rae may never have said it, but the fact was, Blythe was the rightful owner of the place, if it hadn’t been for one stupid weekend, she would have inherited the hotel.
Rae should have gone to college, trained as a vet perhaps or at the very least, found work in some shelter or animal practice.
Would Marcus have wanted to marry Rae without the hotel?
Maybe not, as the years had rolled on, Blythe had often wondered if they’d even been happy in the end.
And now this; if the hotel had been left to her, as it should have been, they would not be in this position today.
‘No good crying over spilled milk,’ Kip said when she told him. ‘Maybe it’s for the best, that place is far too big for Rae to manage on her own.’
‘She has Siggy to help.’
‘Has she?’ He stopped, as if choosing his next words carefully. ‘Siggy won’t be here forever, this time next year…’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Kip, you’re like a broken record. Siggy will run that hotel and she’d be happy to do it. What kid wouldn’t want to walk into not one, but two, family businesses, rather than struggle in the rat race on the mainland?’
‘I can’t have this conversation with you now.’
‘So, that’s it, you’re just going to walk away?’
‘No, I’m going out to the workshop to clean out the lawnmower.’ He sighed like a man twice his age. ‘Face it, Blythe. It’s Rae’s hotel, hers to do with as she chooses. There’s nothing to be done about it.’
‘You’re wrong.’ Blythe railed. ‘That’s the difference between us, Kip, I believe there’s always something you can do about things.
’ She watched him shake his head and disappear out the back door.
He really had no idea – not when it came to things like this.
His family had never owned anything more than a plot in the local cemetery.
Even their little cottage was rented from the council, how could he understand what it was to have your heart sewn into a place from the day you were born?
It was all too much. The hotel. This unevenness with Kip that seemed to expand with every unfinished sentence. And Siggy – she couldn’t even begin to think about Siggy and that awful boy.
Instead of charging out and making a stab at fixing everything back to the way it should be, Blythe found herself immobilised. She was, she could admit it to herself, absolutely gutted, by the accumulation of everything.
More than any of them, though, more than anything else in the whole village, more than Rae employing that kid when she could have given a job to a local, more than knowing Siggy was falling in love with the last person in the village Blythe would want for her – more than that even.
More than Mae English sneering at her as if she knew Blythe was finally getting her comeuppance.
It was the idea that she was completely and utterly powerless when it came to Rae’s decision around selling off a third of the hotel.
Kip was right.
There wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.
The hotel had been left to Rae. It was all down to her what became of it.
Blythe found herself tossing and turning during the night. She’d hardly eaten all day, left half-finished mugs of tea all over the house, somehow even tea didn’t taste right now.
‘You okay?’ Kip whispered groggily next to her.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. Just a bad dream,’ she answered and pulled the covers back to let the air at her legs.
She couldn’t sleep. She shivered; padded her way as quietly as she could across the floor and opened the door with a slow groan.
She crept downstairs, the house creaking and yawning awake with her.
It was four-thirty in the morning. Bright outside, considering the hour.
The moon was full and milky in the sky, the clouds swept back to let it glisten when nobody should be watching.
Navy blue light flooded in through the windows in the rooms at the front of the house.
She turned into the drawing room. This was her mother’s room, in Blythe’s mind at least, there was a comfort to sitting here, a feeling that her mother was close by.
It was as Blythe was sitting there, trying to straighten thoughts that raced too fast to catch up, that she spotted the lights left on in Kip’s van.
He was always bloody doing that and then complaining because the battery was flat the following morning.
Blythe went in search of his keys. She shuffled into his huge old work shoes and tripped across the yard to where it was parked up.
In the beam of the full headlights, she watched as moths and midges swarmed in circles enjoying the glow.
How on earth had Kip not spotted the lights were still on when he’d come into the house in near darkness earlier?
She pulled open the door quickly, already the cool night air was biting into her fading drowsiness far more than any camomile tea could have a hope of rescuing.
And then she smelled it.
Intense and familiar, oppressive on the frigid air around her.
It was coming from the inside of the van. Unmistakable. Fiona Dixon. She’d recognise that cloying heavy scent anywhere. Blythe had never been able to wear a scent, couldn’t bear any sort of perfume near her.
‘NO.’ She screamed and then, horrified, her hand flew up to cover her mouth, fearing her shriek might have wakened Kip and Siggy.
She took a deep intoxicating breath. Toxic.
That was the only word that lingered on the air around her.
She backed slowly away from the van. All thoughts of switching off the lights, of saving the battery, of reminding Kip the following morning. All of it gone.
And then, as she stood there shivering in the dark, she realised.
It really was all gone. Everything she held dear was slipping away from her.
Her marriage. Her daughter. Her hotel. And standing there, in the flaccid night air, shivering as the icy dew crept around her bare legs, she knew, it was all spinning far too fast to do anything about any of it.
She was, in that instant, paralysed with fear.
She moved, like a woman possessed, towards the open back door.
Shrugged out of the jacket she’d been wearing and tossed aside Kip’s boots.
Then, she walked over to the old kitchen chair that her mother had always sat in and allowed the tears to flow down her cheeks until she heard the stirrings of her daughter over her head and she knew, it was time to get ready to start another day.