The stable block looked smaller than it had in his memory and more expensive. Someone had sandblasted the stone, added discreet uplighters and a line of potted bay trees that tried very hard to look as though they’d always been there. Ben pulled the truck into a marked “Contractors” bay with a small, unhelpful flicker of offence and killed the engine.
The smell hit him first when he stepped out: wet mud, old oil soaked into concrete, a faint whiff of horses that hadn’t been here for years. It was like opening a long‑forgotten file in his head. For a moment he was sixteen again, skidding his bike in this yard, getting barked at by some under‑groom with a pitchfork and a hangover.
He shut the door on the memory and reached for his laptop bag instead.
Inside, the conversion was all exposed beams, polished flagstones and tasteful industrial light fittings: the international language of “we have heritage but also Wi‑Fi, please book your off‑site here.” A glass panel listed offices by surname. ASHDOWN, ASHDOWN, ASHDOWN, and, near the bottom, “Estate Office – T. Ashdown”.
Tamsin looked up when he knocked. She was exactly as she appeared in the articles he’d googled on the train: immaculate bob, silk blouse, sleeves rolled to a precise, practical point on her forearms. Two mugs of coffee steamed beside a laptop that glowed with colour‑coded spreadsheets.
“Mr Carter.” Her handshake was cool, appraising, not unfriendly. “Thank you for coming up. I’m afraid the glamour of the countryside is mostly broken boilers and temperamental broadband.”
“I specialise in unglamorous,” he said. “Though we can make the broadband less temperamental.”
He opened his laptop, let the familiar graphs and diagrams bloom on screen, and slid into the patter that had sold a dozen other estates and hotels. Fibre runs from the lane cabinet, discreet access points that wouldn’t upset heritage officers, smart‑heating zones for the parts of the house they actually used. He sketched out projected savings and future‑proofing, spoke about resilience and redundancy, about not having to reboot the router every time a wedding party tried to upload their entire lives to Instagram.
Tamsin listened with the kind of focus that made him slightly nervous. No nodding along, no “I don’t really understand this tech stuff” that he could gently steer. She asked for numbers, for case studies, for how fast they could realistically push data through eighteenth‑century walls without incurring the wrath of Conservation.
Under the questions, he felt the old, unwelcome awareness of where he stood in the invisible village chart. She was Ashdown, he was…well, no longer “young Ben who does odd jobs,” but the echo remained. Contracted. Temporary. Useful.
He smiled, easy and professional, and kept talking, layering competence over the jolt of recognition every time a draught moved the office door and he caught, faint and insistent, the smell of damp stone from the yard outside.
When Tamsin was called away to deal with a caterer crisis, she handed him a set of keys and a floor plan and left him to it. Ben clipped the ID lanyard she’d given him to his belt rather than around his neck (it felt less like a collar that way) and stepped into the main house.
The air changed immediately: cooler, drier, scented with beeswax and old flowers. Motion sensors brought up a grudging glow in the corridor, leaving pockets of shadow where the Wi‑Fi signal promptly died on his phone. He walked slowly, watching the bars disappear and reappear, making notes.
Every few yards something snagged at him. A patch of wall he remembered his mum buffing with slow, tired circles. The brass banister he’d once spent an entire Saturday polishing because “it’ll make a difference to them, love.” The door at the end of the passage where a butler in a black tailcoat had appeared when he was twelve, materialising like a strict ghost to inform him this was “for the family, not staff.”
He told himself he couldn’t recall the man’s name. Of course he could.
At the Old Forge Café that evening, he chose a table near the plug sockets, set out his laptop and notebook with the practised efficiency of a man on yet another out‑of‑town job. It ought to have felt anonymous. Instead, the barista glanced up, did a small double‑take, and said, “Ben Carter, as I live and breathe. Flat white, isn’t it?” before he could open his mouth.
By the time he’d sat down, an elderly man from a corner table was levering himself up with his stick.
“Your mum still at the surgery, lad? Your dad still messing about with that allotment?”
Ben smiled, answered, heard himself say “Not bad, thanks,” in the old cadence. The words fitted too easily. “Our Ben,” not the consultant with the slick slide deck. A band of pressure tightened under his ribs, surprising in its ferocity, like a shirt button done up one too far.
The lane smelt of rain and crushed nettles, the drizzle needling through his jacket. By the crooked stile where they’d once mapped out train timetables and futures, the scene snapped back with indecent clarity: Rowan’s voice raw from explaining, again, that you didn’t turn down a full ride to the States; his own jaw locked, hands shoved in his pockets so he wouldn’t reach for her or the nearest inanimate object. He remembered the horrible, grown‑up calm with which she’d finally said, “Then I’ll go alone,” and how he’d let the silence answer for him. Now he lengthened his stride, eyes on the slick tarmac, informing himself, firmly, that scholarships, ultimatums and the particular way she’d looked at him that night were all ancient history, and had absolutely nothing to do with routers, tenders or the three tidy months he was contracted to survive here.
In the annex over the stable block, with its neutral art and too‑crisp sheets, he should have felt like he did on any other job. Instead he found himself scrolling back through ancient emails, drafts of late‑night messages to Rowan that had never made it past “Hey.” Her name still sat in his contacts. He hovered, thumb poised, then killed the screen, unsettled by how quickly the village had excavated feelings he’d filed under “dealt with” years ago.
He lay on his back and watched the shadows from the stable‑yard security light drag slowly across the ceiling, the annex humming gently with the polite, efficient warmth of modern insulation. It was all very tasteful: oak veneer, oatmeal walls, carefully neutral prints of cows that had almost certainly never seen mud. Someone, somewhere, had sent a mood board. Someone else had approved it.
He ought to have felt at home. This was what he was good at, after all, anonymous, functional spaces. Places you passed through between the parts of life that mattered to other people.
He thought of the last decade as a sequence of doors that all closed with the same soft, pneumatic sigh: serviced apartment, AirBnB, apart‑hotel with keycards that always demagnetised on the second day. Flats where the furniture belonged to an agency and the artwork to whoever had been bulk‑ordering framed typography that year. Co‑working spaces with exposed brick, beanbags and playlists calibrated to offend nobody. Kitchen cupboards containing a single frying pan and three mismatched mugs; wardrobes with the faint, persistent smell of somebody else’s detergent.
It had been freedom, once. He’d told himself that often enough. No mortgage, no school catchment areas, no tedious arguments about whether to knock through the kitchen. Everything in the boot of the car and on the cloud. He could pick up and go anywhere a contract required, plug in his laptop, connect to the Wi‑Fi and be, in theory, the same man.
Only the sameness had started, lately, to feel less like possibility and more like erasure. No creaky stair he’d climbed a thousand times in the dark. No dent in a sofa exactly shaped to him. Nowhere his, full stop. Just a rolling programme of stopgaps, each one perfectly adequate and fundamentally indifferent to whether he stayed or left in the morning.
There was, he supposed, a version of his life that looked enviably sorted if you skimmed it fast enough. Calendar full, inbox humming, LinkedIn politely smug. He’d become very good at talking about growth curves and optimisation, about “delivering under pressure” and “owning the room.” Investors liked that, clients liked that, even his mates from school liked having someone to cite whenever the pub conversation turned to “getting out” and “making it.”
What he didn’t have, as the annex’s tasteful cows looked benignly down on him, was anyone he could admit the rest of it to. That it still felt, some mornings, as if he’d got away with something and was waiting to be called back, told there’d been a mistake. That contracts and case studies hadn’t translated into the solid, settled feeling he’d once assumed arrived automatically with a certain income bracket and a decent car.
He’d had girlfriends, of course. Clever, funny women who met him where he was. On trains, between meetings, in neatly scheduled weekends that never quite tipped into real mess. They got the edited highlights, the competent, unruffled Ben who knew where he was going next quarter. They didn’t get the version lying here now, wondering if all the movement had been less about chasing opportunity and more about running a very long, very successful avoidance strategy.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust people. He just wasn’t sure what would happen if he ever said, plainly, that he was scared of stopping long enough to find out whether any of this (any of him) was actually enough.
Rowan sat in the middle of the avoidance strategy like a missing clause in a sentence he’d never quite finished. They’d gone from planning escape routes on the bonnet of his old Fiesta to radio silence between terms; one scholarship offer, one badly timed argument, and she’d vanished into airports and time zones with nothing more than a brisk, brave email he’d read a hundred times and never understood. Without the why (without the chance to ask whether he’d imagined the whole thing) he’d taught himself to treat relationships as projects with clear deliverables and polite exit strategies. No stakes, no demands, nothing that risked that particular drop in the stomach again. Wanting something as big as that, without explanation or closure, had felt reckless.
His CV read cleanly enough, but the story underneath snagged. Was he the lad from the council end of the village who’d talked his way into boardrooms, or the polished consultant who still flinched at which fork to pick up at formal dinners? He could perform either role on demand, but there was no single, settled version that felt unforced.
He’d told himself he was building towards something: an eventual plateau where the graph levelled out and life, obligingly, felt complete. But when he tried to picture anything past the next contract, there was only a tasteful blur: more pitches, more upgrades, more hotel bars that all smelled the same. No kitchen table, no fixed view from a window, no one whose plans tangled with his in ways that couldn’t be rescheduled.
It tended to arrive in ambushes, that awareness of lack. Not in the dramatic, cinematic way he might once have imagined, but in the stupid, domestic gaps that shouldn’t have meant anything.
Like this morning, standing in the estate kitchen with a mug of coffee cooling against his palm while Tamsin took a call in the next room. The space had that faint, old-house chill even in summer; the Aga radiated a low, constant heat that never seemed to reach the corners. Tin mugs, inherited crockery, a polite rota for staff use blu‑tacked to the fridge. He checked his email, his project management app, the shared calendar for the wi‑fi upgrade. All full. His life, on paper, packed to the rafters.
And yet.
There was an odd, unoccupied silence beside him, as if the room had been built with space for another mug, another hand reaching for the sugar, a voice grumbling about the coffee being too strong or not strong enough. The sort of running complaint you secretly liked because it meant someone had been here often enough to develop a preference.
He’d always been good at filling silence with work. Another report, another spec sheet, another late‑night deep dive into comparative energy efficiencies. In London, in serviced apartments and anonymous hotels, the trick had functioned perfectly: whenever a thought threatened to get personal, he opened a new tab.
Here, the trick frayed. The estate ran on routines that weren’t his, on timetables that honoured feeding times and parish council meetings as much as client calls. There were pauses he couldn’t productively colonise: waiting for a tractor to clear the lane, hanging about while the groundsman located a set of keys, sitting at a long table in the converted stables while village caterers laid out sandwiches.
In those pauses, the hollow made itself known. Not dramatic loneliness, nothing as self‑pitying as that. More like standing in a room that had been purpose‑built for a piece of furniture you’d never quite got round to buying. His career had expanded to fill the available floor space, sleek and modular and ever‑reconfigurable, but there was still that one alcove in the centre he kept pretending was meant to stay bare.
The shape of it was embarrassingly specific if he let himself look straight at it. Not a generic “someone” but a sense of shared weather: the shorthand of in‑jokes, the background hum of a life that had been negotiated rather than optimised. Calendars that overlapped without needing to be integrated. A second toothbrush not because a guest was staying, but because the owner of the toothbrush actually lived there.
He told himself he’d simply fallen out of practice at wanting. That after enough years of treating connection like any other deliverable, scope it, schedule it, avoid scope‑creep, his brain now assumed that any desire which couldn’t be plotted on a Gantt chart was suspect.
Yet walking through Ashdown’s half‑modernised corridors, noting where the new wiring ended and the old walls began, he kept feeling a flicker of something he refused to name. As if his life, for all its motion and polish, had been wired as a temporary fix, extension leads looped round skirting boards, when somewhere, once, he’d believed in the possibility of a permanent installation.
He deleted the thought as soon as it formed, of course. Flagged another email instead. But the hollow remained, quietly taking the measure of him.
He kept catching himself rehearsing a life that wasn’t on any of his spreadsheets.
Not the glossy nonsense of property supplements, no bi‑fold doors or conversation pits, but tiny, unmarketable scenes that arrived uninvited. Two mugs permanently out on a counter because washing them up between rounds was pointless. A shape moving behind a frosted bathroom door while he shaved. A familiar tread on old floorboards at the far end of a corridor, the particular rhythm that told you who it was before you saw them.
He blamed the house, obviously. Ashdown had been built for repetition: same bells rung at the same hours, people crossing and recrossing the same squares of stone until their footfalls became another layer of history. You could almost feel the ghost of domestic habit in the air. Arguments reheated over leftovers, the soft thud of a book being shut in the next room, someone humming tunelessly while they hunted for their keys.
He’d chosen a life expressly designed to avoid that kind of entanglement. And still, here he was, imagining it with the sort of detail he usually reserved for system diagrams, then snapping the daydream shut as soon as it began to feel like wanting.
It was there in the small betrayals of the place: the patched‑over cornices, the tasteful scaffolding tucked round the back, the way a corridor would gleam with new wiring for three metres and then drop back into frayed flex and Bakelite. Ashdown wasn’t falling down, not yet; it was just tired of pretending the stopgaps were a plan. He recognised the look. The estate carried itself the way he did at networking drinks: polished from a distance, quietly held together with temporary fixes.
The longer he walked its uneven floors, the harder it was not to hear the question humming beneath the surveyor’s notes. Maybe it wasn’t only roofs and routers that needed a proper overhaul. Maybe what he’d really mothballed was any conviction that something, someone, might be allowed to stay.
He could see, with the same horrid clarity he brought to a cash‑flow forecast, that he’d spent years worshipping movement because it excused him from choosing. Airports, serviced flats, project timelines. Perpetual transit as alibi. If you were always on your way somewhere else, you never had to risk the far more alarming prospect of arriving, of being properly seen and stayed for.
They had, between them, quietly marked down their own chances, as if grand, derailing love were a product discontinued after thirty. Sensible affection, mutual respect, not being left holding the bill. Those were the things one was meant to want now. Anything larger than that belonged, by mutual consent, to other people’s catastrophes and to their own younger, more reckless ghosts.
They had, with the sort of brisk efficiency they now brought to inboxes and insurance renewals, downgraded the whole concept of love to something more administratively manageable. The wild, re-order-your-life variety was, they had separately agreed, a luxury product no longer aimed at their demographic. That was for people who still believed overdrafts were romantic and hadn’t yet learned how much paperwork grief involved.
The contemporary ideal, as far as Ben could tell, was a partner who looked sensible in LinkedIn photos, understood the difference between gross and net, and wouldn’t flinch at a joint spreadsheet. Someone with whom you could have a pleasant weekend in a tasteful rental cottage without any risk of announcing, halfway through a cream tea, that you were willing to move continents for them. Stability, competence, an agreed rota for who called the plumber: these were the new sacred flames.
Rowan, for her part, had become adept at explaining, usually over coffee in some carefully neutral city, that she wasn’t against relationships, just against melodrama. She told herself that what mattered was mutual respect, intellectual companionship, and exiting things before they fermented into disappointment. The sort of love that made you write terrible emails at three in the morning or stay in a village you’d sworn to leave, well, that was for field notes and other people’s case studies.
Neither of them would have said, out loud, that they felt slightly old for the kind of madness they’d once shared. They framed it instead as maturity, as finally understanding that the trick was not to make a fool of oneself. And yet, under all the sensible rhetoric about boundaries and balance, there lay the faint, treacherous suspicion that they might simply be trying to pre-empt the humiliation of wanting something that wasn’t on offer anymore.
In private, they each recast their shared history as naïve and impractical, a charming pilot episode that would never have been commissioned for a full series. It was a story, they told themselves, that only worked because they hadn’t yet sat through meetings about visas or read the small print on fixed‑rate mortgages; because “let’s just see what happens” had not yet collided with tax codes, tenancy agreements, and the dreary physics of being skint.
Back then, parents had been background figures, safely middle‑aged and disapproving at a distance, not people whose health and finances might suddenly dictate postcodes. Back then, careers were aspirations rather than structures that demanded constant tithe: weekends surrendered to deadlines, flights booked around conferences, the quiet terror of slipping a rung and never quite climbing back.
It was easier to file their younger selves under “sweet but unrealistic,” to treat that wild, portable certainty as one more youthful indiscretion. In this version, they hadn’t failed at love; they had simply grown up and discovered logistics.
They had become very deft, over the years, at laundering inconvenient feeling into socially approved forms of drive. Ben could look directly at a pulse of wanting (connection, recognition, the urge to belong somewhere that wasn’t a quarterly report) and reroute it into Excel forecasts and neat bullet‑pointed proposals. Tenderness became “capacity for long‑term partnership with heritage clients”; the desire to be chosen became a competitive day rate and a pipeline of work booked six months ahead. Rowan, meanwhile, had learned to convert the ache for intimacy into calls for papers and grant applications, to reframe longing as “intellectual curiosity” and commitment as a three‑year fellowship abroad. Careers, unlike people, came with selection criteria and feedback forms; you could fail and try again without anyone calling it heartbreak.
When a flicker of that old, reckless hope surfaced they treated it like a glitch in the system. A symptom, they told themselves briskly, of tiredness, jet‑lag, overwork. They were not, under any circumstances, about to start believing in miracles scaled to village size.
Each arrived equipped with a neat, defensive theorem: love, once admitted, would demand compromises they had finally stopped making for anyone; the lives they had pieced together were too fragile, too hard‑won, to risk on the volatile currency of wanting. Ambition, they could justify. Loneliness, they could manage. But to hunger for more was a luxury for people with safety nets.
Ben crossed the gravel sweep toward the stable block with his laptop bag biting a familiar groove into his shoulder, reciting the day’s story to himself as if preparing for a pitch.
Ashdown: heritage asset with legacy infrastructure issues, medium‑high potential for upsell into digital concierge services and remote‑monitoring contracts. Deliverables: site survey, phased upgrade plan, stakeholder buy‑in. Emotional content: nil. Rowan Ellery: historical footnote, minor risk factor in stakeholder landscape, best managed by polite, infrequent contact and an unwavering commitment to small talk about the weather.
He repeated it in different phrasings, as if the right arrangement of words might calcify into truth. “Three‑month trial,” he muttered, adjusting the strap. “Interim contract. Strategic foothold in the rural luxury segment.” Not: test run for whether his insides still recognised this place, or that girl (woman) who had once made every hedgerow and bus shelter look like a threshold to elsewhere.
The air smelt of damp stone and cut grass; somewhere a pigeon cooed with the leisurely entitlement of a creature that had never opened a spreadsheet. His boots crunched on the gravel in a rhythm as steady as a metronome, but underneath it his pulse tripped over itself every time a door opened in the stable block, just in case it was her.
Ridiculous. Statistically, he reminded himself, the most likely first encounter was with a harassed administrator about Wi‑Fi dead zones, not with the person who had detonated his early twenties. He was here for routers, not reckonings.
He shifted his laptop bag, feeling the familiar drag of weight and the faint ache at the base of his neck that meant he was, at least, still the man who knew how to carry his own kit. Wanting a bigger contract, that was respectable. Wanting… anything else… was a variable he refused to model.
Rowan had commandeered one of the smaller guest rooms on the second floor, the kind that had probably once belonged to an undistinguished aunt. It smelt faintly of furniture polish and old roses, the ghost of other people’s propriety lingering in the curtains. She balanced her laptop on the narrow writing desk, its surface dented by decades of dutiful thank‑you letters, and retitled her document for the third time.
“Ashdown Court as Case Study in Emotional Detachment and Inherited Obligation,” she typed, feeling the capital letters lock into place like armour. Perfect. Impersonal. Comfortingly bloodless. Nothing there about the girl who used to sneak in on open days to press her face to the banister and imagine a different life. Nothing about the boy who had sworn they’d leave together.
She rearranged sections, padded out her methodology with words like “participant‑observation” and “performance of class affect,” building a barricade of theory between herself and the raw, inconvenient recognitions that kept lurching up in every corridor: the catch in her chest at the view from the south windows, the way the gravel sounded exactly like memory under someone else’s boots.
In the makeshift hot‑desk corner of the stable block office, Ben propped his phone against his laptop and scrolled through the week as if sheer density could serve as insulation. Site survey, network mapping, legacy‑cabling assessment, call with the fibre provider, follow‑up with the security firm, three separate calendar blocks titled, with aggressive neutrality, ADMIN.
He added another placeholder (“Supplier liaison”) to the one pale strip of afternoon that had been empty, watching the last slack space vanish under digital ink. If every hour was spoken for, there would be no unclaimed minute in which his mind might wander down to the river, or back twelve years to a departure gate. You couldn’t be ambushed by longing, he reasoned, if you never stopped moving long enough to be caught.
At a corner table in the Old Forge, radiator ticking and grinder shrieking, Rowan angled her laptop to hide the village green. To her colleague’s frozen, pixelated face she said, lightly, that the sabbatical was for “reassessing priorities.” In her head that meant proving she still chose movement over roots, that craving any sort of permanence (particularly the Ben‑shaped kind) was sentimental backsliding.
That evening, as dusk pooled in the dips of the lawns and the house creaked itself into its night‑time skeleton, both lay awake in separate rooms under the same old sky, watching different ceilings and arriving at the same conclusion: whatever flickers of wanting, memories, what‑ifs, the imagined weight of another body, must be disciplined away. It was, they told themselves, merely a matter of will. They had schedules now, deliverables and deadlines; desire could be deferred like any non‑urgent task. Which was, of course, precisely when the practical demands of the coming days began quietly assembling, ready to burst in and upend those careful resolutions.
The next morning’s rain came in on the slant, blown sideways off the fields so that even the sheep in the lower pasture looked offended. Ben eased the 4x4 between the lime trees, tyres whispering over a slick mosaic of flattened leaves. The avenue, usually all postcard charm and dappled light, had become a reflective tunnel of pewter sky and shining bark, every puddle throwing his headlights back at him like small, unamused eyes.
The wipers beat a steady, chastising metronome. Cabling runs, he told himself. Legacy conduit. Patch panel locations. He started reciting them under his breath as if they were a spell: “Survey, backbone, cabinet footprint, power redundancy.” Perfectly ordinary words, the structural steel of a conversation with any client. No reason at all they should keep turning into other phrases entirely. He shifted down as the drive curved, the house sliding into view between the trunks: honey-coloured and self-possessed even under low cloud, its windows blind with morning. Somewhere behind those walls, she would be starting her day. Coffee in a chipped mug or something absurdly continental? Did she still write herself illegible notes on the backs of receipts? He had not given himself permission to remember any of that, yet here his brain was, enthusiastically pirating bandwidth.
He tightened his grip on the wheel and tried again. Points of failure, existing routes, proposed upgrade path. Avoid, at all costs, the conversational cul‑de‑sac in which Tamsin said, “You know Rowan’s back, of course,” and he demonstrated just how badly one local lad made good could fail to look unbothered.
It was three months. A contract. A professional foothold. He was here to install resilience, not excavate history. The rain needled at the windscreen as if to mark punctuation under that resolve, and he drove on towards the stable block with the stubborn air of a man who had absolutely no intention of being surprised.
The “office” had once been a loose box; someone had simply persuaded it, with glass and Wi‑Fi boosters, to pretend otherwise. The scent of fresh paint fought a losing skirmish against old hay, saddle soap and damp stone. Ben shook rain from his jacket, set his laptop at the end of the long glass‑topped table, and watched his own reflection slide beneath the estate paperwork spread like a low-budget war room.
Flipcharts leaned drunkenly against the walls, their felt‑tip scrawls looping between “CAPEX” and “urgent masonry.” Heritage grant brochures lay fanned out beside floor plans so dog‑eared they looked personally offended by the twenty-first century. Coloured dots marched across them in anxious constellations: weak roofs, weaker cashflow.
He’d known Ashdown was strained; he hadn’t pictured quite this level of controlled panic. He plugged in, the extension lead snaking away like a lifeline, and silently revised his estimates upwards: of required labour, of billable hours, of just how deep into the wiring (literal and metaphorical) he might be invited. Three months, he thought. Long enough to stabilise a system. Long enough, inconveniently, to matter.
Across the courtyard, Rowan ducked under the archway out of the drizzle, camera slung at her hip and notebook shoved into her satchel, the hem of her skirt already spattered with mud in small, accusatory rosettes. The flagstones sweated damp; somewhere a gutter gurgled in protest. She had promised Tamsin she’d sit in on “one or two” operational meetings to understand how the estate sold its own story, and had repeated, with academic briskness, that this was pure fieldwork. Now, as she wiped rain from her glasses on the sleeve of her cardigan and pushed them back up her nose, she tried the word on again. “Observer,” she murmured, as if it possessed talismanic properties. Observer, not participant. Certainly not ex-anything. Observer.
Tamsin, running fifteen minutes late after a call with the bank that had used the word “covenant” more often than her blood pressure approved of, strode through the stable block corridor with the same breathless momentum she’d been carrying for years, mentally slotting today’s tasks into an already overfull grid. The facilities review sat at the top. Not only because the ancient wiring was, according to last month’s report, a polite way of describing a fire hazard, but because if Ben’s proposed systems impressed the trustees, they might finally unlock the ring‑fenced modernisation budget she’d been wrestling out of hibernation for three financial years and counting.
Tamsin shouldered the door open with her elbow, a controlled gust of perfume and cold air, and let a stack of files thump onto the table. “Apologies: bank drama. We’ll be brisk. Rowan, this is Ben Carter, facilities and tech.”
Rowan, occupied with coaxing raindrops from her sleeve, heard him before she properly saw him.
“Hi,” he said, somehow casual and not. “Been a while.”
The voice arrived whole, intact from another decade; her body recognised it first. For a beat she stared at the window’s blurred courtyard, as if the glass might offer an alternative timeline, then turned.
Sound arrives before sight: the scrape of a chair leg, the soft thud of a mug being set down, then his voice: warmer than she remembers, threaded with something steadier. “Hi. Been a while.” The air tightens in her chest; for a blink she’s no longer in glass and exposed brick but back under the dripping bus shelter at eighteen, arguing about train timetables and futures.
From his side of the table, Ben watches her shoulders go very slightly rigid. Not dramatic (Rowan was never dramatic) but enough for him to see the moment hit. She doesn’t turn straight away. Of course she doesn’t. She looks out at the rain instead, the same way she used to stare down the high street when she was thinking of anywhere else.
He has a stupid, vivid memory of that bus shelter: her hair soaked, his trainers leaking, both of them insisting they weren’t going to be the ones who stayed. He pushes it away, shoves his hand casually into his pocket so no one will notice it wants to grip the back of the chair.
She turns at last.
The first thing he registers is that she looks like herself and nothing like the girl who left. There are new lines at the corners of her eyes, a paler tiredness under them that mirrors his own. The cardigans have grown more complicated; the skirts, if possible, even floatier. But the tilt of her mouth (half wary, half amused at some private joke) that’s exactly the same.
He summons the easy, client-facing smile he uses in boardrooms and boiler rooms alike, hoping it covers the half-second freeze. It just about does. Outwardly, he’s the competent contractor Tamsin hired: hand offered, tone light, as if they’re old neighbours who once shared a lift, not almost ten years and a spectacularly unfinished conversation. Inside, everything feels fractionally misaligned, as though someone has nudged the whole room half an inch to the left.
Rowan’s fingers stay fixed in the damp wool of her cardigan, thumb pressed hard into a pilled ridge as though it were a worry stone she’d brought home from better-prepared days. The rain streaking the window gives her an excuse not to move; she traces a single droplet’s path down the glass, counts two slow breaths, academic trick for interviews with hostile sources, not ex-boyfriends, while her brain sprints ahead without her.
Ben. Here. Now.
Of course he’d end up somewhere like this, she thinks, a little wildly: wires disappearing into tasteful trunking, spreadsheets open on thin laptops, sensible flooring that doesn’t creak or remember who danced on it. A place where things can be measured and costed and improved.
Another, more honest part of her mutters, You knew this might happen, you just didn’t believe it. She’d plotted routes through the village that curved away from likely collisions, scheduled her visits to the Court at hours when contractors were supposedly elsewhere. It was like moving through a small town in a foreign country where she spoke only enough of the language to get in trouble, not out of it.
When she does turn, the glass room seems to contract, perspective narrowing to a straight, bright corridor with him at the far end. He’s on the opposite side of the table, a folder opened at some crucial spreadsheet and already abandoned, fingers resting on the paper as if to prove he remembers why he’s here. The almost-grin he offers is maddeningly familiar: the lopsided, apologetic one he used when they were caught sneaking over the graveyard wall, smoothed now into something suitable for clients and minor aristocracy, pretending this is all perfectly ordinary.
The scuffed Barbour, the neat-but-rushed hair, the laptop bag dropped by his boots: they assemble a competent stranger over the faint double-exposure of the boy who once climbed the church roof for a better look at fireworks and futures.
Her name surfaces somewhere in Tamsin’s efficient monologue about time slots and key codes, but it never quite lands; the syllables skim past like radio static she’s not tuned to. What does come into focus are micro-fault lines: the brief tightening of his hand on the chair back, the dart of his glance to her bare left ring finger, the fractional stutter before his practised charm reboots, smoothed over so quickly anyone else might miss it.
She drags words up from somewhere that feels both formal and hopelessly inadequate. “It has,” she manages, her voice coming out thinner than she remembers it, and adds, because muscle memory reaches for neutral ground, “So you’re…working with Ashdown now?” The question hangs there like an over-polite bridge, while Tamsin snaps another file open and all three of them conspire, for one brittle beat, to behave as though this is simply business.
Ben keeps his eyes on the tablet for one second longer than necessary, as if the spreadsheet might suddenly reveal a fire he has to put out in Surrey. It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. Tamsin’s colour‑coded kingdom of columns and contingencies is immaculate; the only volatile element in the room has just spoken to him for the first time in…he’s not going to do the maths.
He lets the breath out on a half‑laugh, finds the tone he uses on nervous clients and over‑curious investors. “Yeah. Infrastructure, systems, all the boring bits no one puts in the brochure.” His voice sounds perfectly normal to his own ears, which is disconcerting, because nothing about the moment feels normal in the slightest. The line buys him a heartbeat, the way it always does; a neat, self‑deprecating joke that says I know my place in the grand scheme of heritage fantasies. Wiring and water pressure, not weddings and weekend supplements.
The heartbeat is just long enough to make the mistake of actually looking at her.
The impact is physical, like stepping out of bright sun into a cold church. For a ridiculous instant he’s convinced he must have remembered her wrong, exaggerated her over the years into something she never was. But no. Memory slots over reality with a queasy precision. The mouth he knows, the eyes he could once read from a mile away on the far side of the school field; the rest of her sharpened, edited, as if someone has gone in with a careful hand and removed anything blurred.
He feels his hand tighten on the edge of the tablet and makes himself loosen it, fingers smoothing the glass as if that was always what he meant to do. “Mostly back‑end stuff,” he adds, because silence would be worse, because he’d like Tamsin to keep believing he’s the sort of unflappable professional who can handle a listed Georgian money pit without being derailed by one woman and a decade of unfinished sentences.
Older, yes. But it’s a kind of precision rather than any softening, like someone has gone round the edges with a sharper pencil. Cleaner lines to her face, cheekbones he’s fairly sure weren’t allowed out unchaperoned when she was nineteen, that intent, assessing gaze now set off by thin‑framed glasses that make her look even more like she’s about to dismantle a whole world with a footnote and a politely devastating “as X has argued, somewhat inadequately.” Her hair’s longer, dragged back in a loose knot that keeps failing at the edges; wisps escape and catch the light in a way that is, unhelpfully, exactly as he remembers.
The cardigan and floaty skirt are new, a sort of curated bohemian that makes sense for someone who probably has opinions about archives and slow fashion. The boots are the same kind of practical, though, scuffed at the toes. And the slight angle of her body, weight tipped as if she’s already halfway turned towards an exit only she can see: that’s identical. Talk to me, her stance used to say, but don’t you dare try to keep me.
Rowan feels his voice skim along her skin before the actual sense of the words catches up, that old, ridiculous body‑first recognition. By the time her mind starts filing syllables into meaning, she is already turning, already stitching a professional, non‑committal expression into place. It lasts about as long as a Post‑it on a damp wall.
The sight of him knocks it clean off.
Broader through the shoulders, that much is obvious; the fitted shirt and half‑rolled cuffs belong to someone who spends more time in meetings than up ladders, but she can see the latter in the way the fabric pulls when he shifts his weight. The leaning‑back‑against‑the‑desk is a pose, yes, but it’s also infuriatingly familiar, the echo of a boy who’d sprawled on pub benches and muttered darkly about how he was never going to end up wiring cowsheds for the rest of his life.
Now the pose has acquired edges: a deliberate calm, a practiced stillness that reads as confidence unless you’ve known him pacing holes into cheap carpet. It overlays, ghostlike, on that nineteen‑year‑old version: same mouth, same eyes, everything else rearranged by ten years and a city skyline she didn’t see him climb.
The overlay doesn’t quite align. That faint bracket of tiredness at the corner of his mouth, the way he holds her gaze now without the old flicker of apology, sit uneasily with the remembered boy who joked his way out of every serious moment. There’s something else she can’t immediately name, success, perhaps, or simply distance. It tilts the room a few degrees, as if perspective itself has been nudged, leaving everything just out of focus.
Tamsin’s pen races down a printed schedule, annotating columns as she glides through site access, health‑and‑safety, wi‑fi dead zones and “heritage sensitivities,” her low, precise voice forming a competent hum none of them truly absorb. Ben nods on cue, Rowan supplies the expected “mm”s, while between them something tilts and re‑forms: you’re entirely changed and exactly the same, and I have no working protocol for this.
For a suspended second none of them speaks. The only sound in the room is the low whirr and occasional clunk of the office printer in the adjoining alcove, labouring through another over‑ambitious job. A faint smell of hot toner drifts into the stale coffee and floor polish; somewhere, a fluorescent tube gives a tired little buzz, as if even the lighting is embarrassed to witness this.
The pause stretches, thins, and then thickens again, like something trying to decide whether to be awkward or catastrophic. Ben feels it crystallise around the back of his neck, that old instinctive flinch just before a row used to break out. His brain, usually three moves ahead in a pitch meeting, offers nothing more helpful than: don’t say anything stupid. Closely followed by: say something, you idiot.
He can feel Rowan not looking at him. It’s a very specific kind of not‑looking, familiar in its own way: attention pinned slightly to the left of his shoulder, gaze ostensibly on Tamsin’s neat columns of ink while every nerve in the room recalibrates around the fact of his presence. Ten years ago it would have been averted eyes and a muttered joke about coursework; now it’s the professional equivalent: a measured stillness, pen poised above her notebook, body angled just enough towards the door to suggest theoretical escape.
Beside them, Tamsin hesitates almost imperceptibly mid‑sentence, as if some internal sensor has picked up a temperature drop she can’t yet quantify. Her pen, which has been annotating blocks of time with ruthless efficiency, stills above the page. The silence presses at the edges of her brisk competence, testing for weaknesses.
All the things not said a decade ago crowd into the small, overheated office: why didn’t you call, why didn’t you come, why did you leave without me. Ben can almost hear them, layered under the printer’s mechanical sigh, each unspoken sentence slotting back into place like a file returned to the wrong cabinet.
Rowan’s fingers, betraying her, drift up to her temple before she’s even aware of the movement, finding that familiar loose strand and tucking it behind her ear with fussy precision. The gesture is muscle memory from another lifetime: late afternoons in the sixth‑form common room, essays unwritten, his trainers on the table and her pretending not to care what he thought. Back then she did it whenever an argument edged too close to the bone, whenever a teacher asked a question she absolutely knew the answer to but refused, on principle, to perform.
Ben sees it the way you notice an old scar rather than a fresh wound. The years between flicker and collapse; for a second he’s looking at the girl who used to sit cross‑legged on his duvet explaining Foucault with felt‑tip diagrams, every so often shoving hair out of her face when she lost the thread. The shock of it lands somewhere just left of his sternum and tugs one corner of his mouth upward, uninvited, before he can pull the expression back into neutral.
The almost‑smile unnerves her, so she reaches, as she always has, for irony as if it were armour. “So you’re… Ashdown’s digital cavalry now?” she says, the lightness in her tone just a fraction over‑calibrated. Her gaze takes the scenic route rather than meeting his: a quick pass over the discreet logo on his polo shirt, the roll of annotated plans under one arm, the scuffed laptop bag slouched at his feet like a tired dog. Wires snake from its half‑open zip, a tangle of chargers and adaptors that looks absurdly modern against the stable block’s whitewashed stone and exposed beams. “Riding in with fibre‑optic and spreadsheets,” she adds, dryly. “Very… heritage‑adjacent of you.”
He matches her register automatically, voice coming out a shade too bright. “Someone’s got to drag the place into this century,” he says, summoning the practiced, easy grin he wheels out for nervous boards and sceptical procurement teams. Even as his cheeks arrange themselves into it, he’s uncomfortably aware it doesn’t quite fit here: too polished for this low ceiling, for her unsettled, measuring gaze.
The quip hangs there, delicate as spun glass, and they both produce the same small, social half‑laugh. As if humoured, as if unbothered. It fools no one, least of all themselves. Under the joke something heavier vibrates, an old, unvoiced line, You were meant to leave with me, that seems to contract the room, thinning the air just as Tamsin glances up, faintly frowning at a tension she can’t yet name.
Tamsin, hearing the brittle edge in their half‑laughter, mistakes it for irritation and slides a roll of plans across the table as if deploying a shield. “Right. Since you’re both here, let’s sort this now,” she says, uncapping a pen with a small, precise click that in her world counts as the sound of judgment being passed. The nib glints like a scalpel before she leans over the table, flipping the roll open to a flagged section with brisk, practised hands.
Ben watches her fingers move, grateful for something, anything, that is not Rowan’s profile at the edge of his vision. He has seen Tamsin do this with contractors, with bank managers, with a production designer last week who arrived in trainers and entitlement; the ritual of paper and pen, agendas and bullet points. It’s her way of flattening any awkwardness into a sequence of tasks.
“Floor plans,” she adds, more for Rowan’s benefit than his. “Version five, so if any of you have the temerity to own an outdated PDF, consider this your absolution.” There’s a flicker at the corner of her mouth that might be humour, if she had the time.
She smooths the paper flat, the heel of her hand briefly skimming the outline of the east wing, as if to reassure herself it is still physically there and not yet mortgaged into oblivion. The stable block’s old table wobbles faintly under the attention, one leg shimmying on the uneven flagstones. Ben instinctively reaches to steady the edge, fingertips brushing a coffee ring that is almost certainly his from earlier that morning.
“Come in, will you?” Tamsin says, lowering her voice a notch as she glances towards the open door. “Walls in here are essentially paper; I don’t need the accounts team getting an early access seminar.” She crooks her fingers in a summoning motion.
Ben steps in on her right, Rowan on her left, their shoulders almost brushing as they bend over the schematic. From this angle he can smell Rowan’s shampoo (something faintly herbal, like the health‑food shop her mother used to side‑eye in Cheltenham) and it knocks loose an image of her at eighteen, hair still damp from the river, laughing at something he can’t, irritatingly, quite remember.
Tamsin taps the sketched outline of the house, neat nail making a soft, insistent metronome against the paper. “East wing first,” she says. “Ben, your cabling has to go through the old estate office and past the archives; Rowan, that’s exactly where your Ashdown papers and tenant records live. So you’re going to be tripping over each other unless we’re clever.”
Ben makes a noncommittal sound that could pass for professional interest. In his peripheral vision, Rowan tilts her head, the loose end of her hair escaping its tie and sliding forward; she tucks it back behind her ear with that same hurried, defensive little gesture he remembers from exam weeks and arguments.
“The office is still a bit of a… palimpsest,” Tamsin continues, choosing the academic word with a faint, wry glance at Rowan. “Ledgers from the nineteenth century, broadband routers from last year, three broken printers from God‑knows‑when. And my uncle’s old desk, which he believes is sacrosanct and I believe is a health and safety incident waiting to happen.” Her tone is dry, all practicality, as if this were a minor logistical puzzle rather than (Ben can feel it) an emotional minefield laid out in line drawings and hatch marks.
“The cabling run wants a clear route,” Ben hears himself say, defaulting to the neutral cadence he uses with facilities managers. “If we can keep one side of the room clear, we’ll be in and out before anyone notices we were there.” It is such an obvious lie, in this house where nothing goes unnoticed, that he almost smiles at his own optimism.
Rowan shifts a fraction closer to see the tiny annotations in the margin, the fabric of her cardigan whispering against his sleeve. “And I,” she replies, equally bland, “only need to turn a hundred and fifty years of chaotic filing into something legible. I’ll try not to get in the way of your cables.”
There’s an edge of humour there, but the word ‘only’ lands with the quiet weight of everything she left, and everything she has apparently come back to catalogue. He feels it, the old instinct to smooth things over, to offer help, to ask why now of all times, jam itself against the much newer instinct that says: keep this professional, Carter, for once in your life.
Tamsin, mercifully oblivious to subtext, draws a firm cross over a shaded corridor. “This passage is non‑negotiable. Fire escape access. Share it nicely. Ben, your team stores kit in the far corner. Rowan, you can annex the big table by the window; it gets the best light for your… scholarly rummaging.”
Rowan’s mouth twitches. “That’s the technical term, yes.”
Ben glances up before he can stop himself. Her eyes meet his for a beat, quick and startled, and the look that passes between them is horribly, stupidly like recognition. Of an old joke half‑remembered, of the fact that they still know how to do this, to find the same absurdity in a room full of Ashdown compromises.
He looks back at the paper so fast the floor plan blurs. “Fine by me,” he says. “We’ll label the cable drums so you don’t accidentally archive them with the tithe records.”
“That would upset several historians,” she answers, dry. “And possibly a few future IT consultants.”
It is nothing, just a handful of words over cheap copier paper. But as Tamsin’s pen continues its brisk progress across the plan, the simple geography of it settles with a peculiar finality: whatever story they thought they’d finished years ago now has them pencilled into the same narrow rooms, side by side, for the foreseeable future.
She flicks open Ben’s digital calendar on the laptop with practised fingers and calls up Rowan’s on her tablet, dragging both screens into the sliver of table between them as if staging an impartial negotiation. “Right,” she murmurs, more to herself than to them, and begins blocking out time on a printed grid: pale grey for survey work, a bolder hatch for interviews, darker stripes for evening server tests. Ink creeps methodically across the week, turning blank days into a dense patchwork of shared hours. Their names, written in her brisk, looping hand, stack up side by side in box after box, BEN / ROWAN, ROWAN / BEN, until the sheet looks disconcertingly like an old school timetable someone has quietly rewritten in adulthood.
She doesn’t look up as she adds, “If anything goes wrong, I want incident reports, not folklore.” A faint, almost affectionate glance at Rowan. “And absolutely no improvising with ladders, power tools, or priceless documents. This is not Blue Peter.” Each rule lands with a neat tap of the pen, her gaze flicking between them, tacitly yoking their compliance, and, inconveniently, their days, together.
By the time she caps her pen and nudges the plan to the centre of the table, the implication is undeniable: their coloured blocks of time bleed into one another until they’re almost indistinguishable. “There we are,” Tamsin pronounces, with a cheerfulness just tight enough to suggest headache. “You’ll be in each other’s pockets for a bit. It’s the only way this all gets done before the cameras start sniffing around.” Her phone begins to buzz insistently. As she glances at the screen, Ben and Rowan both look down instead, taking in the crowded grid, BEN / ROWAN, ROWAN / BEN, each recognising, with a faint drop in the stomach, that avoiding one another has been quietly removed as an option.
Ben clears his throat, as if testing whether his voice still works in this room without Tamsin mediating.
“So.” He makes the word do too much work. “Back to colour‑coded timetables. Feels very… sixth form.”
Rowan’s mouth quirks. “Except fewer free periods and worse coffee.” She sets the pen down, too carefully. “And no one’s drawing moustaches on you in the margins. Yet.”
He huffs a laugh that surprises him by sounding almost genuine. “Give it time. Ashford Ley’s always had a rich graffiti tradition.”
The village name hangs there, heavier than it has any right to be. Outside, a car splashes through a puddle in the courtyard; the sound carries in oddly, as if from a much greater distance.
“You’re… you’re really doing all this?” he asks, nodding at the grid between them rather than at her. “The book. The interviews. Turning the place into a case study.”
“It’s already a case study.” She slides her glasses higher on her nose. “I’m just writing it down before Keira’s production company gets first draft.”
The dryness of it lands somewhere between them; he’s not sure whether she’s inviting agreement or warning him off. He chooses the safer middle path.
“Estate as performance,” he says, borrowing one of her old phrases. “You used to go on about that.”
“I still do,” she replies, a little too quick. “Only now people fly me to conferences instead of telling me to shut up and pour another pint.”
He smiles despite himself. “You were terrible at pouring pints.”
“I was underage, Ben. You should never have let me behind the bar.”
“You were very insistent.” He risks looking up properly, meeting her eyes. The impact is absurdly physical, as if someone has opened a door inside his chest and let cold air in. She’s older, yes, but the quick intelligence there is unchanged, the way she seems to be seeing around his words rather than simply at them.
“And you,” she says slowly, as if matching the risk, “you’re… what was it? ‘Our other estates’ now?” The imitation of his earlier tone is precise, but the edge underneath is new. “Very grand.”
He shifts again, heat pricking the back of his neck. “It’s just shorthand. We manage a few sites. Farms, smallholdings, a couple of. “Like this one.”
Not like this one, he wants to say. Not full of ghosts who know exactly how you sounded at seventeen. Instead he settles for, “Similar headaches. Less wallpaper.”
She huffs, the closest she’s come to a laugh since Tamsin left. “So this is just another job, then? Ashdown Court. Ashford Ley.” Her gaze flicks briefly to the window, to the rain‑slick cobbles outside. “One line in the portfolio.”
There’s the sting, neatly administered. He ought to parry it; instead he hears himself answer, more honest than intended, “I thought it would feel smaller, coming back. It doesn’t.”
She studies him for a beat, some of the flintiness easing. “No,” she says quietly. “It doesn’t.”
The fridge kicks, a juddering rattle. Somewhere in the building, a door thumps. He realises his hands are flat on the table, fingers splayed either side of their conjoined names.
“And you?” he asks. “ ‘Only for a bit’: is that an academic unit of time, or…”
“It’s an escape clause,” she says, and this time she doesn’t dodge his eyes. “In case I forget to leave.”
He opens his mouth, whether to ask from where or from whom, he isn’t sure, but the sharp, distant trill of Tamsin’s ringtone starts up again in the corridor, cutting across whatever might have followed. Rowan’s gaze drops back to the timetable; his follows, obediently, until the only safe thing left to look at is ink on paper.
Without Tamsin’s brisk presence the office seems to exhale, the space between them widening even as the room stays the same size. The hum of the fridge swells to a steady, fretful buzz; somewhere in the rafters, pipes tick and settle. Rain needles against the small stable‑block window, a grey, insistent curtain. Ben shifts in his chair, the worn leather of his jacket creaking like a reprimand in the hush. He drags a hand over the day’s stubble, then drops it, apparently deciding that any further movement might count as making a scene.
Rowan, still holding her pen, realises she has gone absolutely still. Her fingers have locked around the plastic barrel, knuckles pale. The scent of him has already reached her: wet wool, engine oil, damp tarmac, and that faint metallic tang of cold air that follows someone in from outside. It is the smell of service stations and lay‑bys and all the roads he took away from here; utterly alien to the polished wood and disinfectant of the converted office, and at the same time intimately, disconcertingly familiar. It hits somewhere beneath her ribs, memory arriving not as image or dialogue but as atmosphere.
“You’re back then,” he says at last, the words dropping between them with more force than the throwaway tone he reaches for. As openings go, it’s about as subtle as a road sign; he hears the weight in it the instant it’s loose, wishes, absurdly, for a rear‑view mirror. Rowan’s mouth tightens. She seems to reconsider the timetable, the room, possibly the last decade, before setting the pen down with exaggerated care, as if it might roll into an answer she doesn’t intend to give.
“Only for a bit,” she says. The lightness is practised; the edge beneath it is not. That tiny stress on “bit” flares like a warning beacon (limited stay, no commitments) an invisible border sketched neatly around her freedom.
Ben lets his gaze rest on the colour‑coded grid, following imagined routes through plant rooms and ducting instead of the land mines in her answer. He pockets the word like a site spec: bit. Temporary. She’s already planned the exit ramp. “Well,” he says, finding the safety rail of work, “for this phase you’ll at least see the best of the infrastructure. We’ve done similar upgrades on a couple of other estates, Norfolk, up near Hexham, so once we’re finished it shouldn’t feel quite so… creaky.”
The phrase rolls out smoothly, a polished bit of patter, but in the cramped office it lands with a dull, awkward weight. Our other estates. Rowan’s shoulders tighten a fraction as she slides her notebook into her satchel, movements suddenly economical. Something crosses her face, wry curiosity, a prickle of pride, and the smallest sting, as if he has, quite without malice, relegated Ashford Ley to one bullet point in a PowerPoint he delivers to strangers. “Right,” she says, after a beat too long, tone impeccably polite, coolly observational. “Sounds like you’ve been… very busy.”
The door bumps open again and Tamsin reappears in its frame, a manila folder and an open laptop balanced in one arm, a takeaway coffee precariously hooked in the crook of her fingers. The air seems to snap back to fluorescent reality with her. Whatever strange, suspended thing had been hanging between him and Rowan dissolves under the arrival of bullet points and liability.
“Right,” she says, brisk enough to slice straight through the silence. “Paperwork. Everyone’s favourite.”
She deposits the folder on the desk with practised economy, the laptop following a second later, cables snaking dangerously close to Ben’s elbow. A fan of laminated visitor passes slides out and she flicks one towards each of them with her thumb, the motion as automatic as dealing cards.
“Standard forms,” she continues, already flipping to a tabbed section. “Sign in, sign out, no wandering into live construction zones without a hard hat and one of Ben’s people, no leaning antique portraits against radiators, et cetera.” Her tone makes the “et cetera” sound like it includes three centuries of family scandal.
Ben takes the pen she offers, the plastic warm from countless previous signatures. The habit kicks in: quick, neat scrawl on the line, date, tidy tick in the ‘contractor’ box. He’s done this dance in half a dozen estates; the script never really changes, only the wallpaper.
Opposite him, Rowan accepts her pen a shade more slowly, fingers closing around it as if she might yet change her mind about being here at all. She bends over the page, glasses slipping a fraction down her nose. The black ink starts cleanly, then catches, just perceptibly, on the curve of her surname. Ellery. He watches the momentary stall, the tiny hesitation no one but him is close enough to see, and feels something tighten under his ribs.
Tamsin rattles on, oblivious or politely pretending to be. “Data protection, confidentiality, no unauthorised recording or posting anything from on-site to social media without prior written consent.” That last phrase is delivered with a hint of weariness, as though she’s already fought this battle with production companies and influencers and would quite like never to hear the word ‘content’ again. “You’re both professionals, I know, but legal get jumpy if I don’t say it out loud.”
Her gaze skims between them, not quite resting, registering the charged air and choosing, very deliberately, not to poke it. She taps another line with her nail. “Restricted areas are shaded in red there. If in doubt, assume the answer is ‘no’ and email me.”
Ben adds his initials in the margin where indicated, the movements deft, almost anonymous. Rowan finishes her name, the brief pause smoothed over into an elegant flourish of the final ‘y’, then dates it with careful numbers, as though accuracy might anchor her more firmly to the page, to the room, to this absurd overlap of past and present.
“Perfect,” Tamsin says, gathering the signed sheets back into order, already reaching for her laptop trackpad with her free hand. The folder makes a soft, satisfied thud as she lines the edges up, bureaucracy restored, whatever else is going on summarily filed under “not my immediate problem.”
“Right,” Tamsin says, the word as much a dismissal as an agreement. She snaps the folder shut with a soft, decisive crack that sounds, to Ben, like a door locking. “Health and safety briefing is in the annex at four: hard hats, thrilling PowerPoint, the works. I’ll email you both the details so you can pretend to have read them in advance.”
She glances at her watch, the movement clipped, already pivoting toward the open doorway. The laptop is scooped neatly under one arm, coffee reclaimed by the other with the ease of long practice.
“For now, I need to get on a call with the grants people before they remember it’s Friday and mysteriously stop answering phones.” A thin smile, there and gone. “You two can sort out the practical overlaps between you. “Just copy me into whatever you decide,” Tamsin finishes, already halfway into the corridor. Her heels begin their brisk, retreating staccato before either of them can marshal a practical objection: or risk a personal one.
The office seems to contract a notch as the click of Tamsin’s heels fades down the corridor, the fluorescent strip light buzzing faintly in the sudden absence of her competence. Without her brisk commentary to occupy his hands, Ben becomes acutely aware of how close the desk is to the wall, how there’s nowhere to stand that doesn’t feel like he’s either blocking the door or invading Rowan’s space.
Rowan adjusts the lie of her satchel, dragging the strap a little higher, fingers whitening on the softened leather as though bracing for impact or escape. He rocks back on his heels, pockets swallowing his hands, shoulder blades touching cold plaster when he leans. Outside, the rain fattens, drumming against the small window until the courtyard dissolves into a watercolour smear. The radiator beneath it hums and ticks, valiantly attempting warmth, while somewhere below them comes the irregular thud and scrape of workmen moving kit, the muffled rise and fall of male voices. The everyday sounds of the estate, pipes, footsteps, distant doors, press in around the edges, and between them, in the cramped, overheated room, silence swells, dense and oddly fragile.
“Look,” Ben says finally, clearing his throat, gaze skittering from the rain to the printed site plan on the desk rather than to her face. “If you’re going to be in and out of the house for interviews and whatever else, and I’m pulling up half the floors… we should probably nail down when you need quiet, which rooms are completely off‑limits, that sort of thing. Avoid me drilling through your big revelations.” He offers a quick, almost apologetic smile that shows a flash of the old boy she knew under the practiced contractor. “Maybe do it properly over coffee at The Old Forge sometime? Go through it room by room. Easier than shouting over drills and fire alarms in here.”
“Sure,” Rowan replies, the word out quicker and brighter than she intends, like a hand raised before she’s decided to volunteer. She shifts a fraction nearer the door as if to thin it out, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear in the old, incriminating gesture. “Just email me a time,” she adds, reaching for neutral, for professional. They exchange careful, serviceable smiles that look as if they’ve been borrowed from other people’s meetings and don’t quite fit either of them. Her boots tap a small, uneven rhythm down the narrow corridor; behind her, he turns back to the rain‑streaked window with exaggerated interest in the guttering. Each silently files it under “polite fiction” and, in the same breath, registers the small, hollow thud of how much they already wish it wasn’t.
The “we should catch up properly” email never appears. Neither of them composes it, though each drafts a version in their head at odd moments. On the drive up the lane, standing in the queue at the Old Forge, halfway through a shower. Instead, their calendars begin to braid themselves together without anyone officially scheduling anything.
It starts innocuously enough. Tamsin, in full efficiency mode, copies both of them into the same planning threads, “infrastructure + interpretation,” the subject lines read, as if the conjunction is natural. A London producer’s recce runs long, his questions about “heritage vibes” multiplying with every echoing corridor, and they find themselves side by side in a faded drawing room, both translating Ashdown into their respective languages. A rain‑delayed delivery traps them under the same bit of colonnade while the sky empties itself onto the gravel sweep.
Ben tells himself he’s only starting his site visits an hour earlier to get ahead of things, to keep the contractors from wandering off to the pub. Yet somehow, more often than not, he arrives to find Rowan already there: perched on a stone step outside the stable block, notebook open on her knee, camera strap diagonalling her shoulder. She always looks faintly surprised to see him, as if the estate has conjured him out of the mist as an illustrative case study.
“You’re keen,” he says once, trying for lightness as he wipes mud off his boots on the edge of a flowerbed.
“Occupational hazard,” she replies, closing her notebook with a soft thud. “The early folklorist catches the performance of class before the day staff have had their coffee.”
He huffs a laugh, more startled than amused, at how effortlessly she still speaks in footnotes. Neither of them mentions how often this keeps happening, how frequently their supposedly separate projects intersect at doorways and bottlenecks, in corridors just too narrow to pass without turning sideways. They let the estate, and Tamsin’s cc list, take the blame.
Each new overlap comes with a flicker of déjà vu and a hurried internal rewrite. Rowan clocks the quick, unconscious tap of Ben’s fingers on his thigh as he talks through power loads, the same off‑beat rhythm he used on revision nights at her parents’ kitchen table, drumming equations into muscle memory. Once, he’d kept time for her while she tried to cram Foucault between shifts at the pub; now he’s marking out socket locations against heritage panelling. Her brain, treacherously associative, supplies both images at once. She looks away, makes a note about “technological encroachment” as if that were what had caught her attention.
Ben, for his part, notices the familiar crease appear between her brows as she chews absently on the end of her pen, teeth leaving faint scallops on the plastic like they used to on biro caps in sixth form. Back then he’d tap it out of her mouth and tell her she’d poison herself; now he pretends not to see. The recognition lands intimate and uninvited, like a hand on the small of the back. They both straighten, change the subject, introduce an extra half‑step of distance and a joke about “purely professional interest,” as if naming the line will keep them safely on the right side of it.
They keep up a running commentary, as if intention can be argued out of existence. Ben stands in the chapel doorway, cable plans in hand, telling himself he’s only here early to test how centuries‑thick stone will mangle Wi‑Fi. When Rowan emerges from the side aisle, camera still warm against her palm, he launches straight into questions about trunking routes and signal bounce, tone brisk enough to suggest he’s interrupted a contractor, not the girl he once kissed behind this very door.
Later, Rowan lingers in the walled garden long after the light has gone flat, muttering “one last shot” like a spell, even as she hears the crunch of his boots on gravel and subtly turns her body so it reads as passing coincidence rather than quiet expectation.
The pull between them grows thickest in the in‑between moments: sheltering under the same dripping arch to shake rain from their sleeves; materialising, somehow, at the estate‑office kettle together, fingers colliding on the mug cupboard; passing a laptop back and forth at the Old Forge, shoulders almost but not quite touching as they scroll through floor plans and archival photographs. The air tightens for a heartbeat, echoes of shared screens in his student flat, of her bare feet on his duvet, of essays half‑written while he made toast, then loosens again in a practised recoil: a joke fired too loudly at a third party, a swivel of a chair to widen the gap, a step back that feels oddly like closing a door they haven’t opened in years.
Beneath their logistical justifications runs something heavier and more dangerous that neither names. Ben tells himself that checking Rowan’s proposed public routes against his cabling plan is simply due diligence, not an excuse to walk the estate at her pace, listening as she spins histories out of hedgerows, coat hooks, and discarded estate‑sale brochures. Rowan insists that quizzing him about access points, server rooms, and backup generators is only research, not a covert audit of how he handles pressure now, whether he still defuses tension with bad jokes or goes quiet and brittle. They behave as if gravity is a matter of choice, as if the steady, wordless awareness of one another’s footsteps, laptop lids, and shifting shadows is mere coincidence, and not the quiet force arranging their days into the same narrow corridors.
The first time they end up sharing the same table at The King’s Arms, it is, Ben tells himself, an IT issue rather than an emotional one. The pub is heaving with a Friday‑night muddle of walkers in muddy boots, estate staff still in fleeces, and a cluster of London producers loudly discovering real ale. Plug sockets are scarce. His usual corner, chosen for its proximity to power rather than any poetic association with their sixth‑form dates, is down to one spare chair and one functioning outlet.
Rowan arrives with a stack of proofs and a camera bag bumping against her hip, doing that quick survey of the room he remembers from years ago: exits, noise levels, likelihood of being cornered by someone from the parish council. She clocks the empty chair opposite him, the single socket under the bench, and hesitates. For a moment, he’s absurdly certain she’s going to turn on her heel and go and balance a laptop on a windowsill rather than sit down.
Before she can bolt, he nudges his charger sideways with the back of his knuckles, making space on the table that feels larger than it is. “You can spread out,” he says, eyes fixed with forensic interest on his spreadsheet. “I’m only terrorising some poor innocent numbers.”
Her laugh is soft and non‑committal, the sound of someone acknowledging a joke while deciding whether to accept the premise. She lowers the proofs to the table in a precise, squared‑off stack that looks, to him, suspiciously like a barricade. Highlighters and pens follow, lined up as if she’s constructing fortifications between their respective territories: Ben, Kingdom of Deliverables; Rowan, Republic of Footnotes.
“Are you sure?” she asks, already half‑plugging in, which answers the question.
“Pub Wi‑Fi’s technically communal property,” he says. “I’d hate to be feudal about it.”
Her mouth quirks. “Ashdown would be disappointed.”
“Estate’s already disappointed in so many ways,” he replies, tone light, as if that has nothing at all to do with the fact that she is now close enough for him to smell the faint trace of her shampoo beneath the pub’s stew and smoke. He keeps his gaze trained on his laptop screen, resisting the tug to look up and catalogue changes in her face, her hair, the way she tucks one foot under the bench exactly as she used to in his university digs.
Across the table, Rowan aligns her notebook parallel to the beer mat, builds her paper rampart an inch higher, and opens her laptop at an angle that allows her to see him without, technically, looking.
They fall into a rhythm of talking at angles, like people edging round a covered well they’ve agreed not to mention. Rowan tips her pen towards the low ceiling. “Places like this are such good laboratories,” she remarks, as if to her footnotes rather than to him. “Everyone thinks they’re relaxed, so the performances get sloppier. You can see where the seams are.”
Ben answers by yanking a project plan to the front of his screen, neat coloured bars marching across it. “Performances of being on schedule are my favourite,” he says, as if her comment were purely theoretical, about villagers and visiting producers, and not about the two of them sharing a table that feels suddenly too small.
Her questions, “Do you actually like being back here? Professionally, I mean”. Arrive disguised as data‑gathering for the book. He hears the real query, but files it under “out of scope.”
His replies (“It’s a solid contract, good test case for rolling this model out to other estates”) are couched in ROI and scalability, never in nights he lay awake in London flats trying not to think about this valley, this pub, this woman.
When talk skims too near the fault line of their past, their bodies stage the retreat before their mouths can. Rowan’s phone, previously abandoned face‑down by her notebook, acquires sudden, life‑or‑death importance; she brings it closer, thumb flicking through an empty inbox with anthropological focus, as if unread spam might yield a chapter. Ben, whose notifications have been off since lunch, performs his own emergency: he taps his mobile awake, frowns at the blank lock screen with the intent of a man expecting a server fire, a tax audit, perhaps an asteroid.
The choreography is so polished it feels almost professional: lean in, brush the edge of something real, then both step away in perfect, unspoken synchrony, as if someone had called “Cut.”
Their safest territory is third‑party subjects, and they patrol it diligently, like co‑authors of a report no one has asked them to file. They dissect Tamsin’s latest funding pitch, trade dry comments about the heritage officer’s zeal for sash windows over insulation, and plot how Keira’s reality concept would snake cameras through Ashdown’s least‑leaky rooms and most photogenic anxieties. Whenever the talk risks turning inward, Rowan saying, “It’s strange, being back after…” or Ben beginning, “I remember when we used to, ” they both pivot hard, swapping “we” for “the estate,” turning memory into case study, hurt into logistics, and twenty‑year‑old tenderness into a line item under “operational risk.”
Even their silences are fortified. There are pauses shaped exactly for apology or confession, but instead Ben taps out phantom calculations on his keyboard while Rowan rifles through already‑organised pages, feigning a hunt for some elusive citation. The night she left, the unanswered texts, the drafts of messages he never sent, the way each of them privately edited that history into something survivable. All of it hangs in the air between their coffee mugs, as present as the steam. They treat it like a structural fault in an old house: logged in the metaphorical survey, costed in private at three a.m., then carefully circled in everyday use, never directly opened up until a crack widens, a floor dips, and something, inevitably, inconveniently, gives way.
The afternoon rain has driven half the village into The King’s Arms, steaming coats and damp dogs and the faint, pervasive smell of wet wool. Ben’s annexed corner table has become a small, beleaguered island in that tide: laptop, charger, a tangle of adaptor blocks, two coffee cups, one abandoned half‑pint, Rowan’s precarious tower of proofs and notebooks sliding slowly towards the sticky edge.
He’s half‑watching progress bars inch across his screen, back‑up sync, software update, another spreadsheet uploading to Tamsin, while pretending not to notice Rowan’s latest assault on the printed word. She’s circling “curated rusticity” for the third time, the pencil jab growing more surgical with each pass.
“Careful,” he murmurs, not looking up. “If you stab that page any harder, the estate’s going to feel it in the foundations.”
“It’s self‑defence,” she replies, dry. “If I see ‘curated rusticity’ in one more brochure, I’m going to start a counter‑movement. Uncurated squalor. Radical mildew.”
“Catchy,” he says. “Bit long for a strapline.”
“You’re one to talk.” She flips a page, scanning his open document with practised nosiness. “What is ‘leveraging synergies across heritage‑adjacent verticals’? That isn’t English, that’s… corporate glossolalia.”
He winces. “It’s client. They like that sort of thing. Makes them feel they’re not just plugging in routers in an old house; they’re participating in… leveraged destiny.”
“Ben.” She underlines “synergies” with a little hiss of graphite. “You are enabling jargon‑based crimes.”
“And you,” he counters, “are breeding footnotes. This is, what, number seventy‑three?” He taps a superscript on the page nearest his elbow. “No one needs that many caveats to say rich people like nice curtains.”
“They’re not caveats,” she says, mock‑offended, though he can see the edge of a smile threatening. “They’re context.”
“You’re literally annotating the curtains.”
“And you’re selling wi‑fi to the curtains,” she shoots back. “At least my footnotes admit they’re ridiculous.”
Their exchange keeps tilting towards the old, easy warmth: his grin flashing out before he remembers to rein it in, her laughter spilling over and then retreating into a wry little cough. Each time the rhythm risks feeling too familiar, they both, instinctively, reach for distance.
“So the. “: the estate’s public narrative,” she says at the same moment, seizing a safe noun like a life raft. “Does Tamsin know her beloved brochure copy reads like a parody?”
He latches onto Tamsin’s name with audible relief. “She knows it sells weddings. And if weddings pay for the new boiler, I will personally print ‘curated rusticity’ on tea towels.”
Rowan snorts, bending low over the margins again. “Late capitalism in four words and a boiler.”
Their low‑key teasing loops and spirals, skimming dangerously close to something softer: a shared glance when a particularly egregious phrase lands, the automatic way their knees avoid each other under the table as if choreographed. Each time, one of them nudges the conversation back to safe abstractions: trends, budgets, narrative frames. They dismantle the estate with affectionate sarcasm, brick by metaphorical brick, rather than risk acknowledging the more fragile architecture between them.
The door swings open on a gust of cold air and expensive perfume; the warmth of the pub buckles around it. Keira strides in first, shrug shrug shrug of camel coat off her shoulders, followed by a London producer with a tablet clutched to his chest and a cameraman already half‑lifting his rig out of habit. The three of them shift the room’s centre of gravity without trying. Conversations falter mid‑sentence, then resume at a slightly higher, showier pitch, as if everyone has remembered there might be a witness.
Keira does her village‑girl‑made‑good act at the bar, greeting the landlord by name, air‑kissing his baffled wife, laughing a fraction too loudly at a joke about the weather. “We’ll get proper country colour here between takes,” she tells the producer, gesturing with a manicured hand that takes in the low beams, the dartboard, the pensioners by the fire as if they’re set dressing.
Ben’s shoulders tighten an almost imperceptible notch. Rowan watches, expression shuttered, while the cameraman’s lens drifts across the room, quietly appraising who and what might make good content.
Keira, in full, easy broadcast voice, is explaining to the producer how they’ll “make Ashdown sexy for prime time”. Same vowels she uses on Sunday‑night specials, different wallpaper. She sketches it in the air: slow‑motion shots of muddy boots lined up just so, champagne flutes on hay bales, “real people, real stories, but aspirational, yeah?” as if a boot room can be coaxed into flirting with a drone camera.
Rowan, face ostensibly buried in a chapter on estate mythologies, goes still. Ben can feel the subtle tension in her shoulders across the narrow table. “Ah,” she murmurs at last, just loud enough to find the hollow of his ear, “the performance of authenticity arrives on cue.”
The remark slides between them like contraband, warm and illicit. His laugh escapes before he can school it, short, delighted, utterly involuntary.
Keira’s head snaps round, smile sharpening as the producer’s brows rise, scenting potential B‑roll. “Some people,” she says, voice honeyed and carrying, “need TV to sell their little theories. Not all of us have the luxury of hiding in footnotes.” A few locals tilt their heads, properly interested now. Ben feels the hit to Rowan like a physical jolt; her hand stills on the page. Before he can think better of it, he leans back in his chair, finding a tone that sounds almost lazy. “Funny thing about theories,” he says, easy but edged, “they tend to outlast any series. And without the dull infrastructure no one films because it’s not sexy, none of this works at all.”
The producer’s chuckle lands somewhere between smoothing and storing it away for later; his eyes have the sharp, acquisitive gleam of a man mentally tagging clips. Keira’s laugh thins, amusement cooling into calculation. “Well, lucky us,” she says lightly, “we’ve got both cameras and cables covered.” She pivots, charm sluicing back over her entourage and the bar.
At the table, heat climbs Rowan’s throat. Humiliation at being made a storyline, yes, but threaded with a reluctant flicker of gratitude that feels far too intimate for a village pub at four in the afternoon. She aligns her proofs with academic precision, the paper‑straightening equivalent of armour, gaze fixed on a footnote that’s already memorised.
Ben’s pulse is still drumming, jaw set a fraction too hard. The words he’d thrown at Keira replay in his head, landing now with the wince of realisation: he hadn’t just defended a colleague, he’d stepped instinctively into an old, familiar role: her shield, her co‑conspirator. Dangerous habit.
The scrape of Rowan’s chair on the flagstones is sharper than it needs to be, a small, jagged sound that slices through the resumed chatter. A couple at the next table glance over; the producer’s ears twitch. In that brittle noise, Ben hears the boundary reasserting itself, the quiet, unmistakable reminder that whatever line they’ve just crossed is not supposed to exist any more.
On the pavement, their breath ghosts in the cool night, small white clouds that dissolve as soon as they form. The pub door thuds shut behind them, cutting off the swell of conversation and the tinny ’80s playlist mid-chorus; out here it’s mostly the faint rush of the A‑road and the trickle of water in the gutter. Sodium light from the sagging streetlamp washes the stone a flat yellow, catches on the damp in Rowan’s hair where the drizzle got to it earlier.
She keeps her gaze trained on the smear of brightness leaking from the pub window, as if looking directly at him would concede something she hasn’t agreed to give. “You didn’t have to jump in like that,” she says at last, voice low but steady. Her fingers worry at the cuff of her cardigan, twisting the wool until it warps. “I’m perfectly capable of handling Keira.”
There’s no real bite to it; the words land softer than the sentence suggests, threaded with a wary humour that doesn’t quite make it into a smile. To anyone listening from the doorway it would sound like a mild rebuke. To him, it sounds like an exam question.
He can hear the subtext as clearly as if she’d laid it out in bullet points: how much of the old pattern are you planning to resurrect? How many of your reflexes around me are still yours, and how many are mine to fend off?
She shifts her weight, boots scuffing the uneven tarmac, but doesn’t step away. The faint line between her brows, the guarded set of her mouth: he remembers versions of them from seminar corridors and bus stops, whenever someone had dismissed her work as “niche” or “cute.” Back then he’d waded in without thinking, pleased to be of use. Now the same instinct feels like trespass.
The edge in her tone is not anger so much as calibration, as if she’s testing how much of the past he thinks he can reclaim, and on what terms.
Ben shifts his weight, gravel crunching under his boots, fingers burrowing deeper into the Barbour pockets as if he might stuff the words back down again if he could get a good enough grip. He keeps his gaze somewhere over her shoulder, on the orange halo of the streetlamp catching the mist. “I know you are,” he says at last, and he does; he’s watched her fillet complacent men with a raised eyebrow and a footnote. The defensive hunch of his shoulders sits oddly with the careful softness of his voice. “I just. Hate seeing people talk down to you. Always have.”
The admission comes out clumsier, barer, than it had sounded in his head, stripped of the sardonic framing he usually wraps around anything that might be mistaken for feeling. For a second it seems to hang in the cold air, clouding between them like their breath. Too much, he thinks, for a narrow strip of tarmac outside The King’s Arms and the faint whine of the A‑road, too nakedly reminiscent of bus stops and playgrounds and all the times he’d taken that role for granted.
For a beat, neither moves. Sound from the pub seeps faintly through the door, a muffled cheer at a goal on the television, but out here the moment feels ring‑fenced, under glass. Rowan’s eyes flick up to his, wary and unwilling and then, treacherously, curious. She catches a flicker she recognises from years ago: the boy who’d square up to lads twice his size for muttering about “that clever girl who thinks she’s better than us,” cheeks flushed, fists balled, indignant on her behalf before she’d even decided whether to be offended.
In the angle of his jaw and the stubborn set of his mouth, she glimpses that same protective fury, tempered now by boardrooms instead of bus stops, redistributed into contract clauses and cooling sarcasm. It hits her with an ache that feels uncomfortably like longing, like a hand at her back steering her through a crowd, like the dangerous ease of being known too well.
He, in turn, sees past the self‑possessed academic in front of him to the girl who once stood in the village hall, chin high, arguing with a retired colonel about land rights until her voice shook but refused to crack. She hadn’t stayed quiet then, and she hadn’t stayed, full stop. Admiration and hurt knot together in his chest. Grudging awe at the way she has never, ever learned to make herself smaller, and a sour awareness that this refusal to shrink had, once upon a time, meant walking away from him as well as from the village.
Rowan breaks eye contact first, clearing her throat, the moment folding in on itself like a page turned too sharply. “Occupational hazard,” she says lightly, summoning irony like a shield. “Comes with insisting class still exists.” Ben huffs a humourless half‑laugh, wanting to say he’s noticed who benefits from pretending it doesn’t, and not trusting himself to start. The pub door bangs open behind them, spilling light and chatter into the lane; a couple tumble out, laughing, their cologne and cold air gusting between him and Rowan. The spell fractures. She steps back, already half‑turned towards the dark lane to Ashdown, cardigan clutched close, and the space between them feels suddenly, sensibly, wider. Like a boundary being reinstated for both their sakes.
The next time they cross paths, it’s mid‑morning in the stable block, the corridor steamed with breath and damp wool. Ben rounds a corner balancing a box of routers and tangled cables, shoulder nudging the fire door open with the practised ease of someone who has spent far too long carrying things that don’t look heavy but absolutely are. The strip light above him flickers once, threatening to give up. He makes a mental note about sensors and replacements because that is safe, practical, non‑Rowan territory.
Rowan shoulders through the opposite door at the same moment, head tipped down against the drizzle, scarf loosened, glasses fogged so thoroughly that she’s effectively walking blind. Damp curls have escaped her knot and cling to her cheeks. There’s ink on the side of her hand, a blue smudge that tugs at something in him more sharply than it should.
They both sidestep the same way. There is the small, inevitable collision: the soft thud of her hip against the cardboard, the box lurching out of true. He tightens his grip automatically, muscles bracing, and his free hand shoots out to catch her elbow. Warmth, bone, the slight give of knitted wool. At the same instant, the brushed‑wool edge of her scarf drags slow across the inside of his wrist, damp fibres skimming that thin, absurdly sensitive skin.
For a second he’s back in a student bedsit: knees knocking against hers on a mattress too small, radiator half‑broken, her laughter muffled against his shoulder as they tried not to wake the neighbours. The same electric jolt runs under his skin now, a fizzing recognition that has no business still existing after all these years and all these people in between.
He snatches his arm back as if burned, the box of routers thumping against his chest. “Sorry,” he mutters, a little too brisk, too clipped, as if he can speed past the moment by sheer efficiency. His voice sounds wrong in his own ears. Office‑Ben, not village‑Ben.
Rowan laughs once, high and awkward, the sound bouncing off stone and paint. “My fault,” she says quickly, pushing fogged glasses up with the back of her wrist. “Shouldn’t attempt navigation while effectively blind.” Her cheeks are flushed from the cold or from something else; he can’t tell. She ducks past him, careful now, fingers flexing at her sides as though resisting the urge to reach out, to touch his sleeve again and test whether she imagined that spark.
He feels the ghost of the scarf against his wrist for minutes afterwards, like a low‑grade static. Halfway down the corridor he realises his heart is doing an entirely unreasonable pace for a man who has only carried a box and not, say, run a marathon or made a terrible life choice. He blames the central heating.
By the end of that week they’re side by side at a trestle table in the drawing room, one of several screens amid a small encampment of coffee cups, paper plans and consultants in sensible knitwear. Outside, the lawn glows winter‑pale; inside, the laptops cast a faint aquarium blue over polished mahogany and portraits that look personally offended by spreadsheets.
Ben is halfway through demoing heating‑zone overlays, talking Tamsin and a heritage architect through load‑balancing, when Rowan leans in. She braces one hand on the back of his chair to see the tablet better, cardigan sleeve grazing his shoulder. Her skirt (soft wool, he notices absurdly) swishes against his knee under the table and stays there, a light, intermittent pressure as she shifts her weight. The faint weight of her palm settles between his shoulder blades when she reaches past him to tap a bottleneck on the ceremonial route.
On paper, it’s nothing: professional proximity, bodies in limited space. His body does not get that memo. The fine hairs at his nape lift; “thermal efficiency” emerges as “therm, ” and abandons him entirely.
Tamsin, eyes on the numbers, doesn’t so much as blink. Rowan does. He feels the minute pause of her hand, the almost inaudible catch of her breath near his ear. A beat later she pulls back, fingers lifting as if she’s only just registered skin and wool and the way his spine had gone arrow‑straight under her touch.
“Sorry, I’m in your light,” she says, to the table, to the room, straightening in her chair. Her voice is pitched deliberately outward, academic‑neutral. She folds both hands in her lap, then retrieves a pen purely to have something to occupy them, and spends the rest of the meeting angling her questions at “Ben’s team” or “IT” rather than at him, even when she’s clearly talking about a decision only he can make.
Ben clicks through the remaining overlays with unnecessary care, jaw tight, forcing his focus onto kilowatts and pipe runs while the ghost of her hand lingers between his shoulders like a misplaced imprint of heat.
The rain on the slate roof has settled into a steady, percussive rush, like someone running a tap just out of sight. The converted office over the old carriage house smells of damp plaster, instant coffee and overheating electronics; breath ghosts faintly in the chill patches the electric heaters don’t reach. Ben and Rowan lean over the same spreadsheet, shoulders almost aligned, debating (politely but stubbornly) whether the converted barns can really sleep thirty‑two without someone having to share a sofa bed.
“Fire regs say thirty,” he says.
“Human beings say at least thirty‑four,” she counters, nudging the trackpad.
She shifts her chair closer to see a note he’s added, the wooden legs scraping too loud in the cramped room. Their knees knock and stay touching for a beat longer than either intends. Heat blooms at the point of contact, precise as a thumbprint. Ben feels his breath shorten, suddenly aware of the exact angle of her shin, the subtle press of bone through wool, the way she doesn’t move away at once, eyes still on the numbers.
Then she seems to catch herself. “Mm. Sorry,” she says, too lightly, and rolls her chair back a full foot: far enough that she has to stretch to reach the keyboard when he turns the laptop towards her.
“Fine,” he says, to the cell formatting, to no one. He responds in kind, exaggerating his focus on the monitor, scrolling with meticulous care, hands locked around his mug to stop them from betraying the absurd urge to reclaim that small, accidental warmth.
Walking the route between house and car park with a film‑location scout, they’re forced into single file along a muddy, hedge‑choked path. Rowan goes ahead, skirt gathered in one hand, the other trailing against briars for balance, narrating some folklore tidbit for the scout’s benefit. At a sudden dip, her boot slips; Ben’s hand lands instinctively at her waist, fingers tightening around damp wool and the curve beneath. She grabs his wrist in reflex, thumb brushing the vulnerable skin above his cuff, steadying herself with a soft exhale that ghosts back towards him in the cold air. For one suspended heartbeat they’re anchored together, his palm full of her, the scout already striding on, oblivious, droning about drone shots. Then Rowan steps neatly out of his grip, smoothing her skirt as if re‑establishing professional lines, thanking him in a voice that’s too formal, almost clipped. For the rest of the walk she keeps a precise gap between them, eyes on the ground, questions directed firmly at the scout; Ben shoves his hands so deep into his jacket pockets that his knuckles ache, concentrating very hard on mud, drainage, anything but the echo of her shape under his fingers.
Even in public, their awareness sharpens into a kind of choreography, all elbows and second‑guessed angles. At The King’s Arms one evening, laptops and papers spread across a too‑small corner table sticky with old varnish, every reach for a pen or a pint becomes a tiny negotiation. Ben finds himself calculating trajectories of cutlery like a man planning ducting runs. When her sleeve brushes his forearm as she flips through annotated proofs, heat spears up his skin; he snatches his arm back so fast his chair legs squeal against the flagstones, loud enough to earn a bored, knowing glance from the barman. Rowan responds by folding her arms tightly, tucking her hands into her cardigan as if they can’t be trusted near him. Or as if she doesn’t trust herself. The air between them feels thick with unsaid apologies and remembered intimacies; their careful work talk starts to fray at the edges, jokes slipping out in the old rhythm then being hastily re‑shelved as “project chat.” By the time storms roll in a few nights later and they both duck into the Old Forge to escape flickering lights and failing Wi‑Fi, they’re as keyed up by the effort of not touching as they once were by the fact that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
For a few long seconds they behave as if sheer professional willpower can bully the signal back into existence. Ben refreshes the browser twice, then a third time, watching the progress bar crawl and stall. Rowan taps a few keys, frowns at the frozen document, and does the small, useless things everyone does before admitting defeat: shifting the angle of the laptop, nudging the power cable, craning to see whether the Wi‑Fi icon is having second thoughts.
The little spinning wheel on both screens turns, falters, turns again with dogged optimism, then gives up entirely. A notification box appears and vanishes before either of them can read it, like the system itself is too embarrassed by its own incompetence.
Rain intensifies on the Old Forge’s low slate roof, a hard, rattling drumming that makes the windows buzz in their frames. The air smells of wet wool, ground coffee and the metallic tang of a storm working itself up properly out over the fields. The overhead lights flicker once, twice, as if considering their options, then settle into a steady, faintly aggressive hum.
The after‑work murmur has already drained away. What’s left of the evening crowd amounts to two pensioners at the bar, each guarding a half‑pint as if it might have been poured during the war and must therefore be eked out indefinitely. They exchange desultory remarks about the weather and the council, glancing up only when the lights misbehave.
Behind the counter, the owner (apron loosened, hair starting to frizz in the damp) gives the router the sort of look usually reserved for delinquent teenagers. He presses the reset button with an air of long‑suffering ritual, watches the lights stutter along it in an unpromising sequence, then shrugs in the resigned, village way that says: this is what comes of relying on anything that doesn’t run on gas or gossip.
“Sorry, folks,” he calls, already reaching for the stack of cutlery and paper napkins. “That’ll be it for the Wi‑Fi tonight. Lines are playing up again. Blame the lightning.”
Ben lifts a hand in acknowledgement; Rowan manages a thin, polite smile. Neither of them actually looks at him. The hiss of the coffee machine dies as it’s wiped down for the night. Chairs start to be turned and stacked on empty tables with hollow wooden thuds that echo more than they should in the suddenly opened‑up space.
In their corner, the quiet rushes in. The lack of background clatter strips away the thin cover their shared industry usually provides, leaving the small, scuffed table, two dark screens and the space between them feeling oddly bare.
Ben shuts his laptop with a soft click that sounds indecently loud in the thinned‑out quiet, like a door closing in an empty corridor. Across from him, Rowan doesn’t move. Her gaze stays pinned to her own black screen as if something might yet appear there to rescue her, fingers curved around a chipped mug that has long since surrendered its heat. A damp crescent of coffee clings to the porcelain just below her thumb; she doesn’t seem to feel it.
He waits for the usual: a mutter about cloud backups, a wry aside about “late capitalism’s fragile infrastructure.” Some academic scaffolding he can grip like a handrail.
Instead, when she finally speaks, the words arrive without preamble or footnote, as if they’ve been braced behind her teeth and the outage has simply knocked the last prop away.
“I didn’t leave because I wanted to get away from you.”
No lecture cadence, no careful hedging: just that bare, ordinary sentence, placed between them with the fatal simplicity of a signed confession. It lands with barely a sound, and yet the space around it ripples as though someone has dropped a stone into very shallow water.
He looks up too quickly, as if the words have yanked a wire inside him. For a heartbeat his face is unarmoured: that old, stunned twenty‑one‑year‑old staring back at her over the departure boards. Then the reflexive smoothness drops into place, the trained client‑meeting calm, jaw tightening a fraction, mouth flattening as if he’s bitten down on something sharp.
The hurt is still there, recognisable and un‑updated, like an old operating system booting up under all the new software. He’s almost offended by its persistence; he’d assumed time and a few respectable exits had at least patched it.
“You did, though,” he says at last, voice low but steady, his eyes on the rim of her mug rather than her face. “From us, at least.”
The pronoun hangs there (us) as though it’s a delicate piece of inheritance he isn’t sure he’s still entitled to, set down carefully in the small, echoing space between them.
The candour jolts them both. Rowan’s shoulders, habitually rounded over books and screens, twitch in a small, defensive flinch. Choice and consequence, things she parses so neatly in footnotes, suddenly feel thick‑tongued and perilously close. “I left because I didn’t know how to be… both,” she begins, then falters, the sentence dissolving. Ben exhales a dry, almost‑laughing breath, palms flat on the table as if steadying crockery in an unexpected tremor, aware the real shock has already gone through him.
The owner wanders over to murmur that he’ll be closing early if the power goes again; they both nod automatically, neither really looking up. Rain drums harder on the windows, a soft, insistent percussion. For the first time since Ben turned his car back onto the lane toward Ashford Ley, their talk has slipped its scaffolding of schedules, funding, infrastructure. The familiar props (laptops, notes, half‑finished emails) lie inert between them, no longer a viable shield but mute witnesses. Silence doesn’t rush to fill the gap so much as settle there, cautious and watchful. Nothing is resolved, not yet, but something has undeniably shifted: a tender, unfamiliar awareness, a hairline crack running through the defences they’ve both kept polished for years.
The rain on the bothy roof is louder here than in the main house, a rougher, more insistent sound that makes the silence between them feel oddly sheltered rather than empty. Ben can almost feel it thrumming through the beams, a steady percussion that holds them in place.
Rowan tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, the camera strap cutting a diagonal across her cardigan, and lets her gaze travel over the blackened fireplace, the graffiti half-scratched into the soot. She looks, he thinks, as if she’s framing the room and herself in it at the same time.
“I wrote about places like this,” she adds, almost to herself. “How we project class and memory onto four damp walls. It was easier when I could pretend I wasn’t part of the data set.”
He straightens up from the skirting, flexing his hand to get the tingling out of his fingers. “Bet your reviewers loved that. ‘Excellent ethnography, shame about the actual feelings.’”
Her mouth twitches. “More or less. They prefer it when you use longer words to say you’re avoiding yourself.”
“Yeah, consultants call that ‘scope management.’” He rests his shoulder against the wall, then immediately regrets it when a flake of plaster crumbles down his neck. “Whole career built on telling people which bits of the mess we’re going to pretend don’t exist.”
Rowan lowers the camera, letting it thud gently against her hip. “And here we are. Two specialists in pretending.”
The line hits closer than it ought to. He feels it in the same place as the question that’s been prowling around since he drove back into the village: what, exactly, is he doing here?
“You ever manage it?” he asks, keeping his eyes on the fireplace. “Staying outside it all. Being the observer.”
She hesitates. He hears it in the change of her breathing before she speaks. “I thought I did. For a while. New cities, new universities. New anecdotes about the quaint village I was from. People like that sort of thing at conferences. It makes you sound… colourful, but safely so. A narrative. Not a person they might have to deal with.”
“And now?” he says.
“And now I’m standing in a bothy I used to cycle past when I was thirteen,” she replies, the academic cadence dropping away, “with the boy I thought I’d leave here neatly in the past. It turns out the data set talks back.”
He risks a glance at her. There’s colour high in her cheeks, not from the cold.
“You know,” he says slowly, “from this side it didn’t look very neat.”
Rowan exhales, a thin white plume in the chill air. “No. I know that. I just, ” She breaks off, fingers tightening around the camera strap. “If I’d let myself belong too much, I was afraid I’d never leave. And if I left and didn’t make something of it, then what had I done? To you. To everyone.”
He swallows the first response, something defensive, sharp-edged, and tries again.
“Funnily enough,” he says, “I had a similar business model. Get out, get on, make it big enough that no one could say I’d wasted the chance. Except apparently there’s no size of office that stops you feeling like the village is marking your homework.”
Ben huffs out something like a laugh, turning back to the wall but not really seeing the crumbling plaster. “Tell me about it,” he says. “Every slide deck I’ve done for Tamsin, there’s this tiny editor in my head running a check: am I selling them something that proves I’ve escaped, or proves I still know my place?”
He presses his thumb into a crack in the skirting, testing its give until a small channel of dust trickles down. “I thought if I got successful enough, that question would shut up. New clients, bigger retainers, people in London introducing me as ‘Ben who’s doing amazingly well’. I kept waiting for the moment it would all click and I’d feel… legitimate, I suppose. Like I’d crossed some invisible line and the village couldn’t get at me anymore.”
He lets his hand fall, flexing his fingers. “But it doesn’t work like that. You walk back into the pub and suddenly you’re eighteen again, and every pitch deck, every contract, just turns into another way of asking for a mark out of ten.”
Rowan eases down onto an upturned crate, feeling the damp creep through the fabric of her skirt, and lets the camera settle in her lap like something suddenly too heavy to hold. “I kept thinking if I published enough, moved far enough, I’d stop caring who I was letting down,” she says, voice low. “My mum. The village. You. Academia likes to pretend you can live from the neck up and never owe anyone a simple explanation.” She studies the cracked flagstones, then lifts her gaze to him, the grey half-light deepening her eyes. “And then I’d wake up at three a.m. in some rented room in Chicago, absolutely furious you weren’t there. Knowing perfectly well I was the one who’d walked away.”
Ben’s hand drops from the wall. He turns fully towards her, rain‑shadow shifting across his face as the wind worries at the broken panes. “I was furious you weren’t here,” he says, the words sounding almost matter‑of‑fact. “Angry, humiliated, all of it. But under that I was just… relieved you were somewhere bigger than this, doing the thing you were clearly meant to do. It made leaving make sense. It made you make sense.” He gives a small, crooked shrug. “And then I hated myself for feeling small every time your name turned up in some article someone shared at work. Like you’d slipped into a world with rules I’d never even be allowed to read, let alone play by.”
Rowan’s breath catches, shoulders tensing in a small, involuntary flinch. “I thought if I called, you’d hear all the ways I didn’t fit there either,” she says. “The accent that slipped, the seminars where I smiled and nodded and had no idea what anyone was talking about. I didn’t want you to hear me failing at the life I chose over you.” She rises from the crate, brushing dust from her skirt, and steps closer, boots whispering on the flagstones. The storm’s roar dulls to a muffled rush, as though the bothy itself has drawn breath and is holding it. “So I let you guess instead,” she finishes, voice unsteady but clear, the confession settling between them like something fragile and heavy, impossible to pretend belongs only to the past.
Ben’s fingers tighten around the dead torch he’s been using more as punctuation than illumination, the plastic casing slick against his palm. He turns it once, twice, as if there might still be a working battery hidden somewhere inside if he just applies enough pressure.
“You didn’t owe me your life,” he says at last, picking his way through the words with care. “I knew that even then. I think I did, anyway.” He glances past her to the doorway, where rain threads down in silver lines, then back again. “But a conversation might’ve been nice.”
The attempt at lightness pulls one corner of his mouth up, then abandons the effort halfway. “Instead I spent months rehearsing,” he goes on. “In the van, in the shower, on those stupid early trains into London. All the different speeches where I told you I’d go with you, or we’d make long‑distance work, or we’d give it a year and see. Some grand gesture about visas and flights I couldn’t afford.” He huffs out a breath that isn’t quite a laugh. “By the time I realised you weren’t calling, it was too late to say any of it without sounding… well.” He lifts the useless torch slightly. “Like this. Pointing something at the dark that doesn’t actually do anything.”
The admission lands between them with the solid, graceless weight of a dropped spanner, no drama to soften it, just the dull echo of what might have been.
He shifts his stance, boot scraping against the flagstone, and adds, more quietly, “So I did the very mature thing and pretended I’d never meant to say any of it. Told everyone I was fine, obviously. Threw myself at work, at London, at being the bloke who’d ‘got out’.” His gaze flicks over her face, searching for mockery and finding only the storm‑blurred reflection of his own. “It was easier to act like you’d made a clean break than admit I was still stood here holding half a conversation you’d already walked away from.”
Rowan’s laugh is brief and too sharp, as if it’s snagged on something on the way out. “I wrote emails I never sent,” she says, and the admission seems to cost her more than all the clever, careful sentences he’s heard from her in the past week. “Whole drafts about how the campus smelled like pine cleaner and cold coffee, how everyone talked about theory like it was oxygen and I was the only one holding my breath.” Her mouth twists. “You remember sixth form debates in the pub? It was like that, except everyone had read five books I’d never heard of, and they all assumed I had too.”
She nudges a curl of peeled paint with the toe of her boot until it comes away and skitters across the flagstone. “Every version made me sound like I was asking you to fix it. To fix me. ‘I hate it here, tell me it’s okay to come home.’” Her gaze drops to her hands, fingers worrying at a frayed cuff. “And that felt like cheating, when I was the one who’d insisted on leaving. So I hit delete and pretended I didn’t need… any of it.” Her shoulders hunch, as if braced for a verdict that doesn’t come.
Ben eases down beside the junction box, back to the damp brick, the cold seeping through his jacket. He stretches his legs out until his boots find a dry strip of flagstone and stay there, as if he’s pegged himself to the floor.
“I wouldn’t have fixed you,” he says, after a moment. “Didn’t have the first clue how to fix myself.” His thumb traces a rusted screw head. “I was working nights at the garage back then, remember? Saving for a van I’d decided was our exit strategy. Whole map in my head. Just… not the scholarship bit.”
He scrubs a hand over his face, leaving a grey smear across his cheek. “When you left without me, I took the same dream and flogged it to my boss as a mobile repair unit instead. Drew up routes, spreadsheets, the lot. Told everyone it was a business plan, not a consolation prize. ‘Ben the entrepreneur,’ not ‘Ben who got left behind’.” His voice stays level, almost conversational, but the thin coat of professionalism he once painted over that choice feels transparent now, the rebranded heartbreak visible beneath like old gloss showing through fresh magnolia.
“God.” Rowan sinks back against the opposite wall, mirroring his posture, knees almost touching in the narrow gap, as if the years between them have been compressed to a sliver of stone. “I told myself if I asked you to come, you’d say yes for the wrong reasons. That you’d wake up in some anonymous apartment in Ohio and realise you hated it, hated me, and I’d be the villain who dragged you away from everything you knew, the idiot girl who’d ruined your life for the sake of an adventure.”
She pushes her glasses up with the back of her hand, eyes suddenly bright. “So I turned you into a fixed point instead. ‘Ben will be fine. Ben will build something here. Ben doesn’t need me; he’s already halfway out of this place on his own.’ It was easier to believe in that polished, self‑sufficient version than risk hearing you say you wanted me to stay and because of that, I never had to face the possibility that I was the one who was afraid.”
Ben studies her for a long moment, storm light striping his face through the cracked window. “I did want you to stay,” he says at last. “But I also wanted you to go, because it meant one of us got out.” He huffs a breath that’s almost a laugh, then isn’t. “What really did my head in wasn’t you choosing the scholarship. It was you deciding I wouldn’t choose you and the unknown with you. Like you’d already sat my exam and marked it ‘fail’ before I’d even seen the paper.” He shrugs, but the movement is tight. “You took that choice away before I knew it was on the table.”
Rowan’s fingers worry the edge of her camera strap as she searches for words, thumb rubbing the softened leather until it creaks. “It wasn’t just ambition,” she says slowly. “It was… paperwork and deadlines and this unspoken test of whether I was ‘serious’ enough. There were forms asking if I had ‘ties’ back home, seminars on how most people couldn’t hack the distance.” She exhales, the sound thin. “They didn’t say, ‘Dump your boyfriend or you’re out,’ but it was all there between the lines. Be mobile. Be flexible. Be unencumbered.”
She stares past him for a moment, as if she can still see the fluorescent-lit office where it all began. “I was twenty‑one and terrified someone in an admissions building in Boston would look at a file and decide a boyfriend in a village meant I wasn’t worth the investment. Like they’d imagine me torn between lectures and late‑night calls to you, and tick a little mental box: ‘high risk of going home’.”
Her mouth twists. “My supervisor talked about ‘clean breaks’ and ‘necessary sacrifices’ in this very reasonable tone, like we were discussing cutting a paragraph from an essay. ‘You’ll never forgive yourself if you turn this down for a relationship that might not last,’ she said. And I thought, God, what if she’s right? What if I stay and then we break up anyway and I’ve lost everything for nothing?”
She gives a fragile, humourless laugh. “So instead of risking them taking it away, I convinced myself the grown‑up thing was to cut out the ‘distraction’ before they could.” She lifts two fingers from the strap to make tired quotation marks. “You got turned into a bullet point on a risk assessment form in my head: local boyfriend, emotional attachment, potential liability.”
The word tastes bitter now, lodged between them with all the weight of what they had been. “I called what we had a distraction,” she finishes quietly, as though confessing to blasphemy in a chapel. “Like we were something you could just cross out in red pen and carry on.”
She looks up at him then, properly, as if bracing for impact. “In my head, you were always going to be happiest here,” she says. “In your van, on these roads, knowing every hedge and pothole. I told myself if I asked you to come, you’d say yes because you loved me, not because you wanted the life. And then five years down the line you’d be standing in some fluorescent supermarket in Ohio, hating the cereal aisle and hating me.” Her mouth twists. “So I decided for both of us.”
Her voice roughens, the words catching. “I wrote those awful texts, went cold overnight, because it seemed… efficient. Like ripping off a plaster. If you were furious with me, at least you wouldn’t be sitting by your phone, waiting for me to make up my mind.” She lets out a breath that isn’t quite a laugh. “It was cowardly. I called it sacrifice so I didn’t have to call myself selfish. Really, I was just too scared to hear you say no. Or yes. Either answer would’ve made it real.”
Ben’s jaw flexes as he listens, thumb worrying a crescent into the softened cardboard of his notebook. “I spent years thinking your silence meant you’d outgrown me in about five minutes,” he says, the words flat rather than accusing. “Like I was some… training relationship before you met people who quote theory over breakfast and actually enjoy it.” The attempt at humour hangs between them, thin and frayed, before he shrugs it off.
“I started clocking how I sounded in meetings. Editing myself. Dropping references I didn’t care about, laughing at jokes I didn’t get. I learned what fork to use because I didn’t want to be the lad who asks.” He huffs out a mirthless breath. “And every time someone said, ‘You’re very articulate for someone from round here,’ I heard, ‘Not bad for the boy Rowan left behind. Almost passes, if you squint.’”
He scrapes a thumbnail over a patch of flaking limewash, watching it powder under his nail. “Thing is, I thought I’d hacked it,” he goes on. “New postcode, nicer watch, invoices with more zeroes. I walk in thinking, right, now we’re on the same level. And then it’s hi‑vis vests and health‑and‑safety briefings while everyone else gets champagne in the saloon.” He laughs once, without humour. “You tell yourself it’s just logistics, fire exits, insurance. But after the fifth clipboard check, you start to feel like an appliance they’ve had installed rather than a person they invited.” His gaze returns to her, steady, the air between them raw.
Rowan flinches, then leans forward, elbows braced on her knees, hands laced tight enough for the knuckles to blanch. “You were never a project,” she says, the words coming out fiercer than she intends. “If anything, I was the one treating my own life like a case study. ‘Observe how the girl from the village reinvents herself abroad; note the shedding of accent and attachments.’” A wry smile ghosts across her face and fades almost at once. “I didn’t trust either of us,” she admits. “Didn’t trust that you could want more without feeling I’d dragged you somewhere you didn’t belong. Didn’t trust that I could come back if it all went wrong and not feel like I’d failed the experiment.” She exhales, the breath shivering. “So I picked the version where I left cleanly and permanently. Only it wasn’t clean at all, was it? It just left us both bleeding in different countries, pretending it was weather.”
The silence after her confession stretches, elastic and uncomfortable, filled only by rain pattering against the bothy’s broken panes and the irregular drip of water somewhere behind them. It smells of damp stone and old soot and something green trying to rot its way back through the floor. Ben scrubs a hand over his face, leaving a streak of dust along his cheekbone. “Bleeding in different countries,” he echoes, half to himself, as if testing the fit of the phrase on his own tongue. “Christ, that’s about right.”
He lets out a breath that seems to deflate something in his chest. “I kept thinking, any day now you’ll send a postcard,” he says, eyes fixed on the mould-blotched wall opposite. “Some smug Ivy League crest on the front, bit of wry commentary on the back. ‘Dear Ben, subject continues to exhibit thwarted ambition, stop. Weather fine, wish you were here, stop.’” His mouth twitches. “When nothing came, it was easier to decide you’d… looked at me properly, weighed me up, and decided I didn’t fit the life you wanted. That I was, ” he gropes for the phrase she used earlier, finds it with a grim little satisfaction, “provincial data in your grand experiment.”
There’s no heat in it now, no sharp edge, just the weary honesty of someone finally naming an old ghost and discovering it’s smaller than remembered. He lifts his head and meets her gaze, steady, inviting correction or confirmation.
Rowan winces, but she doesn’t look away. The rain gives a sudden harder burst, rattling through the cracked glass and then subsiding, as if the weather’s briefly lost its temper on their behalf. “I did want more than what was here,” she says quietly. “Lecture halls, archives, places where no one knew my grandmother’s maiden name or how many times my dad changed jobs.”
Her fingers worry at the strap of her camera, twisting the leather until it creaks. “But I never wanted less of you,” she goes on, the emphasis so soft it’s almost an apology. “I just… didn’t know how to have both without breaking under the strain. Every version I imagined, you were either stuck resenting me in some city you hated, or I was stuck resenting you here for being happy when I wasn’t.”
She huffs a breath that might be a laugh, might be a sob, and tips her head back against the cold stone. “So I picked the neatest hypothesis: leave, entirely. Control the variable. Pretend the ache was just… jet lag.” Her smile is small and crooked. “Turns out you can’t peer‑review your own heart.”
Outside, thunder rumbles again, closer this time, a low, rolling growl that makes the windowpanes tremble in their rotten frames, as if underlining the admission.
The lights hiccup once, twice, then surrender with a soft, terminal click, dropping the bothy into a darkness so complete it feels physical. For a second, neither of them moves; the storm outside suddenly seems louder, the rain drumming on the slate like impatient fingers.
Ben lets out a breath that’s half sigh, half laugh. “Right,” he says into the black. “That’ll be the temporary breakers throwing a tantrum. Again.” Somewhere to his left, Rowan shifts, the faint rasp of her skirt against the dusty flagstones oddly intimate.
His phone vibrates in his pocket, a small, insistent buzz against his hip. He fumbles it out; the screen flares on, carving his jawline and cheekbones into sharp, ghostly planes. The notification banner glows accusingly: SERVER ROOM DOWN. PLEASE COME. – Tamsin.
He angles the phone so Rowan can see. The terse capitals, the implied panic, slice neatly through the fragile, confessional hush they’ve spun between them. “I’d better get back up to the stable block,” he says, pushing to his feet, head nearly clipping a sagging beam. “If those drives fry, Tamsin might actually murder me and bury me under the ha‑ha. Very on brand, really.”
He offers a hand into the dark on reflex more than intent. Her fingers find his, cool and a little shaky, and she lets him haul her upright. Their palms slide against each other, slick with damp, plaster dust gritting at the edges. The contact is brief, clumsy, but something in it steadies them both, as if agreeing, without words, to carry the conversation’s rawness with them rather than abandon it here among the peeling walls.
Ten minutes later they’re splashing through puddles across the courtyard, coats yanked tight against rain that comes in from the side like a personal vendetta. The main house looms to their left, a hulking, lightless silhouette; only the odd security sensor blinks, giving the façade the sulky look of a grounded teenager. Emergency strips along the path to the converted stables glow a queasy greenish‑yellow, turning the gravel into something that looks more sci‑fi set than heritage asset.
Inside, the temperature jumps and the air hums with a different kind of storm: backup batteries whining, faint alarms chirping from black‑screened racks, the steady drip of water somewhere it absolutely shouldn’t be. Tamsin materialises in the corridor like she’s been pacing it into a groove, hair escaping its usual sleek line, trench darkened to a patchy gloss. Her phone is welded to one hand; the other clutches a clipboard bristling with Post‑its.
“The whole block tripped when the last surge hit,” she says without preamble, voice clipped to keep it from fraying. “We’ve got a wedding party’s entire photo archive on that NAS, and Keira’s pilot footage queued for upload. If we lose either…” Her jaw locks on the unfinished sentence, the silence filled by a protesting beep from somewhere down the hall.
Ben doesn’t bother with platitudes. He nods once, already mentally peeling back plaster and floorboards, tracing where someone saved money on trunking five years ago. “All right. I’ll see what I can salvage.” He glances at Rowan, rain still jewelling the ends of her hair. “If you’re staying, I might need another pair of hands. Or at least someone who can read Tamsin’s disaster notes while I’m upside down.”
The half‑joke skims across the tension and, improbably, lands. The corners of Tamsin’s mouth ease by a millimetre; she exhales through her nose, almost a laugh. Rowan nods, shrugging out of her dripping coat and hanging it on the nearest door handle. “Interpreter of crises,” she says lightly. “I can do that.”
In the cramped server room, heat gathers quickly despite the power loss, the air thick with the smell of warm plastic, damp carpet and the faint tang of ozone. Ben drops to his knees, then lowers himself onto his back to snake under the lowest rack, torch clenched between his teeth as he prises up a reluctant floor panel. “The surge protectors did some of the work,” he mumbles around the light, voice flattened and ridiculous, “but whoever installed this bit before us thought daisy‑chaining was a fun hobby.” Rowan settles cross‑legged beside the open panel, Tamsin’s printed network diagram spread across her lap, biro already poised, fringe escaping its pins in the humidity. “So your plan,” she says slowly, translating his muttered assessment into layperson’s terms for herself as much as anyone, “is to stop the ghost of some cowboy contractor from setting Keira’s cameras on fire?” He snorts, the sound echoing off metal and plastic. “Something like that. Hand me the 10mm driver?” She scans the scattered tools until she spots it, then shifts closer, balancing the printout on one knee. This time she takes the torch from his mouth, her fingers brushing his jaw, and angles the beam so the circle of light falls exactly where his fingers are groping. Their shoulders brush; neither of them pulls away.
Time frays into small, shared tasks. Rowan reads out cryptic labels, “Is ‘SB‑UPS‑B’ the one having a full existential crisis, or just a dignified sulk?”, while Ben calls back instructions, and Tamsin hovers in the doorway, phone welded to her ear as she soothes a near‑hysterical photographer. Another crack of thunder rattles the old window frames; the emergency lights sag to a queasy brown. Rowan instinctively braces her hand under the desk to steady herself. Her fingers find the solid warmth of Ben’s forearm just as he tightens a final connection. The touch sends a small, treacherous jolt through both of them, sharper than the storm outside. This time, she leaves her hand there, feeling tendon and muscle flex as he eases the cable into place. He tilts his head, not quite looking at her, but making no pretence the contact isn’t happening. A beat later, the servers shudder back to life in ascending beeps, fans spinning up, status lights flicking to steady green. Tamsin lets out a low, disbelieving cheer and vanishes down the hall, already mid‑apology to someone on another line. In the sudden relative quiet, Ben rolls out from under the rack and simply lies there for a second, chest heaving, staring up at the stained ceiling tiles. Rowan, still cross‑legged on the floor, releases a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding. The old bitterness between them feels thinner now, stretched across the absurd intimacy of saving bridal photos and reality‑TV rushes in the middle of a Gloucestershire tempest. When they finally haul themselves into the corridor, sharing over‑salted noodles steaming in a chipped mug between them, it feels less like a formal truce and more like something rebuilt, quietly, wire by wire, until the whole precarious structure holds.
The quiet between them lengthens, no longer awkward but weighted, the sounds of the estate at night filling in the gaps. Distant sheep, the faint hum of the cooling server room behind them, a door somewhere thudding shut as if the house is rearranging its own secrets. Damp has crept into Ben’s cuffs; a chill works its way up his shins, but he finds he doesn’t mind. It feels honest, in a way that most of his life lately hasn’t.
Rowan’s fingers toy with the strap of her camera, the tiny click of plastic against stone a metronome for the same restlessness that brought him out here on the pretext of “just checking the routers.” Her gaze is fixed on the dark line of trees beyond the car park, where the estate lights give up and the night takes over. “Do you ever wish you hadn’t come back?” she asks suddenly, as if she’s been rehearsing the question in her head for hours. “That you’d kept Ashford Ley as a story instead of a place you can trip over in the dark?”
Ben huffs out a breath that’s almost a laugh and ghosts in the cold air. “Every other hour,” he admits. “Usually when I’m under a floor somewhere, discovering creative new ways people have bodged wiring for the last thirty years.” He scrapes a heel against the gravel, watching the small spray of stones. “But then there’s this weird… relief? That it’s not just in my head any more. That I can actually fix things instead of rerunning the same ‘what ifs’ on a loop.”
He risks a glance at her profile, the sharp, familiar line of her nose softened by shadow. “Same goes for you, by the way. I thought keeping you as… a story was safer.” His mouth twists. “Turns out ghosts are more work than actual people. At least with you here I know when I’m actually putting my foot in it, instead of guessing from ten years away.”
Rowan’s answering smile is small but real, the sort that starts in one corner of her mouth and takes its time deciding whether to commit. She shifts a fraction closer along the wall so their knees almost touch, gravel crunching under her boots in tiny, decisive sounds. “My students think fieldwork is all epiphanies in picturesque settings,” she says, breath clouding between them. “They picture me on a hill somewhere, notebook in hand, decoding the soul of England.” Her fingers worry the camera strap, a tiny counterpoint to her dry tone. “They don’t see the jet lag, the mould in the guest bathrooms, the arguments over broadband speeds and whether the servers count as ‘heritage assets’.” A faint, incredulous smile. “Still, as case studies go, this one’s… unexpectedly personal. Not many sites come with their own unresolved subplot.”
Ben lets the joke sit, tasting the ways he could dodge it. He doesn’t. “I’m done being just a footnote in your research,” he says at last, voice lower than he intends. The words could have landed as accusation; instead they come out tired, honest, edged with a warning mostly aimed at himself, as if he’s drawing a line he isn’t sure he’ll keep.
She turns fully toward him at that, shoulder leaving the cool scrape of stone, searching his face as if testing the foundations of something only just, and somewhat foolishly, erected. Up close he can see the faint smudge of ink on her thumb, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes that weren’t there when they were twenty and invincible. “You were never a footnote,” she says, and for once there’s no irony in it. “You were the bit I didn’t know how to write without blowing up the whole argument.” A shaky, self-conscious laugh escapes her. “Leaving was easy to frame as theory. Staying would have meant admitting I wanted something I couldn’t… edit. Or control.” The confession hangs there, raw and unadorned, fogging the air between them. Ben swallows, throat suddenly tight, some childish part of him perversely gratified and appalled at once. “You could’ve told me that,” he manages. “Instead of just disappearing.” Rowan nods once, the movement small but without flinch, taking the blow as if she’s rehearsed accepting it. “I know,” she says quietly. “You deserved better than a clever explanation delivered ten years too late. Better than silence.”
The admission lets something unknot in his chest; he exhales, surprised at how cold the air tastes. He pushes off the wall to stand squarely before her, boots nudging loose chippings, the stable block’s blank windows watching like curtained spectators. “I wasn’t perfect either,” he says, forcing himself not to look away. “I was so busy being furious I didn’t even try to follow you. Told myself it was pride, or money, or… logistics.” His mouth crooks, mocking his younger self. “Really, I was terrified you’d see me in your shiny new life and realise you’d traded up.” A beat. “Easier to stay the wounded party than risk that.” A draught slips between them, damp with river and turned soil. Rowan’s gaze softens, the line of her shoulders loosening. “For what it’s worth,” she murmurs, almost embarrassed by her own sincerity, “no one in that shiny new life ever made me feel as… seen. Or as infuriated. Occasionally in the same sentence.”
The corner of his mouth lifts at that, some of the old spark returning, but tempered now by everything they’ve learned to lose. “Infuriated is our brand,” he says, stepping in close enough that she can see the faint stubble on his jaw, the tiredness feathering his eyes. “But I don’t want a sequel to the same story. If this is anything, it has to be… different. Slower. Chosen. Not just something that happens to us because this place throws us together.” The word settles between them like a marker on a map no longer hypothetical. Rowan’s hand lifts almost of its own accord, fingertips brushing the collar of his jacket, feeling the rough fabric, the solid heat beneath, the small, startled hitch of his breath. “Different,” she echoes, her pulse loud in her ears, an academic carefully repeating a term she’d like, this once, to live rather than define. “Starting from now, then.” She tilts her face up, the invitation clear but not desperate, and this time when Ben closes the small distance, the kiss carries all the unsaid apologies and tentative hope they’ve been circling.
They draw apart a fraction, just inside the spill of light from the office doorway, as if the rectangle of brightness is a border they’re not quite ready to cross. Cool air snakes between them, cutting cleanly through the warmth still prickling along Ben’s mouth. His heart is going like he’s just sprinted the length of the drive, not kissed someone against a wall like a man with more hormones than sense.
Rowan drags her hair back from her face, fingertips catching in a tangle at the nape of her neck. A few curls have revolted entirely in the damp, haloing her in unruly wisps that would probably make good copy in some lifestyle shoot: Authentic Country Intellectual, Lightly Weathered. She licks her thumb, rubs at the corner of her mouth, checks it with a small frown. Ben, stupidly charmed, looks away before he’s caught staring at her mouth again like a teenager.
He scrubs a hand over his jaw instead, feeling rain grit and the faint rasp of stubble, as if he can rub his face back into something appropriately neutral. The security light above them gives a faint electrical buzz, throwing their shadows long and angular across the gravel. Beyond the stable block, a generator coughs, then settles into a steadier thrum: the estate’s tired heart kicking back into rhythm.
“Apparently,” Rowan says at last, voice low and a little breathless, “the universe prefers we keep our clothes on while discussing electrical infrastructure.”
Ben huffs out a laugh that sounds more like an exhale of held breath. The absurdity of it, emergency lighting, damp stone, the faint smell of wet hay, and them, takes the sting out of his own urgency.
“Health and safety would approve,” he manages. The line comes out lighter than he feels, but there’s an undeniable thread of relief running through it. Not that the kiss is over, God, no, but that it hasn’t shattered under the practical glare of motion sensors and risk assessments. That they can still find their way back to sentences, to jokes, without pretending none of this happened.
He glances sideways, gauging, half-afraid she’ll be smoothing this down already into a neat anecdote for some future essay on rural performances of desire. Instead, she’s watching him with an expression that is, alarmingly, naked: amusement edged with something like wonder, like she’s cataloguing evidence that the man in front of her really is the same boy who once kissed her behind the cricket pavilion and then apologised to the pavilion.
“It’s very… us,” she says. “Attempt emotional intimacy, trigger security systems.”
“That, or Ashdown Court has opinions on fraternisation between contractors and consultants,” he replies. “Probably in the small print.”
“Appendix C,” Rowan says. “Prohibitions on unauthorised… entanglements.”
He snorts, the sound rolling out into the night, and the last tight knot of dread in his chest loosens. If they can stand here under fluorescent judgment and still want to grin at each other, perhaps this isn’t as fragile as he feared.
They drift into motion without quite agreeing to, their bodies finding an old rhythm before their thoughts catch up. Gravel grinds underfoot, small decisive sounds in a night that suddenly feels full of eavesdroppers: bricks, hedges, inherited expectations. The silence between them doesn’t vanish so much as get repurposed, stripped of voltage and wired into something steadier.
Rowan is the one who prises it open. She sketches the outline of her other life in clean, factual strokes, as if reading from a CV she’s too tired to embellish: teaching load technically “deferred” yet looming, grad students whose crises appear in her inbox across time zones, a fellowship committee politely reminding her that draft chapters do not, in fact, write themselves. There’s an office in Boston with her name on the door, colleagues who have only ever known her as Professor Ellery, not the girl who used to nick chips outside The King’s Arms.
Saying it here, beneath Ashdown’s watchful windows and security lights, repositions the whole story. The distance she put between herself and this place stops feeling like treachery and starts sounding like chronology: one chapter, then another.
Ben listens the way he used to when she revised for exams and he revised his escape routes: head angled, mouth quiet, no interruptions disguised as solutions. He doesn’t tell her to stay, or to go, or how easy it would all be if she just chose correctly. His hands stay buried in his jacket pockets, knuckles pressing white against worn fabric, the glow from the house catching the faint line carved between his brows. He’s not frowning at her, she realises, but at the sheer arithmetic of their lives, trying (for once) not to hustle the numbers into a convenient sum.
When she points out, not unreasonably, that his calendar is hardly emptier, site visits stacked like bad Tetris, maintenance contracts muttering about SLAs, the unspoken pressure to scale while the market is frothy, he doesn’t counter with swagger or the old “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” routine. Instead, he exhales and owns it: sixteen-hour days that bleed into one another, a van that functions as office, storage unit and confession booth, an inbox he’s half-afraid to open in case something important has quietly exploded.
“If we tried to do everything at once,” he says, boot scuffing at a loose stone, eyes on the gravel, “we’d burn out and blow the fuses. I don’t want that for us.”
The words land with the gentleness of proper insulation: an unexpected kindness to both of them. They don’t have to choose between catastrophe and nothing, grand gesture or clean break. There is, she realises, a third option: a carefully wired circuit that doesn’t pretend infinite capacity, that builds in switches and trip points before everything overheats.
His wiring metaphor gives her a foothold, a way of talking about them that doesn’t require declarations or deadlines. She pushes it further, testing the idea like a hypothesis: time‑limited stays, shared projects that justify return trips, finding out what each other’s lives actually look like beyond curated stories and crisis moments. “Think of it as mixed methods,” she says, half‑teasing to mask how exposed she feels. “Longitudinal study, small sample size. Qualitative interviews with the ex‑boyfriend turned facilities contractor.” Ben laughs, the sound low and unguarded, and doesn’t flinch from the label. When she threads her fingers through his, he squeezes back. The contact is brief but deliberate. A data point, not a grand conclusion, but one that shifts the whole graph.
As they near the lit window, she lets his hand slip free, instinctively respectful of the estate’s watching eyes, but the sense of retreat doesn’t return. Instead, a quieter mood settles: not giddy romance, but a shared, careful optimism, as if they’ve agreed on a draft proposal neither of them is quite ready to sign, yet both are reluctant to shelve.
On the steps, before they part there’s a small, unremarkable exchange about tomorrow’s joint walkthrough, who’s bringing coffee, whether the forecasted rain will interfere with cabling plans, and if she minds starting early so he can check a temperamental router. Yet beneath the banal planning runs a new assumption: tomorrow, and the day after, they will be in each other’s orbit, testing this “incremental” approach in real time, letting possibility grow not as a single leap but as a pattern of chosen, repeated contact, a timetable they are, for once, writing together.
The next morning in the stable‑block corridor, they fall into step without arranging it, matching pace as if some old muscle memory has kicked in. Ben has his laptop bag over one shoulder, Rowan is still tucking a pen behind her ear, and both are moving with the same low‑level urgency towards caffeine before the first panel descends.
The staff kitchen is already humming faintly: the whirr of the ancient fridge, the tick of the overworked kettle. Someone has abandoned a plate of half‑eaten biscuits beside a stack of branded lanyards. The coffee pot on the counter looks, at a glance, promising; up close, it is clearly on its last legs.
Ben gets there first and lifts it with a grimace. “We’re in the dregs era,” he mutters.
“Historic scarcity,” Rowan says. “Very on‑theme.”
He wordlessly reaches for the cleanest of the mugs, the one with only a hairline crack rather than a chunk missing from the rim, and passes it to her, keeping the more battered one for himself. Then he tips the pot, angling it so the final inch of drinkable brew sloshes between both cups in an even split. She doesn’t comment, just waits until he sets them down, then takes the sugar jar and adds exactly half a teaspoon to his mug, none to hers.
“You’re supposed to remind me I’ve quit sugar,” he says.
“I am reminding you,” she replies. “By giving you just enough not to be dreadful to donors.”
It’s all so offhand that it barely registers as intimacy, more choreography than choice: she nudges the milk towards him with her knuckles, he flicks the kettle back on for whoever comes next. Their shoulders end up touching as they both lean against the counter, mugs warming their fingers, looking for a moment not like guest academic and contractor but like two people who’ve been sharing breakfasts for years.
The corridor outside fills with footsteps, voices testing microphones, someone practising a joke about “country house wifi” for the opening remarks. Inside the narrow kitchen, the noise is muffled, wrapped in the hiss of the kettle and the faint rattle of pipes.
“You ready for your panel?” Ben asks, eyes on the tiny window where the damp is blooming in one corner.
“Define ‘ready’,” Rowan says. “I have slides. I have an argument. I have, ” she gestures with her mug “, this.”
He huffs a laugh. “That’s more than most of them.”
Before she can answer, the door bangs open and one of the junior organisers barrels in, cheeks pink, headset askew. “Sorry: have either of you seen the main projector? It’s not in the drawing room and Tamsin will actually combust if we don’t, ”
“We’ll sort it,” Ben and Rowan say at the same time.
They glance at each other, startled, then fall into the next bit just as naturally: Rowan sets her mug down, already mentally inventorying which room had the spare equipment yesterday; Ben straightens, rolling his shoulders as though gearing up for a small skirmish with the electrical cupboard.
“Check the library AV cupboard,” Rowan says to the organiser. “Top shelf, behind the hymn books.”
“And if it’s not there, the old cinema screen’s in the carriage house loft,” Ben adds. “I’ll come up now and lug it down before anyone decides to improvise with a bedsheet.”
The organiser exhales in visible relief. “You two are actual lifesavers.”
“Don’t tell Tamsin,” Ben says. “She’ll start charging extra.”
The door swings shut behind the flustered figure, and for a heartbeat the kitchen is quiet again. Rowan arches an eyebrow at him over her mug.
“‘We’ll sort it’?” she says.
He shrugs, mouth quirking. “Force of habit.”
“From when?”
He opens his mouth, then seems to think better of answering honestly. That this feels unnervingly like the old days of covering for each other with parents, teachers, landlords. Instead he lifts his mug in a small salute.
“From now,” he says. “Apparently.”
She studies him for a moment, something like amusement and something like caution flickering together in her eyes, then clinks her chipped rim lightly against his.
“From now,” she agrees, and they step back into the corridor together.
By mid‑afternoon the house feels overclocked: too many laptops, too many anxieties sharing one eighteenth‑century circuit. Ben is wedged under a sideboard in the morning room trying to talk a sulking router back to life when Tamsin appears in the doorway, tablet in hand, expression like a tidy spreadsheet given human form.
“Ben. Five minutes?” It is not, obviously, a question.
In the corridor she lowers her voice. “Lord Harbury and his cohort would like a proper briefing on the ‘tech situation’ before dinner. His words. If we bore them, they drift. If we frighten them, they retreat to their foundations office and write us off as a lost cause.”
“So… no pressure,” Ben says.
Her mouth twitches. “Precisely the right amount of pressure. Six o’clock. Drawing room. I’ll introduce you as briefly as possible.”
Which is how he ends up hunting for Rowan and finding her in an empty break‑out room, pacing between stacked chairs with a sheaf of scribbled notes, muttering trial sentences for tomorrow’s keynote and occasionally crossing one out with surgical ferocity.
The drawing‑room briefing turns out more gladiatorial than Ben anticipated: a half‑circle of tweed and pearls, sherry glasses glinting, and politely hostile questions about “ugly boxes” and “Silicon Valley nonsense” delivered as if discussing an unfortunate disease. Tamsin hovers at the mantelpiece like a general who has promised her troops will not embarrass her.
Ben breathes, hears Rowan in his head. He swaps “disruption” for “continuity,” “uptime” for “caretaking,” and, when someone harrumphs about “eyesores on the south lawn,” he simply nods towards the rain‑streaked windows and talks about storms, failing pipes, and hidden work that keeps a house like this alive. He sees their faces tip from suspicion to grudging interest.
When Tamsin’s small nod signals the worst is over, adrenaline flares. Not the old, hollow rush of city pitches, but something steadier, rooted. Before the canapé tray can pen him in with small talk, he slips out, cutting through a side corridor that smells of beeswax and damp wool, and heads for the stable block at a near‑trot, scanning each doorway for Rowan.
Rowan is in the small office they’ve commandeered as retreat HQ, hunched over a spreadsheet of panel timings and emergency phone numbers, glasses sliding down her nose. Ben leans in the doorway until she looks up, and the unguarded spark in his expression tells her the outcome before he speaks. “Your ‘quietly resilient infrastructure’ line landed,” he says, almost boyishly pleased. She laughs, relief flaring warmer than she expects, and they do a quick autopsy of the meeting (who folded first, which metaphor worked best, how Harbury’s eyebrow finally unclenched) before a flustered volunteer bursts in, needing her chair for an oversubscribed workshop. As they stand to leave, their shoulders bump; neither of them steps away quite as quickly as they might have a week ago.
That evening, while most guests are corralled into the main hall, Rowan slips into the back of a side room where a smaller, more specialist panel is underway: her panel, her people, her language. Ben is already there, half hidden against the panelling, arms folded, listening with the wary concentration he usually reserves for temperamental servers. She hears herself explaining “heritage performance” and the emotional labour of belonging, and, absurdly, starts imagining how he might translate each phrase into cabling and code. When she glances up mid‑sentence and finds his gaze, something slots into place: the restless, dreaming boy who wanted out and the patient, competent man leaning against three‑hundred‑year‑old oak are suddenly, incontrovertibly, the same person. The recognition lingers after the applause, softening her shoulders as she fields questions, making her answers less defensive, more generous. Passing him on her way to the next session, close enough to catch the faint smell of rain and solder on his jacket, she feels the odd, bracing sense that, for once, their different paths are moving in tandem rather than away.
The off‑site’s first morning turns frenetic the instant Ben’s phone buzzes with a text, COACH HERE, while he’s still in the plant room checking a sulking boiler. By the time he emerges into the courtyard, the coach of executives is already there, discharging navy suits and monogrammed laptop bags into the cold air like an expensive, mildly disgruntled fog. Someone in a gilet branded with a consulting firm’s logo asks where the “tech guy” is, as if expecting a different species.
At the same time, the hired AV firm rings to say they’ve “taken a scenic detour” and can’t find the right turn off the lane. From the tone, Ben suspects they’re in completely the wrong county. Tamsin’s jaw tightens almost imperceptibly; she switches from welcome-smile to crisis‑mode without moving a muscle below the eyes.
Rowan keeps half a step behind her as they stride between the stable block and the west wing, notebook in hand, scribbling phrases while also noticing the tiny tells in Tamsin’s posture: the fractional hitch when a trustee announces he’s “not doing name badges,” the way her fingers flatten against the folder at the mention of over‑running costs.
In a makeshift green room commandeered from a former tack room, Ben talks the trustees through his integrated access system, coaxing diagrams to life on a flickering screen while mentally calculating how long it will take him to drive out and rescue the lost AV team. He’s halfway through explaining how staff cards and guest passes will work when one of the older trustees waves a hand, expression faintly pained.
“All very clever, I’m sure,” the man says, as if complimenting a precocious child. “But isn’t this all just bells and whistles? We’ve managed perfectly well with actual keys for two hundred years.”
The air thickens; Ben can feel the momentum he’s built begin to leak away. Tamsin inhales, clearly preparing a diplomatic counter. Rowan, hearing the particular mix of condescension and fear she’s catalogued in a hundred interviews about class and change, clears her throat.
“If I may,” she says, in the measured, almost languid tone she uses in peer‑review panels when about to contradict someone twice her age, “what Ben’s describing sounds less like embellishment and more like a form of risk mitigation.”
Several pairs of grey eyebrows lift at the phrase. She continues, gently, as if they have already half‑agreed.
“In an environment like this, the reputational cost of a security breach (or even a guest feeling their privacy has been compromised) would be far higher than the initial outlay. Integrated access is a kind of reputational insurance. It allows you to host events like this with confidence, without compromising the sense of tradition your guests value.”
She watches the words land, sees shoulders ease at “reputational” and “insurance,” the way “risk” gives them something solid and familiar to hold. Ben, across the room, goes very still. Tamsin flicks her a quick, sideways glance (gratitude held tightly in check, like everything else about her) and then, smoothly, picks up the thread.
“As Dr Ellery says,” she adds, cool and authoritative now, “this is about safeguarding what we already have.”
The conversation, which had been tilting towards polite dismissal, tips back. Questions follow: not about “gadgets” but about liability, guest expectations, insurance premiums. Ben answers in this new language, Rowan’s phrasing echoing in his mind, and the system that five minutes ago sounded like an indulgence begins to look, to these men in their well‑cut tweed, like prudence.
The afternoon’s logistics meeting sags under the weight of charts and conditional‑formatting; someone has even printed lanyard‑colour options. Rowan perches at the far end of the table beside the radiator, ostensibly just taking notes for Tamsin, but every so often Ben feels the prickle of her attention settle on him when a phrase like “guest journey” or “asset utilisation” makes him wince.
It’s when a silver‑haired trustee, peering at a mock‑up of the digital welcome pack, says that QR‑coded room keys feel “a bit airport lounge, don’t they?” that she moves. Rowan smiles, almost apologetically, and offers a minor digression about a château outside Lyon that now uses QR passes to separate public and private wings, and about a museum in Vienna where the same technology quietly controls access to conservation labs.
By the time she’s done, Ben’s “gadgets” have become part of a sober, pan‑European trend: “discreet, flexible stewardship tools” as she calls them, that protect collections, staff, and guests from awkward collisions. When the projector finally clicks off, the same trustee clears his throat and asks Ben, not quite meeting his eye, how soon his team could implement a limited trial. Across the table, Ben mouths thank you; Rowan looks down to uncap her pen, the ghost of a smile tugging at her mouth.
That evening’s dinner in the long gallery is all polished glassware and muted corporate branding, the Ashdown crest sharing space with a consultancy logo on the menu cards as if they’ve entered into a discreet marriage of convenience. Ben, drafted to troubleshoot a temperamental projector at the far end, keeps catching fragments of jargon ricocheting down the table.
Rowan finds herself seated between a sustainability lead and a data strategist who talk in dense acronyms about KPIs, stakeholder ecosystems and “leveraging place‑based authenticity.” She listens, head tilted, tracking the odd fit between their vocabulary and the room’s oil portraits. Then she translates, lightly: “So, essentially, you need staff, from housekeepers to gardeners, to feel like co‑authors rather than stagehands.”
The executives latch onto the metaphor with almost indecent relief. “Yes, exactly: co‑authors of the brand narrative,” one repeats, underlining it on his notepad as if she’s just given him a quarter’s work. Ben, sliding back into his seat opposite, hears the phrase and files it away, amused.
Later, when Tamsin briefs the estate team for tomorrow’s workshops, Rowan quietly passes her a page of distilled phrases, “co‑authors,” “shared script,” “keeping the story honest”, that bridge corporate speak and village scepticism. Tamsin glances down, then up, and for once her “thank you” is not entirely professional.
After the last dessert plate is cleared and the executives drift back to their rooms, to emails, spouses, and expense spreadsheets, Ben steers Rowan out of the house and down the lane to The King’s Arms. Inside, laptops glow under the low beams, power banks and extension cables snake around bar stools, and half‑drunk pints stand guard over Slack threads. He introduces her to the remote‑worker regulars (designers, coders, a freelance copywriter who swears he’s “between novels”) who squint, trying to place her, before one older patron snaps his fingers: “Ellery’s girl, from the bookshop, back from foreign adventures then?” Rowan smiles wryly, corrects the details without pricking the nostalgia, and within minutes she’s leaning over a scarred table, asking pointed questions about co‑working visas, rural broadband policy, and how often London clients actually visit in person, her curiosity turning their grumbles into an impromptu focus group and, Ben suspects, a future chapter.
By the time the pub grows louder and the fire sinks to an emberish glow, a consultant already a drink past careful leans back and remarks that estates like Ashdown are “finally monetising the quaintness before it all turns into chain hotels.” The table stills. Rowan’s eyes narrow behind her glasses; she asks, lightly, whether he’s ever costed the unpaid labour behind that “quaintness”. Generations of underpaid staff, the village economies warped by second homes, the quiet arithmetic of who cleans, cooks, and disappears from the brochure. In a handful of deft, lucid sentences she dismantles the fantasy he’s selling his clients, sketching the chasm between marketed idyll and lived compromise. The consultant flushes, mutters something about “food for thought,” and retreats into his pint, while Ben’s friends exchange delighted looks and call for another round in her honour. Watching her hold her ground here, in the messy overlap of estate politics, village memory, and his own scrappy network, Ben feels an unexpected steadiness settle in his chest, as if a long‑open circuit has finally, quietly, begun to close.
The first morning of the pilot, the estate feels subtly occupied, like a house that’s let out its spare rooms to a particularly energetic invading army. Cables snake across gravel that was raked into perfect lines at dawn; runners with headsets dart between vans and urns of tea, murmuring into clipboards; a drone whines irritably above the lime avenue, worrying the rooks. Someone has gaffer‑taped a “QUIET PLEASE – FILMING” sign to a door that has survived three wars and several Ashdown scandals.
Ben moves through it all in his scuffed Barbour like an unofficial marshal, half‑contractor, half‑sheepdog. One minute he’s talking line‑of‑sight and charging points with the camera team, the next he’s explaining to a furious gardener why the herbaceous border must, for reasons known only to the director, be walked past “naturally” at ten forty‑three and again at ten fifty‑one. He translates as he goes, crew jargon into grounds‑staff English and back again, aware that both sides suspect the other of madness.
Rowan, notebook in hand, keeps to the edges at first, watching a producer stage “spontaneous” shots of gardeners trimming already‑perfect topiary. Every “could you just do that again, but as if it’s the first time” makes her stomach knot. A junior researcher, fresh‑faced and already harassed, sidles up and asks if there’s “any wording about, like, ethics or something” they should be aware of before they start pointing cameras at tenants. The casual “like” is what tips her from observation into action.
Back in the stable‑block office, door closed against the hum, she opens a blank document and begins. A one‑page note: consent, power dynamics, the difference between atmosphere and exploitation. She keeps it measured, almost blandly practical (bullet points, no footnotes, nothing to frighten the horses) but her hand still shakes slightly as she prints it, ink smelling faintly of all the seminars where people nodded and did nothing afterwards. Here, she thinks, there is at least the chance it might change the angle of a lens.
The production office has the air of a command centre designed by a lifestyle brand. Mood boards lean against filing cabinets; a ring light glows accusingly in one corner. Rowan pauses on the threshold, her one‑page note feeling absurdly flimsy in a room papered with budgets and storyboards.
Keira, perched on the edge of a desk, is describing the show as “real people with real countryside problems” to a sponsor rep who keeps saying “authenticity” as if it’s a fragrance note. A senior producer hovers over a laminated floor plan of the estate, circling rooms and scribbling “INTIMATE CHAT?,” “CRYING?” in the margins.
Rowan aims for minimal disturbance, offering her document to a passing assistant with an apologetic smile. “Just a quick thing on consent and expectations,” she murmurs, already braced for it to vanish beneath a tide of risk assessments.
Ben shoulders the door open with a tray of coffees at that exact moment, half listening to Keira, half counting mugs. Out of habit he scans the page as the assistant sets it down. Her phrasing is unmistakable: calm, pre‑emptive, turning potential arguments into shared responsibilities. It’s not polemic; it’s scaffolding.
He doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t ask permission. While the assistant rummages for highlighters, he slides the sheet free and tucks it smoothly into the stapled pack of safety protocols and call sheets waiting for the afternoon briefing. By the time the assistant looks back, the stack is already clipped and labelled.
As Ben steps out into the corridor, he passes the internal window. Rowan, still by the door, has clearly watched the whole manoeuvre. Their eyes meet; he gives the smallest lift of one shoulder, half‑shrug, half‑salute. She huffs out a breath that’s almost a laugh, something unknotted in it, and inclines her head in acknowledgement.
It feels, to Ben, like a retroactive amendment to a very old argument: this time, he has her back before anyone starts talking.
The afternoon briefing has barely broken up when one of the location scouts waylays Ben by the laminated estate map, radiating the caffeinated zeal of someone who thinks they’ve discovered penicillin. They’re talking about “texture” and “backstory,” about needing something “a bit raw, a bit unpolished: a forgotten building that really symbolises the hidden heart of the place.” Jabbing at a tablet, the scout flicks through thumbnails of barns and outbuildings until their finger stills on the derelict bothy at the edge of the woods: the place where, two lifetimes ago, Ben and Rowan ducked in out of a storm and kissed until the rest of Ashford Ley blurred. “This is perfect,” the scout crows. “You can practically feel the teenage angst.” Ben inhales to stall just as Rowan, summoned for “local colour,” steps in beside him and catches sight of the screen. For a beat, the briefing room’s babble recedes; it’s only damp stone, the drum of rain on rotten tiles, her cold hands under his jacket, the raw, metallic taste of impending goodbye. Then, in rare, seamless tandem, they both say, “No,” with such unambiguous finality that the scout actually flinches.
They marshal practical objections, structural safety, insurance, access, but the no carries a different voltage beneath it, one the scout registers as vaguely “vibe‑y” without grasping why. When pressed, Rowan adds that local teenagers use the bothy as an unofficial refuge and haven’t consented to having their hiding place turned into primetime scenery; Ben folds in a remark about liability and the risk of copycat trespass if the show romanticises it. The producer grumbles about losing “an absolute gift of a location,” then shrugs, already eyeing the chapel on the map. As the cluster thins, Ben and Rowan keep their gazes elsewhere, as if eye contact might conjure damp stone, clumsy hands, and the ache of that first parting. Only later, when drizzle slows the schedule and everyone scatters for cover, does the shared, unsaid memory between them expand into the spaces the cameras can’t reach.
They drift into the walled garden almost by accident, Ben ducking through the arch to take a call from a London client irritated about delayed install dates, Rowan following the sound of retreating footsteps to escape a cameraman scouting “moody rain shots.” The glasshouse panes rattle with the weather; cold seeps up through the cracked flags. For a while they just share damp air and competing rings: his phone buzzing with rescheduled site visits and questions about fibre trenching, hers vibrating with a terse email from her department chair about “maintaining international visibility” and upcoming funding cycles. Work talk begins as mutual venting, then slides, inexorably, into logistics: his key contracts clustered around the M25 and a possible expansion into Surrey, her next likely fieldwork grant tied to a university in Canada or an institute in Berlin. They lay out timelines the way they used to plot escape routes on pub napkins. Only now the edges are visas, mortgage terms, sabbatical clauses and non‑compete agreements. When the rain intensifies and the signal drops, the garden falls abruptly quiet, the world reduced to wet brick, dripping vine, their breath clouding the air. In that silence, the shape of the problem becomes undeniable: every small tenderness between them is snagged on structures that will not politely rearrange themselves. Neither of them reaches for the neat, selfless answer; instead they stand, close but not touching, each privately reckoning with the risk that choosing each other could mean unpicking the lives they have so painstakingly assembled, and that not choosing each other might be a slower, quieter kind of ruin.
The next morning, the production schedule tightens like a noose. Call sheets bristle with highlighter; someone’s taped an updated version to the kitchen Aga, as if the house staff might cook it into compliance. Keira’s showrunner announces a “golden hour” sequence in the chapel, his voice pitched to suggest that the sun itself has signed a contract, and within minutes the crew is dragging in rigs, unloading stands, and taping over worn flagstones with fluorescent gaffer like they’re marking out a crime scene.
Ben watches a dolly track snake towards the chancel and does a quick mental overlay of cable runs, emergency exits, and the route the fire officer insisted must never be blocked. When an assistant suggests moving a seventeenth‑century lectern for a better shot, “Just a nudge, we’ll put it back, promise”, Tamsin arrives almost at a run, rain on her trench and laptop still open in one hand. Her voice stays low but he can hear the tremor as she informs them the lectern is on a conservation register, insured for more than the entire daily shooting budget, and absolutely not going anywhere.
What follows is not quite a row (no one raises their voice) but the temperature in the chapel drops a degree. The showrunner talks about “making the space work harder.” Keira, arriving in a cocoon of makeup and padded jacket, translates every boundary as “flexibility issues” and “old‑fashioned thinking.” On a tinny speakerphone, the heritage consultant reminds them, with bureaucratic precision, that any unauthorised movement could invalidate grants and shutter future approvals. A camera operator mutters about losing light; the gaffer checks his watch.
Ben hovers at the edge with his tablet, recalculating power loads and Wi‑Fi coverage as the plan mutates in real time. Every extra cable strung through a doorway is another circuit to test, another trip hazard to mitigate, another invoice line he can technically justify. It is also one more reason for the estate office to resent him: the local lad turned contractor who appears, from certain angles, to be helping sell the place by the metre. He catches Tamsin’s eye once, brief and flinty; he can’t tell if she’s asking him to hold the line or speed things up. Either way, he feels the pressure ratchet another notch, the house itself bristling around them like a cat forced into a costume.
By midday, the minor skirmishes have knitted themselves into a full logistical snarl. A wedding‑style dinner scene in the long gallery overruns, the “bride” locked in an endless sequence of toasts while grips rearrange candelabra by the millimetre. The gallery door to the tiny server room disappears behind a barricade of cameras and floral arches just as one of Ben’s London clients is expecting a live demo. After a fruitless attempt to negotiate with a second assistant director wielding a call sheet like scripture, he ends up in a draughty back corridor, laptop balanced on a sloping windowsill, hotspot perched on a radiator that may or may not be original to George III. A sound engineer keeps shushing him between takes; his client keeps asking if this level of chaos is “standard” for their support. By the time he emerges, neck stiff and temper frayed, Keira is waiting with a practised pout and a bulleted list of “tiny tweaks”, extra routers for the bridal suite set, concealed outlets in a Grade II‑listed wall, a hard‑wired line into the chapel, each one framed as barely a favour. She leans in, perfume and camera‑ready concern close to his ear, reminding him that if the show gets picked up, Ashdown could be his flagship case study, the glossy portfolio piece that unlocks a dozen other estates. He feels the old, familiar tug between the short‑term hit of saying yes and the slower, more radioactive fallout of cutting corners in a house where every modification requires a form in triplicate and will be remembered, with names attached, for decades.
Rowan, meanwhile, finds herself abruptly, disconcertingly visible. In the hum of the converted stable block, a junior producer with a sociology degree and nervous enthusiasm clocks her name on a lanyard, half‑remembers a citation from a seminar, and is already scrolling through her faculty profile before she’s finished stirring her tea. Within an hour she’s been spirited to a corner table and presented to the series’ “story team” as a potential on‑screen authority on “modern class narratives” and “how places like this are evolving.”
They frame it as a collaboration: a few incisive, “accessible” soundbites about the reinvention of the country house, a lower‑third credit, a link to her forthcoming book. The language strokes precisely the sore spots she works hard to ignore. Those late‑night jolts of impostor syndrome, the creeping dread that a year off‑campus will make her professionally invisible. But threading through the compliments she hears the quieter, more compromising desire: not analysis, exactly, but a scholarly patina over a pre‑written fantasy.
When she asks, as lightly as she can, about how her words will be edited (whether she’ll see rushes, approve cuts) the answer is a charming shrug, a joke about lawyers and “network notes”, and a reminder that television “has its own rhythms.”
By late afternoon, every minor mishap feels like a portent rather than a glitch. An electrician, taking Keira’s breezy “We’ll sort permissions later” as licence rather than bravado, opens up a panel that hides pre‑war wiring; the power surges, drops, and with it a live feed and half the chapel’s carefully plotted mood. Somewhere behind a closed oak door, Tamsin and the location manager conduct what Ben privately labels a diplomatic crisis summit. Rumour seeps back faster than email: the diocesan officer has already seen an over‑filtered chapel shot on Instagram and is “concerned,” a word that in this world means letters, inspections, possibly withheld grants. Damage‑limitation calls begin before anyone officially admits there is damage.
In the estate office, Rowan’s laptop pings with an altogether different threat. Another clipped message from her department chair, this one headed “Promotion cycle timelines,” asks for “a clear schedule for delivery” and wonders, in carefully neutral prose, whether her sabbatical “remains on track.” She rereads the lines twice, the academic euphemisms translating in her head to: Where are the pages? Are you drifting? Around her, Ben’s laminated floor plans and risk assessments are spread like a second, more literal scholarship application, routes, contingencies, exit strategies. For a moment she has the disorienting sense that Ashdown has shifted under her feet: no longer a controlled fieldsite, a romantic, finite detour, but a knot of obligations tightening around her, threads she is no longer certain she will be able, or willing, simply to cut.
By dusk, the house feels overrun yet oddly airless, as if the corridors themselves are holding their breath. Catering staff squeeze past camera operators in the service passageways, retreat attendees mutter about having become unpaid extras in their own seminars, and Tamsin’s replies to Keira’s “quick favours” turn clipped and formal, timestamps drifting further past her theoretical finish time.
Ben intercepts Rowan in the narrow shadow of the back staircase, where the smell of floor polish and old stone is stronger than any perfume. He’s staring at a voicemail notification: one of his bigger clients, voice already icy, threatening penalties if Ashdown keeps pushing his installations off the schedule. Rowan’s phone screen shows a polite but insistent producer’s follow‑up, asking whether she’s “given any more thought” to doing a talking‑heads segment to “contextualise” the series.
They swap a wry, exhausted look that contains more conversation than they have energy for: an entire Venn diagram of obligations, overlapping precisely here. The estate’s precarity, Keira’s expanding narrative gravity, his contractual deadlines, her academic ones: all of it converging on this house, and, unhelpfully, on them.
Before either can say something honest or reckless, a runner barrels in, headset askew, announcing that a valuable clock has gone missing from a side room used for B‑roll. The words “antique,” “insured,” and “inventory” ripple through the corridor like a change in air pressure. Collective tension spikes; Tamsin materialises long enough to call an emergency meeting in the office, her expression the brittle calm of someone adding one more catastrophe to an already colour‑coded list.
Ben and Rowan are swept back into crisis mode: him recalculating access routes for security cameras and insurance assessors, her watching the narrative of “trouble at Ashdown” assemble itself in producers’ eyes. By the time they sit down at the makeshift conference table, the pressure that has been building all day has ceased to feel exceptional; it folds, almost seamlessly, into the new, untenable rhythm of Ashdown, where every hour now seems to contain a small emergency and a larger, unnamed reckoning.
The emergency meeting over the missing clock drags late into the evening, the kind of slow, grinding ordeal that leaves tempers frayed not by shouting but by endless, careful phrases. By the time Tamsin dismisses them, everyone looks a shade paler in the fluorescent light: producers with their smiles calcified, junior staff blinking like owls, the Ashdown cousins wearing that particular family expression which means, “We will not panic in front of strangers, however much we wish to.”
Ben’s head is full of numbers, replacement values, excesses, the hours already stolen from his installation schedule, when he realises he hasn’t actually breathed properly in about twenty minutes. Chairs scrape back; laptops snap shut; a polite murmur of “We’ll regroup in the morning” circulates like a closing prayer.
Rowan escapes first, or tries to. He catches sight of her by a side door off the service corridor, half in shadow, wrestling an uncooperative sleeve. Her coat hangs from one shoulder, the other arm caught halfway, her fingers clumsy with tiredness and the fine tremor of adrenaline ebbing.
“Here,” he says, already stepping closer before he’s decided whether that’s wise. “You’re losing the fight.”
“It’s winning on points,” she mutters, but doesn’t pull away when he straightens the collar and guides her hand through the lining. For one absurd, intimate second he is twenty again, helping her into his battered leather jacket outside this same door, rain coming in sideways and both of them convinced the world was about to start.
They don’t discuss where they’re going. There’s no conspiratorial glance, no plan. He simply pushes the heavy door open, feels the cold night reach for them, and she steps through as if they have always done this: out, away, up.
The floodlit façade throws their shadows long across the gravel, then lets them go. Once past the last security light, the dark closes in soft and total, broken only by a dilute wash of stars and the sodium haze hovering over the distant village. Their boots find the old track almost by muscle memory, scuffing at the edge of the fields where the grass turns to rougher ground.
Behind them, Ashdown hums and clanks, generators, distant voices, the faint metallic echo of someone moving equipment too late. Ahead, the slope rises, hedges breathing out the day’s stored damp. Each step lifts them a little further from the house’s nervous brightness until its noise is a muted throb at their backs and the quiet of the valley moves around them, not empty but full: wet earth, sheep shifting somewhere unseen, a lone owl testing the air.
Rowan shoves her hands into her pockets as if to keep them from reaching for anything stupid, like his. “I should be writing,” she says after a while, not quite to him. “Instead of, ”
“Playing truant?” he offers.
“Being an extra,” she corrects, but there’s a flicker of agreement in it.
He lets that sit. The climb pulls at his calves, reminds him he has spent too many recent evenings hunched over laptops in service corridors instead of out here. The cold needles his lungs in a way that feels almost medicinal, scraping the meeting’s stale air from them.
They walk in a companionable, taut silence, the kind that isn’t empty so much as overloaded, both of them aware that words are waiting just ahead with the trees.
At The Crown, the beeches rise darker and higher than they remember, trunks pale as bone in the starlight, branches knitting a canopy that turns the sky into a low, breathing ceiling. Below, Ashdown is reduced to a child’s arrangement of rectangles and pinpricks, the house washed in sodium orange so artificial it might as well be a set they’ve both wandered off.
They stand shoulder to shoulder, catching the last of the climb in their lungs, and the thin scaffolding of small talk about generators, timetables and insurance excesses collapses almost at once. The quiet here is different from the house’s: less absence than permission.
“Last time we were up here,” Rowan says, nodding toward the toy‑sized avenue of limes, “I swore I’d never come back.”
She makes it sound almost offhand, as if referring to a bad pub rather than an entire life. The words settle between them anyway.
Ben huffs out a breath that is not quite a laugh. “I swore I would,” he says. “But only as a success story. Not as (” he glances down at his muddy boots “) this.”
The old divergence between them, one leaving, one staying to outgrow the place, feels suddenly close enough to touch; an invisible seam running from the valley lights up through their joined shadows, waiting for someone reckless enough to press a thumb to it.
He does press, because not touching it has stopped working.
They circle back, at last, to the night everything slipped. The rushed acceptance email, her half‑packed suitcase under the bed, his certainty that they had time to discuss it properly because surely you didn’t just leave a whole life between Tuesday and Friday.
Rowan’s voice comes out level, if too careful. She explains that she did it fast on purpose: that another week of walking past his van on the green, of seeing his tools by the back door, would have undone her. That she made herself believe he’d be safer furious than half‑hopeful, checking flight prices and promising he’d follow.
Ben, gaze fixed on the dark slope, admits he did read those early emails (once) before deleting the lot. Not because he didn’t care, but because typing any reply made it obvious he was going nowhere that sounded like a story without her, and he couldn’t bear seeing that truth in writing.
The honesty shakes loose other, deeper worries. Rowan admits that a fortnight back in Ashford Ley and people are already filing her under parts she thought she’d shed: dutiful daughter popping to the shop, the quirky professor wheeled out to “see both sides.” If she roots herself here, if she roots herself with him, will she be absorbed into Ashdown’s narrative instead of authoring her own? Ben counters with the dread that no number of zeroes on an invoice, no consultancy title, will ever outweigh the boy who fixed routers and unblocked drains; that the Ashdowns, Keira, half his clients, will always hear a tradesman when he speaks. When they finally lean in toward each other, the movement is almost defensive, an instinctive attempt to bridge shared shame as much as to answer desire.
His fingers have just brushed the warmth beneath her ear, her breath a fraction of an inch from his, when his phone saws through the dark with a vulgar little jangle. Tamsin’s name glows up at him like duty in sans‑serif. He hesitates, one heartbeat, two, then answers, listening to her clipped account of a burst pipe threatening the pilot’s lighting rig. By the time he’s promised to be right down, apology has already settled in his shoulders. The charge between them diffuses into something taut and awkward. They fall into step, then out of it, and end up taking different lines down the hill: same destination, separate paths. The almost‑kiss hangs there, an unfinished sentence, proof that work, class and old stories still claim first refusal on whatever this might be.
In the days that follow, the almost‑kiss files itself away with everything else they’re not quite talking about. It sits there, humming faintly between them while life at Ashdown pelts them with more immediate emergencies: a faulty router mid‑presentation, a last‑minute keynote speaker stranded at Kemble, a camera drone that refuses to charge.
Ben’s evenings become a kind of split‑screen. Physically, he is often near Rowan: sharing a bench in the walled garden while she edits notes, trading dry commentary at the back of the barn during an overlong plenary, walking her back toward the village beneath a sky the colour of dishwater. Mentally, his attention keeps glitching to the rectangle of light in his hand. Tamsin’s messages arrive in clipped bullet points (budgets, permissions, a new email from Legal) while Keira’s pings are all urgency and exclamation marks.
We need to ride this wave, B x
Momentum is EVERYTHING
Are you free five mins to brainstorm “our” arc??
He thumbs replies with his jaw tight, telling himself this is the work. The more polished the pilot looks, the better his case for a long‑term contract, the safer the estate, the easier Tamsin can breathe. Somewhere circling all of that, less neatly articulated, is the thought that if his name trends alongside Keira’s, certain doors stop creaking when he pushes them.
One afternoon, after a tech walkthrough of the stables set, Keira manoeuvres him into a strip of flattering light by the barn doors. “Hold still,” she says, already angling her phone. Before he can protest, her arm is hooked around his shoulders, her perfume a clean, expensive citrus cutting through the smell of cables and dust. The shutter clicks three times.
“For the fans,” she declares, checking the screen. “Trust me, you’ll thank me later.”
He manages a laugh that lands somewhere between flattered and cornered, and doesn’t quite step out of her reach. It’s publicity, he tells himself as she posts it on the spot. It’s harmless. It’s strategic. It’s not, in any meaningful way, about him.
Across the courtyard, he spots Rowan coming out of the conference room with a sheaf of papers and an absent frown. For no sensible reason at all, he slides his phone into his pocket and pretends it hasn’t just buzzed with the first delighted comments.
The photo lands on Keira’s feed that night in a flurry of curated enthusiasm, slotted between a flat‑lay of tweed and a boomerang of champagne flutes catching fairy lights. Within minutes it sprouts a constellation of siblings: behind‑the‑scenes clips in which Ben is never quite the subject but never entirely background either. There he is, leaning over her laptop, forearm braced on the table, talking her through a latency graph while she swings the camera round to catch his profile. There he is again, gesturing at a cable run, lips moving in some tedious explanation, while she grins into the lens and captions it:
couldn’t do this without him 💫 #reunion #dreamteam
More follow: a over‑the‑shoulder shot of him checking a monitor (“shared vision in action”), a slow pan of the barn with his silhouette at her side (“some projects are just meant to be”).
Crew members pile into the comments with wink emojis and ship‑names; a junior camera op tags it #Benira, which promptly acquires a life of its own.
Rowan encounters the whole thing indirectly, on the Old Forge’s communal iPad: a media account has reposted the most flattering image under the headline LOCAL HERO HELPS TV QUEEN GO RURAL. She passes it back to the barista with a dry, “Ashford Ley’s answer to a royal engagement, apparently,” and earns a laugh, a raised eyebrow about invitations. It’s only when she returns to her corner table, coffee cooling by her notebook, that she realises she’s reopened the post on her own phone and zoomed straight in on Ben’s face, ignoring the woman in the foreground.
In production briefings, the language shifts almost imperceptibly, like the thermostat nudging up a degree. Keira introduces him as “our tech genius and my secret weapon,” the phrase landing with a deliberately proprietary lilt that no one thinks (or dares) to challenge. A junior producer, eyes bright with imagined viewing figures, wonders aloud if they should build a “second‑chance romance” beat into the sizzle reel; another laughs that “the audience will do it for us, trust me.”
Ben, cheeks hot, mutters that they’re just old friends and business partners, emphasis on the plural, but he doesn’t push harder, especially when the showrunner leans forward and says an exclusive contract with his firm is “exactly the synergy we’re after” and “great for your profile, Ben: ours too.”
Rowan stares at the headline’s faux‑breezy tone until the words blur, her fingers hovering over the trackpad as if academic detachment might be a matter of manual dexterity. She dutifully annotates phrases like “chemistry you can’t fake” and “authentic country couple vibes,” then closes the tab half a beat too late. Sleep is fitful; in the morning, the chair’s email reads like a politely worded exit strategy, as if the village, the estate, Ben himself were a distraction she ought to tidy away along with her field notes.
Ben, meanwhile, is juggling emergency repairs, Keira’s deadlines, and Tamsin’s spreadsheets, sleeping badly and living on coffee. His inbox is a mosaic of crises: a furious bride about a generator test, a corporate client querying bandwidth guarantees, Keira’s assistant demanding “spontaneous” golden‑hour shots. Every time he resolves to tell Keira to tone down the innuendo or to talk frankly with Rowan about the online speculation, something derails him: a blown fuse in the guest wing, a last‑minute change to a filming schedule, a call from his accountant about cash flow that makes his throat go dry. He keeps reassuring Rowan in passing that he’ll “sort the optics” and insists to himself that any discomfort is temporary. Once the contracts are signed and the estate stabilised, he can set boundaries properly, redraw the lines, explain. But with every reposted image, every meeting where Keira speaks of him as if he’s already in her pocket, every academic email nudging Rowan toward elsewhere, another quiet assumption hardens into fact in other people’s minds, laying down the invisible foundations for the rupture neither of them quite believes is coming and that he is, brick by brick, too busy to see.
The summit begins tensely but formally, with the particular stiffness that comes when everyone suspects something unpleasant may be hiding behind the word “strategic.”
The long room in the converted stable block smells faintly of old hay beneath the fresh paint and hired coffee urns. Folding chairs, hired for the occasion, have been set in disciplined rows. A portable projector hums on the table beside Ben, its beam slightly skewed on the whitewashed wall so that Tamsin’s title slide is leaning uphill, determinedly dignified.
Tamsin stands at the front in a navy blouse and trousers that signal both business and “not trying too hard.” She holds a clicker like a weapon. Her voice is clipped, school‑governor clear as she guides the small crowd of trustees, local councillors and key staff through bullet points on “Phased Infrastructure Modernisation” and “Targeted Heritage‑Aligned Partnerships.”
Ben, running mostly on adrenaline and indifferent instant coffee, sits near the projector with his laptop open to spreadsheets and wiring diagrams. His company logo glows discreetly in the corner of the Ashdown crest on the slide; he tries not to feel ridiculous pride about that. He scrolls through his own notes reassuring himself that this is the serious, grown‑up meeting where they finally agree a realistic plan, not another round of aristocratic hand‑wringing.
He can feel the room’s attention wax and wane: the older trustee in tweed brightening at the phrase “grant eligibility,” the young parish councillor covertly checking her phone, the housekeeper frowning at a bullet point about “temporary disruption to guest corridors.”
Rowan is three chairs along, notebook open, pen poised. From the corner of his eye he catches the familiar crease between her brows as she listens, the way she worries at her lower lip when something doesn’t quite add up. She isn’t looking at him. This, he tells himself, is good. Professional. Clean.
Tamsin clicks to a projected Gantt chart. “So, as you can see,” she says, “if we confirm Ben’s team for Phase One this quarter, we can have essential works completed before the main summer season without…dramatic measures.”
Ben nods, perhaps a fraction too emphatically, and adds, “We’ve modelled three scenarios on cost and disruption. None of them involve turning the house into a circus.”
A faint ripple of relieved laughter. Even Tamsin’s mouth twitches. The words are aimed at the trustees who have been muttering about television offers, but he’s aware they also land somewhere near Rowan, whose pen has paused.
For the first time in years, he feels almost anchored here: his slides, his figures, his expertise forming a neat grid over the sprawling anxieties of Ashdown Court.
They are, he thinks, just about getting away with it when, fifteen minutes in, the double doors bang open.
Keira doesn’t so much enter as happen to the room.
The double doors fling back on a gust of colder air and she sweeps through in cream cashmere and immaculate suede boots that have clearly never met actual mud. Behind her, a small army pours in: sound techs unspooling cables, a cameraman already panning across the rows of folding chairs, a runner distributing sleek bottles with her logo where the village hall’s tap water used to be.
“Darling, you’ve started without me,” she says, kissing the air somewhere in the region of Tamsin’s cheek without quite decelerating. “I am so, so sorry (utterly my fault) we’ve just wrapped the most divine little segment in the walled garden, you are going to die when you see the light.”
Ben’s hand tightens on his laptop mouse as a second projector is magicked onto the table, its cable nudged into the socket beside his own. Keira is already gesturing to her producer, who plugs in a sleek silver device with practised entitlement.
“Shall we just pop my deck up for context?” she says brightly, not waiting for an answer as Tamsin’s Gantt chart winks away.
The atmosphere tilts, almost visibly, as Keira’s sizzle reel floods the room. Tamsin’s sober bullet points are replaced by syrupy drone shots of Ashdown Court at golden hour, lawns impossibly green, stone turned to honey. Slow‑motion footage of invented champagne receptions and laughing “guests” glides past, intercut with mock‑ups of candlelit dinners and yoga on the terrace, all stamped with a glossy new logo: “Ashdown: Modern Heritage, Modern Hearts.”
Keira’s voice pours over it, warm and perfectly modulated. She sketches a multi‑season “docu‑reality experience” following “the real lives and loves” of the estate as it “reinvents itself for a new generation,” promising international syndication, product tie‑ins, influencer residencies, and a revenue stream so dazzling that Ben can feel the trustees’ attention sliding away from Tamsin’s careful charts like oil off glass.
Mid‑flow, Keira clicks to a slide plastered with Ben’s logo: blown up, branded, welded onto images of sleek control rooms and improbably rustic cottages glowing with discreet screens. She announces, to a little chorus of impressed oohs, that his company will be the exclusive tech partner “bringing twenty‑first‑century smart luxury to three hundred years of history.” Ben’s stomach drops. This is not the cautious, back‑of‑envelope talk they’d had over lukewarm coffee in Tamsin’s office; this is fait accompli, in 4K. With two cameras trained on his face and the trustees leaning forward like an audience at a proposal, he manages only a strained half‑smile and a noncommittal nod, feeling the room seize on his hesitation as wholehearted assent while, beside him, Tamsin’s pen stills above her notebook, knuckles whitening.
She feels the atmosphere swell, predator‑sure, and steps from the lectern as if drawn by instinct, silk and cashmere gliding. Her arm snakes through Ben’s before he can sidestep, angling his body towards the key camera. Laughing, she turns them into a tableau. “And of course Ben is already basically family,” she trills, giving his forearm a fond squeeze calibrated for maximum zoom. “Old sparks, new setting. Utter catnip for our international audience.” The crew whoop on cue; someone whistles. “Can I get a hero two‑shot, please?” the director calls, edging nearer. Ben feels the heat of lenses on his skin, the trustees’ expectant smiles hardening around them like wet plaster. Out near the back, Rowan, who had been quietly annotating the printed agenda, stills as the boom mic swings, the camera widening to frame “the room.” For a startled heartbeat her expression is completely uncomposed. Then her gaze jerks down, pen moving in small, pointless loops, while beside her Tamsin watches the staging with a tightened mouth, calculating and appalled as she understands that Keira has just written their future in public, in pixels, before any of them signed a thing.
Her first instinct is to slam the laptop shut, as if she’s just walked in on something indecent. Instead she sits down on the edge of the single bed, the old box‑sprung mattress giving its familiar little complaint, and watches herself become incidental.
The clip auto‑plays, sound blaring before she can fumble the volume down. A shaky caption (“when ur temp job turns into a romcom!!”) bounces over the screen. The runner’s breathless commentary jitters on the audio: “Omg guys look at this, Keira and her ex or whatever, it’s like a film.” Keira’s laugh rings out, bright and stage‑perfect; Ben’s follows half a beat late, the tiny delay no algorithm will ever notice.
The view count ticks upwards in real time. Comments stack themselves like rubble:
omg this is the content i signed up for
Country Emma + Tech Mr Darcy!!
he can reboot my estate any time
Someone has clipped a freeze‑frame of Keira pressing her head briefly against Ben’s shoulder, overlaying it with sparkles. Another has zoomed in on the Ashdown crest in the background and started a conspiracy thread about secret engagements and aristocratic come‑ups. Beneath it, a lone, earnest user writes, “Anyone else worried this will totally wreck the local community?” and is promptly buried under eye‑roll emojis.
Rowan scrolls, nausea coming in slow waves. There she is again, in a repost from a gossip account. Just a smudge at the table’s end, head bent over the agenda. “Is that the help making notes?” someone asks, and the chorus answers: probably! lol / get that bread, hun / background NPC vibes.
She backs out of the tab and the browser, helpful as ever, serves up more suggested content: a thumbnail of Keira in soft focus, captioned “Home is where your story begins,” Ashdown’s façade glowing behind her; a teaser article promising an inside look at “the brains behind Keira’s country tech empire,” with Ben’s name misspelled but bolded all the same.
Rowan’s cursor hovers over the notification from her university, “Change to Sabbatical Terms”, glowing insistently at the top of the inbox. For a long moment she stares at the subject line while, in a minimised window off to the side, the paused frame of Keira and Ben waits, one click away from springing back into motion.
Curiosity and dread knotting together, she clicks anyway. The runner’s Instagram story has been clipped, filtered, captioned in bouncing pink text: “accidentally filmed a proposal???” Swipe, and the entertainment blogs have already metabolised it. Side‑by‑side paparazzi shots of Keira in red‑carpet gowns and Ben in badly lit conference photos, ringed with animated hearts and headlines about “Ashdown’s real‑life fairytale” and “From Village Lad to Country King.” One piece helpfully embeds a still of the exact moment Keira jokes that Ben is “basically family,” freezing his half‑smile in place. The camera’s pan is just wide enough that Rowan appears at the edge of the frame, mouth parted, eyes raw with surprise before her head ducks. In the comments, people debate wedding venues and “heritage chic” ceremony aesthetics, trading Pinterest boards for barns with chandeliers. No one mentions the woman in the background with the notebook, until one user types, “lol the help is like ‘not paid enough for this,’” earning a stack of crying‑with‑laughter reactions and a reply thread of maid and secretary memes.
The algorithm, thrilled, keeps feeding her more: Keira’s polished grid posts about “coming home to my roots,” a boomerang of champagne flutes clinking in the Ashdown drawing room, Ben half‑visible over her shoulder, his profile tagged with a heart.
Her email pings, a discreet blue banner sliding into the corner of the screen as if the universe has decided to send formal correspondence about her own redundancy. Latching onto the distraction, she switches tabs and opens the message from her department. The first paragraphs are all institutional cotton wool each phrase politely erasing the stretch of time she thought she still possessed. Then, halfway down, the tone pivots. The dean is suddenly “delighted,” “thrilled” to offer her a newly endowed chair at a prestigious overseas university: salary, research budget, graduate assistants, the whole gleaming package. The conditions arrive in the next breath. She must confirm relocation within the month and deliver the Ashdown manuscript to their press as the inaugural title in a new “Global Heritage Futures” series. “Your work on contemporary country house identities would be a perfect flagship project,” the dean enthuses, adding a brisk line about how fortunate it is that she “has access to such rich material on site.”
She lets the cursor blink over “Reply,” doing its small semaphore of inevitability. Around her, the room has the curated poverty of a museum exhibit: childhood trophies, sixth‑form essays, a bookshelf sagging with borrowed theory. Everything insists on her origins even as the email points outward, promising citation, panels, a life of airport lounges. Onscreen, Keira’s captions about “writing our next chapter” pulse beside draft chapter headings on performance and belonging, the juxtaposition almost parodic. Rowan feels, with the clinical detachment she usually reserves for interview transcripts, the exact moment hypothesis hardens into conclusion: the clever girl archives the myth; the beautiful couple live it.
Her pulse, perversely steady, seems to accept the verdict before her mind does. Even the offer’s flattery curdles: they don’t want her to belong here, only to interpret here. Return the gaze, bind it in footnotes, ship it abroad. Onscreen, Keira’s champagne flickers; in her inbox, the dean’s delight glows. Rowan breathes once, twice, and understands: departure isn’t escape this time, merely compliance.
The confrontation doesn’t begin with shouting but with Rowan’s flat, controlled “We need to talk,” the words catching Ben just as he’s nudging the office door shut with his shoulder, a stack of draft contracts sliding in his grip. He almost drops them. His mind is still on line items and contingencies; hers, very obviously, is elsewhere.
The corridor feels half‑unfinished, half‑museum: one wall lined with stern Ashdown faces in gilt frames, the other interrupted by emergency lighting, a fire extinguisher, a laminated health‑and‑safety notice for the crew curling at the corners. Above them, a sensor‑strip light flickers faintly, buzzing like an irritated wasp. The floor bears the ghosts of other uses: scratches from trolleys, a pale rectangle where some ancestral umbrella stand once stood. It smells faintly of printer toner and beeswax.
Out in the courtyard, someone laughs too loudly; a director calls for a backup battery; a runner jogs past the end of the corridor, headset flashing. The spill of white light from a camera truck turns the open doorway into a glare and throws their shadows long and distorted across the scuffed boards, making Ben look taller, Rowan narrower, as if even the building is stretching them into caricature.
Rowan stands between him and the stairs, feet planted, arms folded tight across her chest as if she’s holding herself together by main force. Her cheeks are still unevenly flushed from the cold outside and the heat of humiliation within. Her eyes, usually distant in thought or quick with some sideways joke, are bright in a new, hard way. A few strands of hair have slipped from her knot and catch the corridor light like fine wire. He notices all this in a rush, alongside the incongruous detail of ink on her thumb from whatever notes she was taking before the meeting detonated.
He has just seen the same footage she has on a producer’s monitor in the barn: Keira radiant, declarative; himself, half‑smiling, non‑committal; Rowan in the background, her hurt and shock instantly legible even on a tiny playback screen. Ben had looked away before the clip looped. From Rowan’s expression now, she watched it all the way through.
“How long have you known you were back with her?” she asks.
There’s no quaver, no theatrics. Just a brittle, almost academic curiosity, as if she’s testing a hypothesis she already knows she’ll have to reject. He feels the question more than hears it, a small detonation in the stale office‑corridor air.
“I’m not ‘back’ with Keira,” he says, too quickly. “What she said in the barn. That was for the cameras. It wasn’t in any of the treatments.” The words sound reasonable in his own ears, contractual, tidy.
Rowan’s jaw tightens; a pulse jumps in her cheek. “Right. Improvised. Like jazz.” She doesn’t let him breathe before the next question: if it was a lie, then why had he stood there and let the crew keep rolling while Keira angled herself into him, calling him “already basically family” as though the past decade were a rehearsal?
He drags a hand over his face. The day’s weight pulls at his shoulders, makes his answer come out mud‑thick: challenging Keira, on‑mic, in front of investors and Ashdowns, would have torched weeks of negotiation. In his head: grant deadlines, cash‑flow models, structural surveys. In hers, his pragmatism slides neatly into an old template: a man calling cowardice “timing,” complicity “strategy.”
The conversation doesn’t so much leap as ratchet up, one notch, then another. Rowan’s composure goes first. “Staying quiet when someone lies about you isn’t neutrality, Ben. It’s consent.” The word rings in the narrow space. “You stood there and let her turn our history into B‑roll. I became local colour in Keira’s origin story.”
He feels himself stiffen. “I’m not playing along, I’m being strategic,” he says, hearing how boardroom it sounds even as it leaves his mouth. “This isn’t just Keira’s circus. It keeps the roof on, keeps people paid. That matters.”
Her laugh is short, incredulous. “Strategic. Of course.” He sees, too late, the way the word slots into everything she’s been writing about: tasteful half‑truths, heritage‑branded euphemisms. “You sound exactly like them.”
Something hot and raw snaps in him. “And you don’t sound like an observer, you sound like you came looking for betrayal because it’ll make a cracking chapter.” Her eyes flare. He barrels on, reckless. “You’ve been taking notes on all of us since you got back. What did you expect tonight. Authentic local pain for the conclusion?”
Her mouth tightens, hurt flaring into fury. For a beat, neither of them is talking about cameras or contracts but about the older, untidier ledger between them: the trip he never took to see her in the States, the letter she never sent explaining why she left when she did. He hears himself say he never understood how she could disappear overnight; she hears herself admit, in a voice she doesn’t recognise, that she never forgave him for not once asking her to stay.
It slides, almost with relief, into the old quarrel. Ben hears himself accuse her of doing what she always does: keeping a suitcase packed in her head, already halfway down the lane the moment anything here requires staying put. Rowan snaps that at least she names her exits, that she doesn’t cosplay belonging while outsourcing her spine to other people’s expectations. She jerks her chin toward the glare outside, the silhouettes of Keira’s crew ferrying kit across the cobbles, and asks when he started letting production schedules and Ashdown anxieties dictate his character arc. She reminds him, softly vicious, of the boy who once swore he’d never be beholden to anyone’s story, least of all an Ashdown’s. His reply, that she wouldn’t recognise staying and fighting if it bit her, that bolting for the next prestigious opportunity is simply her factory setting, lands heavier than he intends. She actually flinches; the colour bleeds out of her face, leaving her looking oddly transparent, then she drags her shoulders back, armouring herself against the impact.
The silence that follows is thin and dangerous, the hum of distant generators suddenly very loud. In that narrow gap, Rowan decides there’s no gentler way to do this. Still not looking at him, fixing instead on the fire‑exit sign glowing bilious green above his shoulder, she says, quietly but distinctly, that she’s accepted the permanent chair abroad. That the email came through this week, the terms were too good, and she’s already said yes. The admission hangs between them like a confession and a verdict. Ben’s jaw works; after a beat he manages only, “Of course you have,” then, with a bitter little huff that tastes of every half‑finished sentence between them, adds, “Predictable.” The word hits her like a physical shove, confirming everything she’s feared about how he sees her: not complex, not conflicted, merely consistent. She nods once, as if he’s merely confirmed the data, and steps aside. He shoulders past toward the stairwell, the smell of cold stone, hot dust and coiled camera cables rushing in as they separate, each heading in opposite directions down the corridor that, moments ago, had seemed to narrow around them like a throat.
In the brittle days that follow, Rowan and Ben orbit the same spaces without ever quite colliding. They arrive in rooms on opposite trajectories: she slipping into the back of briefings with her laptop already open, he at the front with a laser pointer and a stack of handouts. On the gravel paths between house and stable block they pass within arm’s reach, offering the kind of politeness reserved for near‑strangers.
“Morning,” he says on Tuesday, eyes on the clipboard in his hand.
“Hi,” she replies, adjusting the strap of her satchel as though it suddenly needs both of her hands. Their footsteps crunch in opposite directions.
In meetings, the easy shorthand they once relied on calcifies into clipped professionalism. Where Rowan used to lean over and murmur, “You’ll translate that later, right?” when Tamsin launched into technical heritage jargon, she now keeps her gaze fixed on the agenda printouts. Questions that should be simple routes across the table become zigzags around it.
“Tamsin, could you ask Ben’s team whether increased overnight occupancy will affect the power draw in the west wing?” Rowan inquires, eyes on her notes.
Tamsin glances, briefly, between them. “I’m sure Ben can answer that now.”
Ben doesn’t quite look up. “We’ll model it,” he says, directing his words to the neat columns of numbers in front of him. “I’ll send you both the projections by end of day.”
The email arrives that night, terse and impeccable, addressed to “Rowan and Tamsin” with no sign that his cursor once hovered, undecided, over her first name alone. She replies with a thank‑you and a clarifying query about sockets in the Blue Drawing Room, rewriting the first draft that began, out of pure habit, “Hey, this room still trips the breaker if anyone so much as boils a kettle: remember?”
Each small avoidance accretes, becoming, for Rowan, further evidence that she has made the only rational choice. If even now, with the clock running down, they cannot risk a frank sentence, what would staying actually look like? Ben, reading her brisk signatures and cc‑chains, sees instead proof that she was already halfway gone; that the suitcase in her head had been packed long before Keira’s cameras ever rolled.
Rowan responds by working as if cramming for an exam with no resit, fuelled by bad coffee and the thin, metallic buzz of adrenaline. She prowls the house and grounds with her recorder and notebook, ticking off locations like revision topics: kitchens, staff staircase, gun room, chapel. Gardeners, housekeepers, the electrician who has “seen it all,” even the most reluctant Ashdown cousin: she corners them all, her questions precise, her thanks automatic. Her handwriting tightens into a cramped, efficient scrawl, pages filling with arrows and cross‑references where once there had been leisurely observations about light and silence.
In the half‑cleared walled garden she notes the half‑finished polytunnel, the rusted frames and abandoned seed trays, the moss edging back over a gravel path. The air smells of damp earth and missed chances. It hits her, with a sudden, hollow clarity, that she’s documenting the overture to a story she won’t stay to see, writing an ethnography of her own absence.
When Tamsin corners her in the stable‑block corridor, Rowan offers a cool, rehearsed explanation about “a rare opportunity” and “not wanting to overstay,” ignoring the quick flash of hurt in Tamsin’s eyes as she accepts it with a brittle, “Of course. One can’t argue with a permanent chair,” and turns away before either of them risks honesty.
Back in Ashford Ley, Rowan packs up her life in the village with the same methodical detachment she’s been applying to the house. At the Old Forge Café she clears her corner table of dog‑eared field notes, charger cables in tangled knots, and borrowed books with fluorescent library stickers, sliding them into wine boxes the owner has saved for her. The barista, drying a mug with more enthusiasm than skill, chatters about how “the village is really putting people out into the world these days: first Ben, now you,” as if they are products stamped and shipped. Rowan musters a thin smile and a noncommittal joke about sending postcards, but her throat tightens when she drops her chipped‑mug loyalty card into the bin. On the walk home past the King’s Arms and the churchyard, she can feel curtains twitch, the prickle of being remarked upon. She pictures the narrative already congealing in the pub: the clever girl, back only on loan, heading off again to somewhere more important, leaving the rest of them exactly where she found them.
Meanwhile, Ben throws himself into the machinery of Keira’s proposal, convincing himself that busyness is clarity rather than flight. Days blur into back‑to‑back Zoom calls with producers, lawyers, and brand consultants; nights into annotated shot lists and risk assessments sprawled across his rented cottage’s kitchen table, laptop glow reflecting off half‑finished mugs of tea. He signs preliminary heads of terms with a hand that doesn’t quite shake, telling himself that exclusive tech rights, guaranteed sponsorship tie‑ins and a recurring slot in the credits are exactly what his company needs: what the estate needs. Yet each time a producer enthuses about “the Ben and Keira dynamic” or suggests a segment where he “shows her the ropes,” a sour twist of nausea coils under his ribs, a quiet sense that someone else is storyboarding his life, which he stubbornly refuses to name.
Keira, misreading his withdrawn intensity as heartbreak over Rowan’s latest “disappearance,” doubles down on the one narrative she trusts. In interviews she sprinkles lines about “coming home” and “reconnecting with an old flame,” posts artfully filtered shots of them on the lime‑tree avenue, his profile turned just enough to suggest intimacy. Captions talk about “building something real, on and off camera,” as if repetition can make it true. In Ashford Ley, phones buzz on kitchen counters and under pub tables; links and screenshots are passed along with the crisps. It is agreed, almost kindly, that the academic girl was never going to stay, and that Ben has done well to hitch himself to someone properly going places. When the first teaser reel drops (Ben and Keira back‑to‑back before Ashdown’s honeyed façade, her laugh bright, his expression unreadable) Rowan appears only as a soft blur crossing the edge of the frame, an accidental extra in a scene she helped set. By the time the clip has done its loop through group chats and Facebook feeds, the tentative, private future Ben and Rowan once traced between them has already been neatly recut into two separate storylines, each cleaner and crueller than the truth.
He pauses the footage on Rowan’s face and, almost without thinking, drags the timeline back a few seconds, then forward again, hunting for the precise frame where impact becomes visible. There: her mouth tightens, the lower lip almost imperceptibly caught between her teeth, and her fingers clamp around the folder in her lap as if she’s bracing for a blow. He zooms the frame until the glossy branding at the bottom of the screen dissolves into pixels and all that’s left is that tiny, unguarded reaction, her features breaking rank for a heartbeat before they reassemble into polite neutrality.
The room seems to tilt. He grips the edge of the desk, knuckles whitening against the cheap veneer, because of course he’s seen that look before. Not just at the stakeholders’ table, not just in the blur of the last chaotic week, but years ago on a splintering pub bench outside The King’s Arms.
Eighteen: Rowan with her hair coming loose in the damp evening, the smell of chips and stale lager drifting from the open door, her hands worrying at the strap of her rucksack. She’d told him about the scholarship in that same careful, hopeful tone, as if holding out a fragile thing between them and asking him to see it as good news. He can hear his own reply as if it’s been waiting on a loop: the stupid, brittle joke about her “trading up” from him, as if making himself the punchline meant he was the one choosing to be left.
He remembers the flicker in her eyes then, hurt and determination sparking like flint before she smiled over it, smoothing everything down so he wouldn’t have to admit he was scared. That was the moment, he realises now, when he started practising this particular trick: pre‑empting abandonment by pretending he was already halfway out the door, teaching himself to shrug first so no one could see him flinch.
He lets the chair spin a fraction and then come to rest, the leather’s small protest the only sound besides the hard drive’s faint whirr. In the dim light, with the monitor’s glow flattening the room into shadows and rectangles, he lets the reel of his twenties and thirties spool out: half‑remembered conferences in beige hotels, start‑ups with exposed brick and cold‑brew on tap, men in expensive shirts calling him “mate” while explaining his own proposals back to him as if they’d just had the idea.
He sees himself smiling on cue, laughing a shade too quickly at jokes about “lads made good,” trotting out the origin story as though it were a party trick rather than a soft spot to be poked. The clients he’d endured while they talked over him, the networking drinks where he’d turned himself into a brand, the 2 a.m. debugging marathons done not only for the invoice but from a bone‑deep conviction that stopping would mean slipping behind, being exposed as the boy who didn’t really belong.
Keira slots into that montage with unnerving ease: the glossy London rooftop where they’d first worked together, her arm looped through his for the cameras, her introducing him as “the genius who makes all my mad ideas actually happen.” It had been effortless to become a supporting character in the Keira Langton Show, the dependable “tech guy” whose ordinariness made her shine all the brighter. Flattering, too, to be recast as stability instead of scarcity.
Threaded through it all runs the same pattern, suddenly obvious as bad wiring in an old wing: every time someone with more power, more social ease, more glitter, opened a door and said, Come in, be part of this, he’d stepped through before checking where it led. He’d treated their invitations like lifeboats, assuming he was lucky to be aboard, never stopping to ask the most basic question: what exactly was the price of passage, and why did he always seem to be the one paying it.
The director’s email pings again on his laptop, a cheery reminder about “the great chemistry in that boardroom scene” and a nudge to approve the cut, plus a smiling emoji that makes his teeth clench. Ben hovers over the reply box, fingers poised to type something neutral and agreeable, and then, instead, clicks away and opens the raw footage folder. If they want chemistry, he’ll see what they’ve bottled.
He scrubs past the orchestrated beats and pre‑planned reaction shots, watching himself in the background when he isn’t on cue: checking Tamsin’s reaction whenever a figure is mentioned, glancing reflexively towards Rowan as if to confirm she’s still there, shoulders tightening each time Keira steers the conversation into softer, more flattering light. What plays back isn’t a man in command of his own big break, but someone constantly scanning the room for potential damage, mapping exits, calculating who might leave and what might be taken away. It lands, with a slow, spreading shame, that he’s built an entire career on making himself indispensable so no one would dare discard him: yet here he is, letting the show frame him as entirely interchangeable, a useful prop in Keira’s redemption arc, the reassuring male presence any other “tech partner” could be cut in to replace.
The more he watches, the more the glamour drains from the meeting. The grand table shrinks to old wood with water rings and a wobble in one leg; the cameras to a cluster of hungry red eyes. When Keira calls him “basically family,” he hears his own laugh come out a fraction too loud, his gaze dropping at once: not to Rowan, not even to Tamsin, but to the notepad where he’s underlined figures as if the numbers might bless the line into truth. Behind Keira’s shoulder, Rowan’s posture changes with awful clarity: shoulders drawing in, chin dipping as she folds herself into the edge of the frame, making herself smaller, safer, as the room obligingly orbits the “power couple” at the centre. He sees, properly, this time, what he’s made her sit through: years of thought and research about places like this boiled down to background texture, her history with the house demoted to local colour, while he stands at the focal point playing the part of the convenient village success story who proves the show’s thesis that everyone can be curated. The word that comes is cowardice. Not hers, for taking the scholarship and leaving, but his, for staying on almost any terms as long as someone important kept saying he was lucky to be invited.
He closes the laptop with a soft thud and sits in the darkened office, the only sound the faint tick of the ancient radiator and his own uneven breathing. Without the blue light, the room feels suddenly bare: just files, peeling paint, the ghost of generations who never had the luxury of reinventing themselves on camera or walking away from duty with a tidy exit clause. His chest is tight, but beneath the ache is a hard, clean line of understanding. If he keeps going like this he’s not just repeating the night Rowan left; he’s institutionalising it, baking his fear of being left into every contract he signs, every cheerful soundbite about “partnership.” The thought of looking back in ten years and seeing nothing but other people’s stories with his face in the corner makes his stomach turn, a sour, hollow twist that feels a lot like grief for lives he hasn’t even lived yet. For the first time, the idea that genuinely matters isn’t whether he can hold onto Ashdown or Rowan or the deal, but whether he can finally stop abandoning himself. The boy who once swore he’d never again apologise for being in the room.
He wakes before dawn, the estate still wrapped in a soft grey quiet, and pulls on yesterday’s clothes without checking his phone. For once, he lets it lie on the desk where he abandoned it, dark and mute instead of pulsing with other people’s priorities. The familiar weight of his Barbour on his shoulders and the chill of the flagstones under his boots feel more solid than any notification or production schedule waiting for him. The air in the corridor has that faint, mineral cold of old stone and furniture polish; somewhere a pipe knocks, the house clearing its throat. He doesn’t bother with coffee. If he waits long enough to boil a kettle, he knows muscle memory will take over and he’ll find himself at his laptop, cursor hovering obediently over “reply all.”
Instead of heading for the stable‑block office, he turns instinctively toward the front steps, hand skimming the smooth dip worn into the banister by centuries of other palms. The great door is heavier than he remembers from childhood visits, or perhaps that’s simply what it feels like to move it without asking permission. It opens on a breath of mist and cut grass, the faint tang of damp earth and last night’s rain.
Outside, the facade of Ashdown Court looms honey‑pale against the washed‑out sky, its windows still mostly dark, the scaffolding on the east wing ghosted in fog. For a moment he just stands on the top step, listening. No vans yet, no shouted directions, no click and whirr of lenses hunting for the most flattering angle on decay. Only birds starting up in the trees and, somewhere down by the brook, the distant cough of a tractor.
His feet find the gravel path without consulting him, carrying him towards the long line of limes disappearing into the whiteness. As he steps off the stone and onto the crunch of gravel, a small, traitorous part of his mind offers up the shot the crew would want: lone man, early light, heritage backdrop, inspirational voice‑over about “vision” and “legacy.” He almost laughs. There is no camera this morning, no one to cut away if he falters or decides to turn back. The avenue stretches ahead, an unedited take.
As he walks the lime‑tree avenue, gravel crunching underfoot, he deliberately peels away everything with a logo on it. No drone shots, no branded drone shots, no “Ben Carter Solutions” watermark ghosting the sky. Just the place, and what he’s actually been doing here when no one was filming.
He thinks of the tenant farmer who’d asked, half‑embarrassed, whether the new monitoring system meant fewer night checks in the lambing shed. Shoulders hunched as if hoping the answer wouldn’t make him sound lazy. Ben had watched the man’s face when he’d said, “Yes. It means you can go home before midnight and still know they’re all right.” Relief had arrived first, then something like suspicion that life might, for once, get simpler rather than more complicated.
He remembers the maintenance guy whose whole expression changed when Ben showed him on a tablet how they could reroute failing circuits instead of gutting three eighteenth‑century walls. “So we keep the panelling,” the man had said, grinning, “and no one gets electrocuted.” In those small, unrecorded victories, Ben recognises the version of his work that feels clean: making lives less precarious, not more performative.
He thinks of Tamsin, grey‑faced at midnight over spreadsheets, hands pressed to her temples as she muttered about cash flow, roof repairs, staff wages, the oil tank that really mustn’t go another winter. He remembers the one time she’d sagged back in her chair, eyes closed, voice stripped of its usual steel. “If we get the infrastructure sorted,” she’d said, almost to herself, “I might actually sleep.” No camera crew, no lighting, no brand partnership in sight: just a woman at the edge of what she could carry. That small, unguarded sentence sits in brutal contrast to Keira’s pitch decks and mood boards of “aspirational heritage living,” the slo‑mo drone shots and hashtag‑ready taglines. The glossy narrative on offer doesn’t merely overlook the strain baked into these corridors; it requires that strain to vanish, sanding off the worry and overtime until Ashdown becomes a frictionless backdrop, a lifestyle stage set in which real exhaustion, real compromise, real fear about the next bill are continuity errors to be edited out.
At the slight kink in the avenue where the rise lifts enough to glimpse the top of the walled garden’s brick, Rowan comes to mind: boots darkened with dew, hem damp, pacing the narrow paths and trying out sentences about labour and lineage under her breath. She’d listened to the groundsman’s tales of busted drains and late frosts as if they belonged in footnotes beside parliamentary debates. In her Ashdown, the leaks and bodges were not shameful aberrations but evidence. Proof of the bargain required to keep this place standing. Breath misting in front of him, he has to admit that what Keira is scripting is the opposite: the same burnished country‑house fantasy that once taught him his accent, his parents’ jobs, even his wanting more were things to be smoothed away.
By the time he loops back towards the house, the understanding that’s been circling for days finally locks in. Staying on Keira’s terms doesn’t just risk wounding Rowan; it means throwing his weight behind the very story that once taught him to be grateful for crumbs. He’d be helping to lacquer Ashdown into a lie: all surface, no strain. What he actually wants is work answerable to the people whose lives cross these lawns in muddy boots and hi‑vis, and a relationship in which he turns up as himself, not as a conveniently inspirational case study. The clarity is oddly cooling. Walking away might cost money and headlines, but staying would cost his integrity, and, he realises with an almost physical jolt, any honest chance of something real with Rowan.
As the assistant director called for “more banter, more village charm,” Ben edged closer to the monitor bank, as if a different angle might magically improve what he was seeing. It didn’t. On the main feed, a gaggle of locals were being repositioned like slow, good‑natured props while an extra in an improbably pristine flat cap pretended to deliver eggs to the big house. Mrs Partridge, who had spent thirty years running the post office with the efficiency of a field marshal, was being steered into the background so the camera could get a clean shot of “Egg Man” doffing his cap to Keira.
“Can we get the older lady just… more over there?” the assistant director called, making a vague shooing motion that somehow managed to encompass both Mrs Partridge and half the village.
A runner translated the gesture into action, guiding her like one might coax a reluctant spaniel.
The sight landed wrong in Ben’s chest. These were people he’d grown up with; people who’d slipped him penny sweets, signed his school sponsorship forms, given him lifts to the station when he’d first started going up to London. Now they were being arranged as background texture in someone else’s story, their real lives stripped out and replaced with whatever “charm” focus groups had approved.
On another monitor, Keira stood in the walled garden archway, laughing with the producer. He watched her throw her head back just enough for the light to catch her hair in a way that would look spontaneous on camera and utterly calculated from three feet away.
“If we can just turn the authenticity dial up another notch,” she said, bright and brisk, tapping the laminated shot list with a manicured nail. “More baskets, more mud, less hi‑vis. You know.”
The phrase grated against him, scraping over everything that had felt clean and simple on his walk that morning: the quiet avenue, the damp air, the half‑formed thought that maybe he could make something here that wasn’t hollow. Now, standing in the electronic glow and manufactured bustle, he could feel that thought shrinking, making room again for contracts, deliverables, and not making a fuss.
Rowan drifts into his peripheral vision, hovering just behind the script supervisor, half‑sheltered by a boom stand as if she’s trying not to obstruct the view and yet can’t quite bring herself to leave. It takes him a moment to clock what’s different. Her notebook, an extension of her, really, since she arrived, is shut tight, elastic looped, pen clipped along the spine with an almost aggressive neatness. No margin jottings, no absent‑minded tapping against her lip. Her hands are empty, folded around nothing.
She isn’t writing; she isn’t even pretending to. She’s just watching the scene play out with a detached, almost pained stillness, gaze moving from villagers in their rearranged positions to Tamsin in her immaculate coat, to the lens that will flatten them all into content.
When her eyes find his, the contact lasts no more than a heartbeat, but it’s enough. There’s an unvoiced question there, Are you really part of this?, and behind it a flicker of something like disappointment, or worse, recognition. It hits harder than any argument. Shame and stubbornness tangle in his throat. He’s the one who looks away.
A runner ghosts up beside him, materialising like guilt with a clipboard. “Updated call sheet for you, Ben,” she chirps, already half turned away. His name, in bold, sits atop a newly inserted mid‑episode segment: “BEN’S BIG TECH REVEAL!!!” The triple exclamation marks glare. He skims the description (“heart‑warming makeover moment,” “from cranky old country pile to smart estate of the future,” “guided by Keira’s inspiring vision”) and feels his jaw set. The fibre runs, the server rooms, the quiet, unshowy resilience he’d planned to build into the place have been repackaged as a glossy montage about Keira unlocking “hidden potential.” On paper he isn’t a partner in the estate’s survival at all, merely the bloke with the toolkit in her transformation narrative, with no space for Rowan’s Ashdown, or his.
Over the walkie, someone asks if they can get “a reaction shot from the brainy ex in the corner” when Ben signs the on‑camera paperwork later. The throwaway label makes the back of his neck burn. He pictures Rowan’s research, years of fieldwork, careful ethics forms, late‑night drafts, shrunk to a three‑second cutaway of her face while Keira narrates a tidy arc about small‑town sweethearts and second chances. In that imagined edit, his silence is spliced in as assent: to Rowan being flattened into a knowing eyebrow raise, to the village into background colour, to himself into the lad who got lucky by hitching his wagon to the right woman and the right brand.
The director calls a reset, lights flare hotter, and the garden turns curiously airless, a stage set left too long in the sun. In the din, Keira practising lines, Tamsin ironing her face smooth, villagers nudged back to their marks, Ben feels that morning’s conclusion click into place. Going through with this would not be “just business”; it would be signing off on a version of Ashdown, and of himself, he doesn’t believe in. His pulse kicks, not with panic now but with resolve. Better to be the idiot who stops the scene and walks away, under every watching eye, than the good sport who stays, lets the cameras roll, and helps edit Rowan, and himself, into Keira’s story.
The “community picnic” setup rolls on like a travelling circus: tartan rugs laid with untouched pork pies, borrowed labradors tied to benches, villagers instructed to “laugh more naturally, please” while clutching prop cider that sweats in the unseasonal glare. A crate of fluorescent cupcakes, flown in that morning from some London bakery that does frosting like architectural renderings, is artfully arranged on a weathered trestle table no one in Ashford Ley has ever seen before. A production assistant spritzes bottled water over the lettuce so it looks “dewy and abundant” on camera. Nobody is allowed to eat.
Ben hovers at the edge of frame beside a bank of cables and battery packs, nominally “on hand for any tech hiccups,” actually serving as part of the invisible scenery: the reliable local expert, plugged in and obedient. His headset crackles in his ear as the assistant director barks timings. Background, on my count. And can we lose the mobility scooter from shot, please?”. And somewhere across the lawn, an elderly villager is politely herded out of frame.
On the monitor, he watches Tamsin hit her marks by the rose border as if she were presenting a Royal Horticultural Society segment and not mentally running through overdue invoices. The director leans in over the bank of screens. “Lovely, Tamsin. Can I get more vulnerability? Remember, the house is on the brink, you’re just holding it together. Think… single tear, not full breakdown.”
As if exhaustion is something she can summon to order, like extra soft focus.
Tamsin obliges anyway, because of course she does: a fractional tremor in the jaw, the slightest quiver on the word “legacy.” Ben, watching, can see the cost of it in the way her shoulders flatten between takes, in the almost imperceptible roll of her eyes when the makeup artist darts in to dab at non‑existent shine. The script has decreed that she will be the embattled chatelaine saved from herself by Keira’s vision and Ben’s wiring. The fact that she has been quietly saving the place for years without cameras or hashtags has no coverage plan.
He glances away from the monitor to the real garden beyond the arc of flags and soft boxes. The bare patches the camera doesn’t frame, the hoses coiled like abandoned snakes, the gardener hovering just out of shot with soil still under her nails. Out here the wind carries the sour‑sweet mix of fertiliser and old stone. On the screen, everything is glossy, timeless, arranged. Two different estates, folded clumsily together, and he is supposed to be the bridge between them.
Every few minutes a runner peels him away from the cable bank and shovels him into a fresh little vignette: Ben at a laptop under a parasol, Ben kneeling beside a junction box with a purposeful frown, Ben pointing at a router while Keira nods like she’s absorbing state secrets. “Can you, like, say something about bandwidth?” she trills in one take, eyes straight down the lens. When he obligingly mutters about fibre and latency, the director calls, “Perfect, that’s our geek hero moment.”
They plant him in a doorway while a drone screams past his ear for “dynamic B‑roll,” instruct him to “look up, like you’re envisioning the future,” then forget to tell him when to stop. His company logo glows on a mock‑up of a tablet screen, neatly framed between Keira’s manicured fingers and a tasteful lens flare. Plucky Innovator, brought to you by post‑production.
A producer with a clipboard materialises at his elbow, briskly ticking through “storyline beats.” By the time she’s finished outlining his “journey,” Ben understands they’ve already written his life for him: local boy makes good, comes home, saves the house, discovered, of course, by Keira.
Between takes, Keira moves through the garden like a privately‑schooled sun, and everyone else remembers they are, at best, rented planets. She greets extras by name, having checked them on a cast list first, links arms with the WI treasurer, flatters the vicar about his “perfectly cinematic” church. She trades filthy in‑jokes with the sound crew about “catching her good side,” making them bark with laughter and love her more. Each time she passes Ben she folds him into the orbit: a proprietary hand on his shoulder for the B‑camera, a brush of her hip against his, a low murmur about spin‑offs, foreign sales, the Ashdown brand going global. “Think of the pipeline,” she says, eyes bright. “After this, every estate in the country will want your genius on speed dial.” The word genius lands like a paper crown: gaudy, flimsy, oddly constricting. Her confidence presses on his chest like a weight disguised as a gift.
Whenever he scans the lawn for Rowan, he finds her only in fragments: the taut line of her jaw as she peers through the camera near the kitchen‑garden wall, the quick flash of her cardigan as she sidesteps a dolly track, determined not to become B‑roll. Once, as villagers are rearranged into a more photogenic halo around Keira, their gazes lock. In that split‑second he reads too much: an academic’s practised distance suffocated by something rawer, hurt threaded with a bleak little “of course you’d choose this, of course.” His throat tightens on a defence he hasn’t yet earned. Before he can move towards her, a roaming camera slews round and a PA briskly ushers him back to his mark, turning the misfired connection into one more moment the show might hoard, splice, and misinterpret on his behalf.
The afternoon grinds on, light flattening to a pale glare that bleaches the lawn and everyone’s patience with it. Ben is wired, literally and figuratively, into the machine: radio hissing at his hip, his name ricocheting through headsets, his “future‑proofing plans” dropped into Keira’s to‑camera pieces as though contracts exist, logos agreed, destiny branded. Each sideways step towards Rowan’s corner of the garden or the knot of tension that is Tamsin draws a brisk interception: “Just one more take, Ben,” “We need you in this shot,” “Can you repeat that, but with more… hope?” By the time the director corrals them for the climactic “community picnic” that will cradle Keira’s legacy speech, he stands in the curated pastoral, with its photo‑ready hampers and strategically diverse villagers, feeling less like a collaborator than a high‑value prop, posed in an Ashdown where there is no space for the man who left, the boy who once raged against this hierarchy, or the person who thought he’d come back to mend something broken rather than help lacquer it for prime time.
Ben watches the scene arrange itself with the practised choreography of people who have done this a hundred times before in other fields, other postcards. Villagers are nudged into looser clusters on gingham rugs, “more organic, please, but cheat towards camera”, while production assistants adjust the angle of a wheel of cheese as though it, too, has a best side. A teenage runner hovers, anxiously guarding a tray of sweating elderflower cordial like a sacred relic. Every patch of grass becomes provisional: stepped on, reconsidered, reset.
The director’s voice crackles in Ben’s ear, distorted by distance and low battery. “Okay, people, this is the hero moment. From Keira to Ben to the crowd, big sweep, yeah? Standing by for drones. And… rolling.” The word settles on his shoulders like an instruction to a piece of machinery.
He stands just off the central rug, half in the sun, hands shoved into the pockets of chinos that suddenly feel wrong for his own body, let alone the part he is meant to play. The fine wire of the earpiece itches against the sweat at the back of his neck. Every time he swallows, he can feel it shift, a reminder that his hearing now belongs to someone else.
Keira moves to her mark with unstudied grace, skirt skimming the top of her boots, face lifting automatically towards the main camera. When she starts to speak, the shift is almost imperceptible: her expression opens, vowels lengthen, consonants soften, as if she’s donned an invisible tiara.
“We’re here today,” she begins, “to honour centuries of Ashdown tradition while embracing a brighter, digital tomorrow.” Her tone is perfectly pitched, half reverent, half visionary, leaving just enough room for the home audience to imagine themselves on the rug beside her. Above, the drones whine into position over the walled garden, sounding to Ben like a nest of oversized wasps preparing to sting this moment into permanence.
On the tablet a nearby runner is holding angled towards the director’s monitor, his own line pulses in fluorescent highlighting, waiting: he’s supposed to step neatly into frame, take Keira’s outstretched hand on cue, and promise to “secure a future worthy of Ashdown’s glorious past.” The phrase sits on the glass in tidy sans serif, a slogan with its edges smoothed of anything awkward or true. As he reads it, the words detach themselves from him entirely, floating there, clean and hollow, like they’ve been test‑marketed in a room he would never have been invited into.
The director’s voice snaps in his ear, “And… Ben, go”, followed by his own line, fed in a soothing murmur by the floor manager as if confidence can be piped in like hold music: “I’ll deliver a digital future worthy of Ashdown’s glorious past.” The words slip into his head with the oily ease of something written by committee. Instead of moving, he feels his body lock, a small, stubborn refusal gathering in his chest like a cramp.
He reaches up and unhooks the earpiece. The tiny pop as the connection breaks is absurdly intimate. The cable drops against his shirt and swings, a thin black pendulum announcing mutiny. Sound changes at once: no more hiss of comms, no more disembodied counting‑in, just the ordinary noises of the garden: the distant clatter of cutlery, a child’s muffled giggle, a pigeon blundering out of the beech trees.
He stands there, feeling his own pulse in his throat, and realises how long it’s been since he heard only himself think. Before anyone can shout “Cut” or herd him back into position, he steps forward into the frame, not to his taped‑out mark but onto the open strip of grass between the rugs. He’s aware of lenses tracking him, of Keira’s head tilting with the faintest alarm, but he keeps his gaze level.
“I can’t do this,” he says, clear and unhurried, pitching his voice so it carries to the boom without needing the wire. He leaves a deliberate beat, feels the silence tighten around him. “Not like this.”
The picnic freezes on a collective intake of breath: villagers mid‑smile, Tamsin with a crystal glass halfway to her lips, Keira caught in a half‑turned pose that’s almost too perfect, like a still from the show’s own trailer. Even the drones seem to hover in puzzled suspension. Someone near the monitors swears, the word breaking oddly loud in the curated pastoral. Keira’s eyes flick to the cameras, then to Ben, a warning tightening her jaw, calculation racing visibly behind the practiced warmth, but he doesn’t look away.
“I’m not going to sign the exclusive deal,” he continues, addressing her but angling his body so the lenses get him full‑face, making it impossible to edit him into mere colour. “Because if this is the version of Ashdown it requires, everyone here flattened into background, then it’s the wrong deal for me, and for the estate.”
A low murmur stirs the crowd, the rustle of blankets and polyester picnic dresses, the clink of glass on china, suddenly very loud in the pause between his sentences. Somewhere a child asks, too clearly, “Mum, is it finished?” and is shushed, as if the answer might change everything.
He turns from Keira to Tamsin, deliberately dragging the focus with him as surely as if he’d taken the main camera by the lens. “You don’t need me promising ‘legacy’ on cue,” he says, his voice softening but not dropping. “You need the damp in the north wing sorted before it brings down another ceiling. Wiring that doesn’t trip if someone plugs in a kettle and a server in the same room. Boilers that don’t sulk every time there’s a frost. Decent water pressure in the staff cottages so people who live here aren’t boiling pans just to have a bath after a twelve‑hour shift.” The list is almost comically mundane against the staged bunting and vintage hampers, but that is precisely the point; each item lands with a small, hard thud, puncturing the picnic’s gloss. “Those are the things I came here to work on. They matter more than B‑roll of drone shots.”
Only then does he gesture outward, past the picnic rugs, past the lenses and reflectors, towards the knot of crew and onlookers at the garden’s edge where Rowan stands with her notebook held like a shield. “If anyone wants the real story of this place it isn’t this.” He inclines his head at the tableau of choreographed merriment, the bunting, the borrowed labradors. “It’s what Rowan’s been recording. The graft, the compromises, the way class still quietly decides who fetches and who is feted.” Saying her name on‑camera feels like stepping off another ledge, but he doesn’t flinch. “That’s the Ashdown that deserves attention. Not a fantasy you can trim to fit an episode order.”
The director’s “Cut. The shout goes up a second and third time, each more strangled than the last, as if sheer repetition might somehow restore the scene to its approved, anodyne version. It doesn’t. The syllables skate over old brick, clipped rose stems, the rusted hinge of the walled garden gate, and fall uselessly at people’s feet.
On the lawn, a boom operator lowers his mic with theatrical exasperation, rolling his eyes for an audience that has abruptly ceased to care. One of the runners skids to a halt, the laminated schedule pressed to her chest like a religious icon, a reusable coffee cup dangling precariously from her other hand. Behind her, a cluster of production assistants are caught in that particular hell of live television: no one has yet told them what to do, which means nothing can be done.
The background “villagers”, most of them actual villagers, some tarted up with loaned flat caps and floral pinnies, straighten out of their staged merriment, half in costume, half in disbelief. A woman in a “vintage” tea dress pushes a fascinator back from her forehead and mutters, “Well, that’s that, then,” with a satisfaction entirely unscripted. One of the teenage extras pulls out his phone, thumbs already moving. Word will be in the pub before the director has finished his first email to Legal.
The illusion holds for a moment longer, as if muscle memory might bully it into staying: someone keeps pouring Pimm’s into a glass no one will now drink; the hired string quartet saws obediently through the last bar of their movement before faltering into silence. Then the whole thing buckles. Voices rise in overlapping shouts about continuity, about clearance, about whether he’s actually allowed to say that with the cameras rolling. “Has he signed the bloody release?” someone near the monitor bank demands. “Get me Legal,” another voice snaps. “And for God’s sake, keep recording,” a third insists, because even disaster might yet be turned into content.
Through it all, Ben stands where he is, the shock waves of his own decision still moving outwards, unable, and, he realises, unwilling, to be called back.
Keira reaches him first, heels biting into the lawn as she cuts across the grass with a predator’s grace, every line of her body camera-ready except for the white-knuckled grip on her cue cards. Her smile is stretched so tight it’s practically stapled on. “We’ll cut around it,” she trills to the nearest camera, voice dipped in honey for the benefit of anyone still wearing a headset. “We’ll shape it in the edit, don’t worry. It’ll be… powerful.” The word lands like a threat.
Her eyes never leave Ben’s. Up close, the charm peels away in harsh little flakes. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she breathes, barely moving her lips. “Do you have any idea what you’ve just thrown away? My team, my name, my contacts: this was set up for you. And you decide to improvise?” Career suicide, breach of contract, ungrateful, naive. She doesn’t need to say all of it; he can hear the list in the clipped hiss of her breath.
He feels the heat of her indignation roll off her like studio lights, but he doesn’t retreat, doesn’t fumble for an apology or soften what he’s done. The choice he made hangs between them, solid and undeniable, a third presence neither of them can charm, renegotiate, or slice out in post.
On the edge of the set, Tamsin stands very still, the rigid poise of “lady of the manor” slowly bleeding out of her shoulders as if someone has pulled a crucial pin. The part of her that runs on timetables and cash-flow forecasts is incandescent: at the risk he’s taken with her fragile negotiations, at the chaos now rippling through a schedule she’s sweated over for months, at the line of emails she can already see breeding in her inbox. But beneath that, something rougher and older stirs: recognition. Someone has finally said, in plain language and in front of witnesses, that Ashdown cannot live forever on borrowed fantasies and sponsored bunting. Her gaze meets Ben’s; there is no neat gratitude, only a wary, complicated acknowledgement that he has just smashed a window she might secretly have wanted broken: and that now she will have to feel the weather.
Around them, the extras and local hires begin to unpeel themselves from the parts they’ve been assigned. The retired farmhand who was handed a wooden churn for “local colour” snorts, shifting his bad knee. “About time someone said it,” he mutters, earning a few nervous laughs and one hastily averted camera. Two teenagers in borrowed flat caps exchange a look in which embarrassment and pride wrestle to a draw. The WI stalwart drafted as “cheery jam lady” pointedly removes her apron, folds it with military precision, and tucks it under her arm. One by one, a scattering of villagers catch Ben’s eye and offer small, ironic dips of the head, half‑shrugs that concede: you’ve probably made our lives more complicated, but you’ve also spoken a truth we recognise.
Across the lawn, Rowan doesn’t move. Her notebook is pressed flat against her chest as if bracing for impact, fingers whitening at the spine. She watches the scene not as an academic observer arranging data points, but as someone whose own history is being quietly, publicly revised. The Ben she remembers learnt early how to swallow his anger whenever wealth and opportunity were in the room, how to make himself useful and agreeable and small enough to be let in. The man in front of her has just risked all three by naming, out loud, the reality she usually parses in footnotes and interviews.
Her expression shifts: surprise flaring first, then a narrowing, cautious consideration, then a careful, inward turning as she recalibrates the story she has been telling herself about him for years. This isn’t a grand romantic gesture staged for her benefit, not exactly; he hasn’t looked over, hasn’t tried to claim her gaze. But it is data, of the most awkwardly compelling kind. Evidence that he is willing, finally, to step outside the scripts others have written for him, the grateful contractor, the modernising saviour, and, by extension, perhaps outside the old script of their breakup as well, in which she was the one who left and he was the one who let her go.
For a moment they simply stand there, a careful distance between them, the filtered light striping the gravel at their feet. Ben shoves his hands into his pockets, takes them out again, as if he’s testing and rejecting a series of rehearsed lines. When he finally speaks, his voice is flatter than he intends, like he’s giving a status report rather than offering up the softest part of his underbelly.
He says, stumbling a little, that he didn’t jump in front of the cameras for her, or for some noble abstract principle he’d nobly discovered in the last ten minutes. He isn’t auditioning for the role of Hero of the Village. He did it, he says, because he suddenly couldn’t stomach watching himself become the kind of man who turns other people’s lives into a backdrop. The thought of spending the next three years smoothing over the mess so it looked good in 4K, of building his whole business around that, made him feel… ill. He cuts off there, groping for a word that isn’t melodramatic and not quite finding it.
The words don’t arrive in a neat, rousing speech. They trip, double back, contradict themselves. He admits (eyes on the ruts in the gravel) that right up until he saw her face at the monitor, he’d been prepared to swallow his misgivings. Of course he had. The contract was big. The association with Keira was bigger. He could have spun what they were doing as “a platform for real stories” and told himself that the estate would be grateful.
He tells her, in a low rush, that a part of him was already composing the email to his team, imagining the slide deck, the headlines. And then he’d looked at her and all he could see was himself, ten years from now, still nodding along while someone else arranged the village into something cute and profitable. That was the moment, he says, when the idea of keeping quiet stopped feeling like compromise and started feeling like self-erasure.
Once he starts, the confession comes in uneven layers, like plaster chipped back to older colours. He hears himself talking about London deals where he’d laughed along at jokes about “hicks” and “heritage tat,” about PowerPoint slides with stock images of places that looked uncomfortably like Ashdown, captioned as “untapped charm.” He mentions the meetings where he’d kept quiet while someone in a better suit wondered aloud why people didn’t just sell up and move to town, “they’ve had their fun playing lord of the manor”, and how he’d smiled, because the day‑rate was good and no one expected him to take it personally.
He talks about how walking back into Ashdown with money and contacts felt like the only way to rewrite the story of the lad who left, that there was a childish, vindictive part of him that wanted people here to see his car, his slides, his confidence and think: you were wrong about him. He admits he liked the way Keira’s world made him feel temporarily untouchable, grandfathered into a different class by proximity and camera angles. How easy it was to believe that if he just played his part, kept his accent soft, his clothes neutral, his anger invisible, no one would see where he came from, or worse, feel entitled to judge it.
Breaking with that on camera, he says, wasn’t some brave strategic line in the sand; it was plain panic at the idea of locking himself into a lie he might never climb out of. The thought of watching rushes where he smiled through it, of hearing his own voice selling a version of the village that made real people smaller, felt suddenly unbearable. He could see, with the horrible clarity of a bad decision caught mid‑flight, how easily three years of “just this one project” would harden into the person he was. So he opened his mouth before he’d worked out what would come out, and by the time he’d finished, there was no way to tuck it back in.
Rowan listens without interrupting, the familiar tick of her fingers against her elbow the only sign of nerves, the gesture he remembers from revision nights at her parents’ kitchen table. When she does speak, her voice is low but steady, the cadence almost lecture‑like until the words catch. She tells him that for years she has rehearsed her own justifications: that the scholarship was a once‑in‑a‑lifetime escape, that he would have held her back, that choosing herself was a clean, political act, proof she wasn’t the girl who followed a boy into whatever shed or bothy he’d set his sights on.
Under the trees, she lets the harsher truth out: that at twenty‑one she was so frightened of being consumed by the village’s expectations, by his family’s warmth, by the sheer gravity of staying, that it felt easier to vanish than to ask whether he might want the same bigness for both of them. She had been certain, she admits, that if she voiced that terror he would either laugh it off or, worse, try to fix it. Leaving without explanation was, in her panicked logic, the only way to keep the possibility of herself intact.
The air between them shifts as they trade specifics instead of indictments. Ben hears himself confess that every promotion, every new contract, came with a petty postscript: would this, finally, make her sorry? That sour little audit, he realises, has been distorting his work for years. Meetings at Ashdown, compromises with Keira, were all coloured by a need to prove he’d won the break‑up. Rowan, in turn, admits that she tracked his LinkedIn announcements and glossy press shots from anonymous hotel rooms, feeling a queasy blend of pride and vindication. If he looked content in those photographs, then she hadn’t, she told herself, abandoned him so much as released him from the drag of her uncertainty. She apologises, not for taking the scholarship, which she would still choose, but for airbrushing him out of her narrative so neatly, for not trusting him enough to say: I want the world, and I’m terrified it will obliterate us.
Silence settles again, looser round the edges. A van reverses somewhere down the drive; a burst of crew laughter lifts and dissolves among the leaves. Rowan uncurls her arms, fingers flexing as if she’s setting something down. Ben, watching the light sift through branches instead of watching her, admits he has spent a decade blaming her exit for every part of himself he disliked, when the truth is that both of them were acting from wounds they hadn’t yet learned to name. She steps half a pace nearer, not quite touching, and says that if they are to attempt anything now, it cannot be as the injured boy and girl tallying who was more wronged. In the soft green‑gold hush they reach, without ceremony, a different understanding: that those younger selves deserve a measure of kindness, and that anything built between them from here must grow out of who they are now, not out of who they were once afraid of becoming.
They begin, almost shyly, with the smallest, safest hypotheticals. Nothing that could be mistaken for a Promise, just trial balloons floated into the green‑gold air between them.
Rowan talks first, because timetables are easier than feelings. If she didn’t take the chair outright, she could, in theory, propose a split arrangement: teaching blocks in the city, the rest of the year based here, turning Ashdown and Ashford Ley into a long-term case study instead of a picturesque example in chapter three. She could run interviews in the village hall, document the strange ecology of class performances on and off camera, watch the estate’s “transformation” in real time. The Old Forge café has Wi‑Fi; the train from Kemble still runs. It is, academically speaking, perfectly defensible.
Ben, in turn, sketches the outline of a different life for his company. His second‑in‑command already knows the systems; remote monitoring doesn’t require him physically tightening every bolt. He could refuse the high‑gloss contracts that keep him ping‑ponging between airports and anonymous conference centres, and lean into fewer, longer relationships with places like Ashdown. There’s a way, he says, to build a business that isn’t just perpetual motion.
As they talk, the hypotheticals acquire edges: calendar blocks, rent figures, how often she would have to be physically at her department, how many weeks a year he might still be travelling. Every few minutes they circle back, almost like a refrain, to the same condition. Whatever they build cannot be one of them tucking their life politely into the other’s. She will not be the adjunct to “Ben Carter, local boy made good,” smiling dutifully at clients while her work gets boiled down to “his girlfriend writes about class.” He refuses, equally, to become a footnote in the acknowledgements of her book, the man who “held the ladder” while she climbed.
They test the idea out loud: evenings where her laptop breaks curfew on the kitchen table and he is allowed to disappear into spreadsheets without it meaning rejection; mornings where he drags her away from a paragraph to look at a faulty boiler because life, inconveniently, leaks. The point, they agree, is not to iron out those frictions but to make certain neither of them disappears inside the other’s story. Only if there is space for her late‑night writing jags and his sudden 3 a.m. schemes (side by side on the same worn sofa, perhaps, instead of continents apart) does any version of this future make sense.
They move, almost with relief, into the unromantic arithmetic of it all: visa categories, sabbatical clocks, investor expectations, cash flow forecasts. Rowan outlines, with the briskness of someone presenting at a conference, what the overseas chair would mean on paper: salary bands, research budget, the line it would carve into her CV like a gold bar. Then she falters, admitting she can already feel the flat-pack furniture in yet another sublet, the way a life lived in rented rectangles has begun to make her feel curiously provisional, like a visiting lecturer in her own days.
Ben, propped against the lime tree opposite, sketches in turn what the exclusive with Keira would do for his numbers. Guaranteed revenue, brand visibility, a case study to make investors’ eyes light up. All while he spends the next three years optimising pretend crisis scenarios for cameras, an engineer of illusions rather than infrastructure, a consultant on someone else’s fantasy country life.
Saying it here, to each other, strips the glamour off. The impressive options sound, in the Ashdown dusk, smaller than they looked in emails. What remains, oddly, is not confusion but a steadier kind of certainty.
When the practicalities are mapped, they edge, almost reluctantly, into braver territory: what staying might demand of their identities. Rowan says, with a crooked smile that doesn’t quite disguise the rawness, that she refuses to become “the professor who moved back for a man,” a parable whispered at conferences about clever women who traded tenure tracks for Aga cookers. Ben agrees, almost before she’s finished, insisting he doesn’t want a partner who has to brand her own compromise as proof of love. He admits he is equally frightened of becoming the bloke down the pub who boasts about knowing the owners of the big house while quietly resenting everyone who left. They agree that if either of them starts shrinking to fit a village story, the other has to name it, out loud, and refuse to play along.
The decisions don’t arrive with trumpets so much as settle, like mist choosing a field. Rowan hears herself say, almost conversationally, that she’ll email her head of department in the morning to propose a formal split post, naming Ashdown as the backbone of her research rather than an illustrative aside. Ben, watching the last van’s taillights vanish at the gate, answers that he’ll write to the production company, and to Keira, formally withdrawing from the series and proposing instead a quieter, infrastructure‑only contract that serves the estate rather than the storyline. They list, briefly, what each choice might cost and then let the silence stand; neither rushes to minimise or romanticise the losses. The refusal to rescue one another from consequence feels, unexpectedly, like its own kind of fidelity.
By the time they turn back towards the house, the light has thinned to blue and the lime trees are dark cut‑outs against the sky. They fall into step without thinking, shoulders brushing in an easy rhythm that feels less like slipping back than edging forward. No dramatic declarations; only the tacit agreement that tomorrow’s emails will make this real. The future is still blurred at the edges, no cottage yet, no timetable, but as gravel crunches underfoot they both feel a small, decisive internal shift, as if some long‑misaligned gear has finally bitten. Ashdown’s windows glow ahead, no longer a backdrop or an escape route, but the landscape in which they might, at last, learn how to stay.
The shift begins quietly, almost bureaucratically, without so much as a swell of background music. Months after that dusk walk under the lime trees, Rowan sits at a corner table in The Old Forge, laptop open, fingers hovering as she rereads the email confirming the university’s offer: teaching compressed into short city blocks, formal recognition of her fieldwork at Ashdown, a line about “strategic engagement with rural communities” that makes her snort into her coffee. Someone in a distant office has turned her messy, ambivalent life into bullet points. She wonders, not for the first time, whether that has always been her speciality.
Across from her, Ben scrolls through a draft of the revised services agreement, his own cursor blinking over clauses about maintenance schedules and remote monitoring that assume he will be here, year after year. The legalese is dry enough to curl paper, but every “ongoing” and “renewable” feels like a small, practical vow. The old version of him (the one who measured worth in air miles and frantic pitches) would have been searching for the exit clauses. Now he keeps catching himself checking the dates at the top and bottom, measuring not how quickly he can get out, but how long this can reasonably run.
Outside, the village green is slick with recent rain, the oak dripping methodically onto the empty bench. Inside, the air smells of coffee and old stone, of damp coats and toasted cheese, of staying put. A toddler in wellies thumps past, pursued by a harassed parent Ben dimly recognises from school, and someone at another table is discussing chicken feed and broadband speeds in the same breath. It is, objectively, unremarkable. Yet his chest tightens with a sense that this is the moment everything quietly tips.
Rowan clicks “Reply” and types, I am pleased to accept, pauses, deletes the full stop, adds it again. Ben, without looking up, nudges her ankle under the table. A silent, habitual check-in. She nudges back. Between them, their screens glow with contracts and calendars, the future laid out in tidy, editable lines.
They feed the pages through The Old Forge’s wheezy little printer, one cautious sheet at a time, as if the machine might be startled by sudden movements. Each pass produces a new, slightly compromised artefact: the university crest emerging with a faint halo, Ashdown’s letterhead leaning a degree or two off true, a line of legal text interrupted by a pale stripe where the ink has simply lost interest.
“Nothing in this village is ever going to be entirely high‑definition, is it?” Ben says, peering at the latest effort.
Rowan means to roll her eyes, but something in the crooked logos and softened edges tugs instead. After years of glossy conference packs and perfectly kerned city contracts, there’s an almost indecent tenderness in these smudges and misalignments, as if the future might be allowed to arrive a bit blurred at the edges.
At the counter, without comment, the barista slides over a heavy, scuffed stapler and a pen that has chewed plastic at the cap. No ceremony, no curiosity. Just the quiet assumption that people staple their lives together over cappuccinos here all the time.
In the narrow courtyard behind The Old Forge, they claim a strip of sun-warmed stone beside the bins, clipboards balanced precariously on a flowerpot and a crate of milk bottles waiting for collection. The rain has retreated in sulks, leaving the cobbles dark and shining; the sun catches on damp ivy, on the curl of Rowan’s breath over her mug, on the faint ghost of steam from Ben’s tea. One by one, they sign: Rowan first, her name looping more steadily than she’d rehearsed in her head at three a.m.; then Ben, tongue caught briefly between his teeth as he methodically initials every page of the Ashdown contract he’s already memorised.
A gust of wind barrels down the alley, flips the papers, and turns the courtyard briefly into farce. They lunge in opposite directions, laughing, pinning corners with chilled hands, Ben flattening his own signature with the heel of his palm. Rowan ends up with one foot in a shallow puddle, Ben with a coffee ring blooming over clause 7.[^2]. By the time order is restored, their fingertips are smudged with ink and damp cardboard, as if the place itself has insisted on leaving a print on their decisions.
When the last page is countersigned and stacked, there is a small, almost awkward pause. Their hands hover, suddenly unemployed. They glance at each other, half‑expecting some grand swell of feeling, a cinematic cue that this is the moment their lives change. Instead there is the clink of crockery from inside, the distant thud of a delivery van’s door, a pigeon landing heavily on the roof and eyeing them with bored entitlement. Ben clears his throat, aware of his own heartbeat sounding absurdly loud in such an ordinary morning. “Well,” he says, dryly, “that’s us, then.” Rowan huffs a laugh, the sound threaded with something softer, like relief finally exhaling. “Apparently,” she replies, and the understatement feels exactly right.
They don’t mark it with champagne or photos for anyone else to like or scroll past later. Ben slides the signed binders into his scuffed satchel, where invoices and socket catalogues jostle for room; Rowan tucks her contract between dog‑eared notebooks and an overused field diary. No ring appears, no vows are spoken beyond the legalese they’ve just committed to, but both feel a distinct internal shift: the soft, decisive click of doors quietly closing on versions of themselves who always kept a suitcase half‑packed. As they leave the courtyard side by side, turning automatically toward the lane that leads past the green to the cottage and the estate beyond, each carries the same settled, slightly terrifying knowledge: they have chosen here, and each other, without escape clauses, and will have to stay present for whatever follows.
The first months are messier than any tidy ending they might have imagined, not because anything dramatic explodes, but because so much of what is wrong is invisible until it bumps awkwardly into what is right. On paper, everything looks astonishingly adult: contracts signed, direct debits arranged, a shared calendar colour‑coded for lectures, site visits, village meetings. In practice, Ben still wakes some mornings with the familiar knot in his stomach, half‑expecting to find an email from Rowan saying a fellowship has come up in New York or Berlin, that she has to go “just for a year,” that this is all “bad timing, really.”
He lies there sometimes, phone face‑down on the bedside table, conducting an entirely imaginary argument with an entirely imaginary funding body. By the time he actually checks his email and finds only a departmental circular and an update from a plumber in Stow, the adrenaline has nowhere to go; it just sits in his chest, hot and stupid. He is short with the kettle, with his socks, with the slow‑to‑start Land Rover, and only realises what he is doing when Rowan eyes him over her mug and says, lightly, “No one’s deporting me this week, you know.”
Rowan, for her part, still finds herself, on long walks back from the estate under low, pewter skies, rehearsing the old speech about how she isn’t built for staying. The sentences arrive unbidden, fully formed: explanations about career arcs, about needing stimulation, about how some people are simply migratory. She shapes them silently in the air as she walks past the church and the bench with the gamekeeper’s plaque, as if her tongue needs to keep them supple in case of emergency.
When she reaches the cottage door, though, key cold in her hand, she is confronted by the smear of mud Ben has left on the mat, the crooked line of his boots, the smell of last night’s curry thick in the small hallway. None of it fits with the speech in her head. She hangs up her coat anyway, feeling faintly fraudulent, like an actress who has forgotten which role she’s come to play.
Neither of them pretends those reflexes aren’t there. They surface in sideways comments, Ben asking, too casually, how long her current contract really runs; Rowan joking, too often, about “the next place” as if one has already been booked. They joke about it between themselves and, sometimes, at The King’s Arms with a kind of brittle bravado, calling it “relapse into commitment‑phobia” or “late‑onset class panic.” The laughter lands, but it has a raw edge, as if they are both testing the floorboards beneath them with every punchline, waiting to hear which ones creak.
It happens slowly, in patches, like damp creeping up a wall. They start catching themselves mid‑swerve, choosing bluntness over charm. One damp Sunday, when the sky sits low on the cottage roof and the wi‑fi keeps sulking in and out, a trivial query about whether Ben should bill Ashdown for an extra hour tips sideways.
“It’s my project,” Rowan snaps, too sharp for the subject at hand. “I don’t want to feel like I’m… commissioning you.”
The word tastes worse than she expects. She presses on anyway, cheeks hot. “I hate feeling beholden. To men in particular. Too many of them have treated ‘help’ as an instalment plan for obedience.”
Ben, who has been braced for a very different sort of criticism, about competence, not patriarchy, feels the ground shift. His own defence leaks out sideways. “I still keep thinking,” he says, aiming for flippant and missing, “that one day you’ll decide my usefulness is all there ever was. Once the wiring’s done and the funding’s sorted, you’ll realise you can upgrade.”
The silence after that is long and graceless. The argument frays rather than finishes; by early evening they have retreated to opposite ends of the same sofa, a shared blanket laid over both sets of legs like an armistice flag.
They sit there with the rain ticking against the windows, dismantling their own lines with the care of people defusing old ammunition. She explains, stumblingly, that dependence has always felt like a trap door; he admits that usefulness has been his ticket into rooms that otherwise wouldn’t open. Between them they trace the old pattern, her leaving before anyone can claim her, him staying useful so no one will throw him out, and consider, haltingly, whether they might try a different draft. Not a grand manifesto, just a series of small edits: asking rather than assuming, stating rather than hinting, agreeing that gratitude and freedom can, in fact, coexist.
The cottage itself becomes a slow‑moving declaration. They don’t rush to make it Instagram‑ready; boxes remain stacked in corners, mismatched mugs accumulate by the sink, and a wobbly bookshelf from Ben’s teenage bedroom finds a second life under Rowan’s stack of theory texts and ring‑bound lecture notes. A splinter from one shelf catches on her cardigan; she swears, laughs, leaves it where it is instead of sanding it down.
On a rainy afternoon, she pins photographs from her years abroad above the small desk in the spare room (cracked desert landscapes, neon‑lit streets, a blurred shot of a diner at 3 a.m.) and then, after a long pause, adds a printout of Ashdown’s beech copse from her childhood. Ben watches from the doorway as she steps back, rearranges one image by half an inch, frowns thoughtfully, then leaves the collage as it is: a visible admission that all these places now belong in the same life, and that this cramped, damp little room is its centre of gravity for now.
Outside the cottage, they begin to let other people see the new shape of “them.” At The King’s Arms, Rowan no longer sits with her back to the room as she once did when she first returned, wary of village scrutiny; she leans against Ben at the bar, arguing cheerfully with a visiting researcher about housing policy while he trades good‑natured insults with an old school friend about the state of the pub’s Wi‑Fi and the relative merits of fibre versus “good, honest gossip.” The landlord rolls his eyes but tops up their drinks without comment. When a tipsy local mutters something about “not lasting, that one’ll be off again,” Ben doesn’t bristle or change the subject. Instead, he glances at Rowan, lets her choose whether to respond; she smiles thinly and says, “I’ve renewed my library card, if that helps,” and the table laughs, tension dissolving as quickly as the foam on their pints.
The rituals they build are small but cumulative in their insistence. On nights when Rowan returns late from the city, she texts him not from the platform but when she’s passing the weathered bench on the village green, “ten minutes out”, and knows there will be a lamp on, soup warming on the hob, his laptop finally closed. When Ben has a crisis of confidence over a major contract and mutters about taking on more work in London “just in case this all goes sideways,” she sits him down with a spreadsheet of their shared expenses and the modest but real buffer they’ve built, her fingers ink‑stained from note‑taking at the estate, her voice steady as she underlines the numbers twice. Each gesture, each conversation, turns the sharp memory of abandonment and not‑being‑enough into something quieter and more distant, until their shared present carries more weight than either of their separate pasts, ballast against any future storm.
The first full season of residencies threads through the year almost without drama, which Ben decides is the highest form of success: nothing on fire, nothing trending. A small cohort of writers, a landscape architect, and a documentary sound designer arrive with modest expectations and leave with pages, sketches, and recordings full of the house and its people, cluttering the group WhatsApp with photos of rain on stone and the world’s most over‑qualified kettle.
On the first morning, he walks them through the practicalities and catches himself saying “we” when he talks about the estate’s plans. “We’re trialling a booking system for the walled garden,” he hears himself explain, hand resting on a section of panelling that once terrified him into silence. “If anything cuts out, tell me, not the portraits.”
No one laughs quite as much as Keira’s crews used to, but several of them smile and scribble notes. One of the writers, a woman with purple hair and fingerless gloves, asks a follow‑up about data security. Another wants to know how many staff live on site. Ben, to his surprise, has answers that don’t sound like a sales pitch.
Rowan follows with a low‑key welcome talk in the converted carriage room, sleeves pushed up, glasses sliding down her nose. She doesn’t offer nostalgia; there’s no talk of “quaint village life” or “escaping the rat race.” Instead, she starts with who built the house’s wings and who used to sleep above this very room so they could light the fires before dawn. She talks about labour, lineage, and who used to serve dinner in this space, and how those histories cling like draughts in the corners.
Several residents visibly recalibrate their mental picture of the place. The sound designer, who had arrived joking about Downton Abbey, switches off his phone and begins recording the murmur of the old radiators. The landscape architect asks to see historic maps. By the time Rowan wraps up, “You are not here to consume an aesthetic; you’re part of an ongoing negotiation”, Ben notices that no one is looking at the ceiling beams for Instagram angles. They’re looking at the doors, the corridors, the invisible routes that once separated “family” from “staff,” as if they’ve just realised the house has more than one story to tell and they might be implicated in it.
As the weeks pass, Ashdown’s fabric starts to bear new kinds of marks. Ben’s team tucks mesh nodes into cornices and hides server cabinets behind old linen presses, labelling everything in neat, almost reverent handwriting so future electricians don’t panic at the sight of eighteenth‑century plaster meeting Cat6. Rowan negotiates with Tamsin for whiteboards and stackable chairs that don’t jar too hard against the panelling, arriving at a compromise involving muted colours and wheels that don’t squeak on old floorboards. Ben finds himself oddly protective of both panelling and chairs.
On a damp April afternoon, a seminar relocates from the walled garden to the long gallery when rain blows in sideways. As Rowan leads a discussion about curated authenticity beneath ancestral portraits, an artist quietly sketches Tamsin in the doorway, laptop under her arm, listening despite herself, jaw unclenching by degrees. Later, an electrician from Ben’s crew and a poet on residency end up at the same pub table, trading stories about wiring regulations and rhyme schemes. By closing time, they’re planning a zine titled “Live Wires,” and neither seems to feel they’ve crossed a border.
In Ashford Ley, the novelty of “the professor and the tech bloke back together” wears off in increments rather than headlines. Mrs Hall at the shop stops peering over her glasses when Rowan comes in with a satchel and mud on her boots, merely jerking her chin toward the shelf where a copy of the London Review of Books waits tucked behind gossip magazines and lottery slips. The same shelf quietly sprouts Ben’s preferred brand of chocolate digestives after he grumbles once about “the terrible ones” while paying for milk; thereafter, a packet appears as predictably as sunrise. At The King’s Arms, the bar staff learn that if Rowan is scribbling in a notebook and Ben is half‑inside a wiring diagram on his tablet, they’re as likely to order another round as they are to start an impromptu debate about rural broadband policy or land‑use planning with anyone who’ll listen: or foolishly contradict them. The locals roll their eyes, argue back, and, without quite meaning to, start asking questions about upload speeds and who really owns what around here.
Their weeks fall into a pattern that feels improvised yet dependable. On days when Rowan is running a workshop in the garden, Ben schedules his loudest work in outbuildings, appearing at the end with flasks of coffee and tales of temperamental routers; on her city‑teaching days, he front‑loads site visits so he can be back in time to walk down for the late train, boots scuffing in companionable silence before spilling over, as ever, into talk. They develop a habit of debriefing on the lane between the estate and the village. She talking through an interview with a housekeeper about “how it used to be,” he mulling over whether to hire another apprentice from the next village over, or whether that fibre run will upset the parish council: so that by the time they reach the cottage, the sharp edges of the day have mostly been spoken out loud and rearranged into something they can both carry.
By degrees, the tidy line between “their two worlds” smudges into something more like a shared, if oddly shaped, sphere. Rowan’s visiting students find themselves stacking chairs after a local history talk because the village hall needs clearing for choir practice; Ben’s junior technician is roped into a late‑night row about class tourism with two resident filmmakers who’d come for “authentic rural material” and instead acquired an education. When a power cut rolls through in a January storm, it’s Ben’s quietly modernised circuitry that keeps the main house and a stubborn corner of Ashford Ley glowing, and Rowan who drafts the wry, precise notice about phases, circuits, and “the caprices of eighteenth‑century masonry” that goes up in the shop window. The story people start to tell, at the estate, in the pub, and in the residents’ newsletter chain‑emails that now occasionally cite her work, is less about a faded big house clinging on, and more about a small, intricate ecosystem where technology, scholarship, and local habit have learned to lean, argue, and ultimately depend on one another.
Tamsin notices, one misty Monday, that the ache between her shoulders has dulled. It takes her a while to believe it. At first she assumes she has simply gone numb in some new and creative way, but when she rolls her neck the familiar bolt of pain fails to appear. Her inbox still thrums with spreadsheets, grant proposals, and cautiously worded enquiries from curators and academics who would like to “activate the site’s latent narratives,” as if Ashdown Court were a sulky teenager. Yet the panic has gone out of them.
The residencies run to a rhythm now: arrival days with controlled chaos and misplaced suitcases; long, quiet weeks where the house seems to exhale; occasional public events that swell and then recede without leaving scorch marks on the calendar. Thanks to Ben’s systems (and a discreet app icon on her phone) a burst pipe is a ticket in a queue, attached to photos and a status update, not a midnight sprint in pyjamas with a torch and a prayer. The boilers have personalities rather than vendettas. Lighting schedules hum away in the background, predictable as tides.
She notices small, treasonous signs of surplus attention. She looks up from her laptop and registers that the view from the office window has shifted from bare branches to a faint haze of green. She hears birdsong instead of just the ping of incoming mail. One evening she closes the estate ledger and realises she is not behind, for once, but almost imperceptibly ahead.
Rowan, of course, pounces. “We should mark the end of the pilot season,” she says, appearing in the office doorway with an air of faux-casual determination. “Dinner. Actual dinner. No agenda, no minutes, no strategic objectives.”
Tamsin’s first instinct is to say she has budgets to finalise, trustees to mollify, a roof repair to schedule. Instead she hears herself agreeing, provided they “at least glance at next quarter’s numbers.” Rowan rolls her eyes and shepherds her away from the desk as if handling skittish livestock.
They end up in a low-lit corner of The King’s Arms, jackets shrugged off, the estate at a deliberate arm’s length. The first glass of wine goes down with the guilty fizz of truancy. By the second, they are no longer talking about occupancy rates or access paths but about their grandparents: her grandfather who refused to install central heating on principle; Rowan’s grandmother who smuggled paperbacks into chapel and was caught every time.
Somewhere between a story about an escaped pony in the rose garden and Rowan’s impression of a particularly pompous visiting don, Tamsin hears a stranger’s voice say, “I don’t actually know what I’d do with a weekend off.” It takes her a disconcerting moment to recognise it as her own.
Rowan only lifts an eyebrow, the way she does when a seminar participant has finally stumbled on the thesis of their paper. “You could find out,” she says lightly, as if suggesting a new brand of tea rather than a small revolution.
The idea hangs there, reckless and weightless. Tamsin tries, automatically, to list the reasons it is impossible. Trustees’ reports. Contractor schedules. The superstition that the house itself will sulk if left unsupervised. Underneath all that, a quieter fear: if she steps away and nothing collapses, what does that say about the last decade of vigilance?
Rowan, apparently hearing none of that and all of it, changes the subject to sea walks and second-hand bookshops in places where no one knows your surname. Tamsin laughs it off, but later, back at her desk, she catches herself opening a browser tab and typing in “coastal B&B, off-season.”
The experiment comes on a wet April Friday when the sky has settled into one unbroken sheet of grey and even the lime trees look resigned. At four o’clock, an hour she usually regards as mid‑afternoon rather than any kind of end, Tamsin shuts her laptop. Not just closes the lid, but waits for the screen to die, as if it might argue. She sets an out‑of‑office that reads, after three abortive drafts, “Away from email until Monday. For urgent estate matters, please contact Ben Carter.” The sentence makes her wince. Urgent estate matters. Ben Carter. She hits save before she can change her mind and walks out of the office without taking her usual, reflexive glance at the boiler panel.
The drive to the Devon coast feels illicit, like bunking off school in a very expensive car. Her phone lives in the cup holder, screen arcing to life with every minor notification; her eyes flick to it at every lay-by, fingers hovering over Ben’s name, composing absurd check‑ins (“Still there?” “Everything functional?”) and erasing them.
The first evening in the quiet B&B, with gulls shrieking outside and the radiator ticking, she keeps her phone facedown on the bedside table, picking it up every few minutes anyway to check for disaster. There is none. A spam offer from a stationery supplier. A photo from Keira’s latest shoot, flung into the family group chat and politely ignored. No burst pipes, no trustees’ alarms.
On the second morning she wakes far later than she meant to, to a pale wash of sea light on whitewashed walls and the low hiss of waves beyond the window. For a disorienting second she thinks the power has gone at Ashdown, because her phone is blessedly dark and silent. Then she remembers: out‑of‑office. Delegation. Experiment. She reaches for the phone, sees no missed calls, no frantic messages, and begins to laugh, short, incredulous, then properly, helplessly, at the unfamiliar sensation of nothing, absolutely nothing, demanding her.
By Sunday afternoon, guilt and habit gang up on her. She caves, thumbing out a text with the briskness of someone pretending not to care: “Nothing has fallen down yet, has it?”
The three pulsing dots appear, vanish, return. Then her screen fills with Ben’s photo: Ashdown Court at dusk, the house held in a soft, improbable gold. The windows burn with steady light; the scaffolding, for once, is out of frame. His caption reads: “All still standing. Even my inbox. Go look at the sea.”
Sitting on the narrow B&B bed, shoes still on, Tamsin feels a knot she has carried since her twenties loosen a fraction, then another. She flips her phone to silent, steps into the smell of salt and wet stone, and walks the headland with her hands in her pockets and no itinerary but the next turn, the next gust of wind, the next indifferent wave.
When Keira’s relocated series finally airs, the estate gathers around laptops and pub televisions out of a tangle of loyalty, nosiness, and faint dread. The new house, all marble atriums, infinity pools and helipads, looks impressive but curiously airless; arguments flare exactly on cue, hashtags bloom and subside, and Keira’s smile, though dazzling, never quite reaches her eyes. Ben notices the cutaways to imported sheep and rented “locals” and feels, irrationally, protective of their own muddy fields. On her next visit to Ashdown she arrives without a camera crew, slipping into the kitchen for tea with a kind of practiced nonchalance that fools no one, least of all the housekeeper who wordlessly puts the good biscuits within reach. Conversation with Tamsin is stilted at first, queries about occupancy rates countered with remarks about audience share, but there is a flicker of recognition when they both roll their eyes at a producer’s note about “leaning harder into ancestral ghosts,” as if either of them had time to stage‑manage the dead.
Over a series of brief, unspectacular encounters: an estates meeting squeezed between Keira’s shoots, a rain‑soaked walk where they both complain about contract clauses, a coffee taken standing up in the boot room while a director shrieks down the phone: their hostility cools into something like pragmatic alliance. Tamsin learns to treat Keira not as a threat but as another overworked woman caught between family and public image; Keira, watching residents debate land use in the converted stable block and hearing Ben speak about “reducing friction” with a seriousness that has nothing to do with ratings, begins to understand why Ashdown refused to be just a backdrop. Down in the village, the narrative shifts as well: at the King’s Arms, gruff regulars who once muttered about “television nonsense up the hill” now point out visiting fellows and writers with a possessive kind of pride, claiming them as evidence that their odd corner of the world has become, somehow, a place where serious work gets done.
The cottage’s slow transformation happens almost by accident, the way ivy takes a wall without anyone quite remembering when it started. One weekend they clear a corner of the sitting room so Rowan can spread out interview transcripts, print‑outs, notebooks, a small avalanche of coloured Post‑its, promising they’ll put everything away before bed. They do not. The following Friday, Ben stubs his toe on the collapsing side table that’s meant to be hosting her laptop and, after swearing with feeling, quietly orders a sturdier second‑hand one online “because that wobbly thing’s a health hazard and I’m fond of your kneecaps.”
The box arrives three days later; assembling it involves an Allen key, two mugs of tea, and an argument about whether the instructions constitute “patriarchal flat‑pack propaganda.” By the end of the afternoon the table is up, the transcripts are in orderly piles, and a power strip has sneakily appeared so she no longer has to trail extensions from the hallway.
Hooks go up by the door for their respective coats: her green wax jacket beside his battered navy one, a city trench squeezed in between for when she dashes to the station. A basket for shoes materialises below, then a second when they admit one is not enough. Shelves fill with overlapping books. Rural sociology next to network engineering manuals, ethnographies of land ownership leaning against guides to mesh networks and energy‑efficient boilers. Ben finds one of her field journals balanced on top of a router in his bag; she discovers a rolled‑up wiring schematic tucked among photocopies of eighteenth‑century estate records.
An old rug from Ben’s mum replaces the frayed runner in the hall, installed on a Sunday afternoon after a roast that somehow involves all the available pans. When his mother visits and sees it down, she says “So this is where it’s landed, then,” with a brisk nod that makes Rowan oddly shy and Ben unexpectedly hopeful.
Friends begin to say “your place” instead of “Rowan’s” or “Ben’s,” and neither of them bothers to correct it. The phrase settles into the beams and the chipped skirting boards, into the mugs that never quite match, into the way two sets of keys now live in the bowl by the door.
Practical conversations lace through domestic ones, the way steam curls around the kitchen light. While chopping vegetables and arguing, cheerfully, about who last bought milk, they sketch hypothetical months on the back of an old electricity bill: her teaching weeks shaded in green, his on‑site installations marked with messy blue crosses, days when one of them can reliably be home to sign for parcels or let the plumber in. The paper grows crowded with arrows and question marks.
A joke about needing “his and hers Gantt charts” becomes less a joke when Ben fetches his laptop and Rowan, with theatrical sighs about late capitalism invading the stew, brings hers to the table. By dessert they are configuring shared project boards and calendars, colour‑coding deadlines and travel days, adding recurring events: Ash Brook walks, pub quiz nights, call Mum.
It is, unmistakably, the kind of nerdy co‑planning that once belonged only to their separate professional lives. Yet here, surrounded by mismatched mugs and the smell of garlic, it feels less like work and more like quietly drawing the outline of a shared future.
Offers and invitations arrive in flurries, like weather fronts sweeping through their inboxes. A London producer wants Rowan on a panel about class and countryside, “We love your take on authenticity,” the email gushes, on the same weekend Ben’s been pencilled in to re‑survey Ashdown’s ancient wiring. A Scottish estate rings to ask if he can oversee a full digital overhaul, “ideally on‑site for three months,” while Rowan is staring at a glossy brochure for a visiting professorship in Canada that makes her stomach twist with equal parts temptation and dread.
Each time, they end up at the small kitchen table with mugs of tea going cold and the shared calendar open between them, teasing out contingencies, Could we commute that? What would it mean for the cottage lease? For Mum? For the book? For the local team? The conversations stretch and loop, full of scribbled pros and cons, until they reach the same quiet conclusion: they are willing to travel, stretch, bargain with time zones and train timetables. But not to uproot entirely, not to turn this life into a lay‑over.
The question of marriage arrives sideways rather than in any orchestrated moment. Halfway through a dull insurance form, they run up against a tick‑box that assumes either separation or legal union, and Rowan snorts at the lack of nuance, muttering about liminal states and bureaucratic imagination. Later, walking back from The Old Forge beneath a sky hazy with stars and the distant spill of light from the big house, Ben mentions (almost off‑hand) that it might be simpler, administratively, “if we made some of this official one day.” She bats the idea back with a wry line about romance reduced to paperwork and premiums, but neither of them laughs it off, and neither of them, notably, changes the subject.
Out here, with the village lanterns pricking on one by one and the green settling into shadow, the talk that began as theory turns practical. They pick over other people’s mistakes. Couples who moved for one career and never quite moved back, families who “meant to” return. Against that, they set their own rough terms: big choices must be argued through over this table, walked out along the Ash Brook, held up against the shape of the cottage, the needs of the estate, the tug of ageing parents and half‑adopted neighbours. It is less a rule than a habit they are already rehearsing: checking in, recalibrating, refusing the easy story that says love automatically goes where work leads. When the glasses are finally empty and the air smells of cut grass and distant woodsmoke, the notion of “later” feels less like a far horizon than the ground already firming under their feet as they cross the road together.
They step out into the spill of evening, the pub door swinging to behind them with a soft thud and a last wash of warmth and noise. Outside, the air is cooler, edged with damp stone and woodsmoke, the faint sweetness of something floral still clinging on in the planters under the windows. Ben shifts both glasses into one hand so he can shoulder the door properly, then passes Rowan her pint with a small, unconscious check of the level: as if she were likely to complain if he’d taken an extra mouthful on the way out.
The landlord gives them an absent, proprietorial nod from behind the bar hatch, already reaching for the blue roll; they’ve been here often enough, these last months, to be part of the furniture, the couple who colonise the corner table with spreadsheets and library books and arguments about VAT. Tonight, mercifully, both laptops are zipped away. A pair of teenagers on bikes rattle over the uneven tarmac toward the lane, brakes squeaking, one of them letting out a yell as he swerves too close to the kerb. Their laughter spikes, then thins and disappears down toward the green, folded into the soft, cooling dusk.
Rowan pauses just beyond the pub’s hanging sign, feeling the shift in temperature on her cheeks. She tugs the borrowed Barbour closer around her. The sleeves are too long; she pushes them back with the heel of her hand.
“Cold?” he asks, already knowing the answer, the question more ritual than inquiry.
“Only theatrically,” she says. “For atmosphere.”
He huffs a quiet laugh and steers her the few steps across to the weathered table beneath the sign, his palm coming to rest, briefly, at the small of her back. There is no grand gesture in it, no performance for the benefit of the two men smoking by the side door or the dog tied up under the bench; it’s simply the way his body has relearned hers, the way they navigate narrow pavements and crowded trains and the unpredictable temper of village traffic. He nudges her toward the bench with that same familiar, wordless ease, as if arranging them both at this table were as natural and fixed a part of the landscape as the leaning church tower or the oak on the green.
She slides onto the bench, the old wood cool through her skirt, and tilts her head back for a moment to watch the sky bruising from mauve to ink. Ben settles opposite, stretching his legs out until his boots bracket hers under the table, casual and proprietorial all at once. The hanging sign above them creaks as it shifts in a faint breeze, the painted stag and crown rocking gently, and somewhere inside the pub the low murmur of conversation lifts into the first, stray line of a song.
From here, the valley unrolls itself in deepening blues and pearled greys, as if someone has quietly turned the world’s volume down a notch. Mist has begun to pool along the line of the Ash Brook, not yet a blanket so much as a low, hesitant cloud feeling its way around the willows and over the grazing meadows. Beyond the dark, clipped hedges at the edge of the green, the steady drone of a tractor rises and falls, working the last streaks of usable light out of the fields; its headlamps sweep briefly across a gate, a flash of white wood and metal before dipping away again.
Over the huddled rooftops, Ashdown Court’s upper windows blink on one by one. They no longer read, to Ben, as a stage set waiting for its cue, but as the quiet, irregular pulse of a place in use: a desk lamp tilted over an open notebook; the pale oblong of the library; the top-floor corridor where residency rooms have been carved from old servants’ quarters. Somewhere up there a visiting botanist is still bent over soil samples and maps; in another eyrie, a poet who arrived with three suitcases and no internet presence is pacing out a stubborn line. In the east wing, Tamsin’s office lamp holds steady, a small, unwavering square of gold, proof that she is obeying their hard-bargained compromise and finishing late from home, not from her desk.
Behind them, The King’s Arms exhales warmth and sound each time the door swings on its stiff hinges: clink of glasses, a burst of laughter, the scrape of chairs over flagstone, someone calling for another round. Then, as the bell above the door jangles again, a voice inside lifts into an old folk song Rowan once collected for a paper, the tune threading out through the crack of light and into the cooling dark. She stills, then smiles into her glass, mouthing the next line before it’s sung. Under his breath, she follows with the one after that. Ben, who has heard the village mangle the chorus at enough harvest suppers to know his limits, hums along off‑key, cheerfully under her lead, content to let her carry the tune and the history both.
Their talk meanders with the lazy precision of people who no longer need to audition: a half-practical rundown of tomorrow, her interviews in the walled garden, his meeting with the electricians and the eternally baffled plumber, fraying into an argument about who makes the worse coffee, which somehow invokes three continents and a malfunctioning French press, and then dissolving into easy quiet. Ben stretches his legs until his boot finds hers and stays there, a small, steady pressure anchoring them both. Rowan tips sideways so her shoulder fits into the familiar notch beneath his, their bodies arranging themselves without discussion, as if they had been rehearsing this unshowy closeness for years and have finally reached opening night with no audience at all.
The village green lies behind them, scattered with the first serious fall of leaves; ahead, the lime avenue up to the house is only a suggestion now, an ink-dark line against the mist and the faint, hovering glow of the upper windows. Their laptops sit shut and forgotten between the pint rings on the table, the cursor lights long since timed out, while their joined hands rest openly beside them: unremarkable to anyone passing by, unmistakable to them as the centre of gravity they’ve chosen and recalibrated, again and again, in late-night conversations and small, stubborn concessions. Between estate and village, plans and unknowns, they sit until the chill finally reaches their bones, until Rowan’s teeth threaten to chatter and Ben’s breath feathers white, then rise together, fingers still linked, and walk home across the darkening green, cutting diagonally over the grass like people who know exactly where they’re going.