Today’s first minor crisis is waiting for her in the converted tack room that masquerades as Reception. The corporate guests are due at eleven; their organiser has already sent three emails about “seamless arrival experience” and one about “brand-aligned refreshments.” Sophie sets her coffee down beside the guest welcome packs (hand-tied with twine rather than ribbon, because apparently ribbon reads “wedding” and twine reads “authentic”) and wakes the ageing desktop with a firm tap to the tower.
The bookings spreadsheet loads at its usual glacial pace. While she waits, she scans the whiteboard she and Lucy re-lettered last month: this week’s yoga retreat in gentle teal, next week’s “Leadership Synergy Away Day” in a sterner navy. Under the latter, Lucy has, in smaller script, added: TRY NOT TO LET THEM BURN THE PLACE DOWN.
“Morning, boss.” Jess from the kitchen appears in the doorway, clutching a tray of sample canapés and looking both hopeful and murderous. “Can we talk about the vegan thing?”
“Which vegan thing?” Sophie asks, because there are always at least three.
“The one who’s also keto and doesn’t ‘believe’ in nightshades.”
“Of course she doesn’t,” Sophie mutters, then straightens the stack of branded folders. “Right. Swap the bruschetta for those little beetroot blinis, lose the tomato garnish, and tell Mark we’ll need extra avocado. I’ll magic it into the budget.”
Jess snorts. “If anyone can.”
When she’s gone, Sophie scans the day’s schedule again, pencil tapping against the margin. The numbers in the separate, password-protected spreadsheet in her laptop, Jack’s spreadsheet, really, float across her mind like mildly accusatory ghosts. Occupancy percentage. Catering costs. The projected shortfall if the winter bookings don’t materialise exactly as she’s told everyone they will.
She pushes the thought firmly away, picking up the welcome envelopes instead. Out loud, to the empty room, she says briskly, “We are absolutely on the up,” as if the walls need reminding. Then she squares her shoulders, pastes on her best country-house serenity, and goes to meet the florist who is, inevitably, already rearranging her plan.
In the service corridor behind the kitchen, she slips into a quiet choreography of greetings and course corrections, as practised as any sun salutation. She pauses by the linen cupboard to intercept Mrs Patel and her daughter, arms full of towels. “Can we bump the blue rug from the sitting room?” Sophie asks, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “The one with the hole big enough to swallow a regional manager?” A faint smile, a nod; crisis averted, no memo required.
Farther along, she falls into step with Kayla, the newest housekeeper, who is eyeing the closed door to the unused west wing as if it might breathe. “You hear it yet?” Sophie asks, tone light. “The tragic wails of dissatisfied aristocrats. Mainly about the lack of en-suites.” Kayla giggles, tension easing, and promises to show Sophie the TikTok she’s planning about “haunted heritage” later.
By the back door, leaning on his broom like a staff of office, Martin the groundsman frowns at a folded invoice. Sophie touches his arm. “I’ve spoken to Accounts. This week, I promise.” He searches her face, then nods once. Her accent softens on the thank you; her boots never quite stop moving, squeaking faintly on the worn flagstones as she pushes the whole fragile enterprise on.
The kitchen is a low-ceilinged bustle of clattering pans and steam when she ducks in, shoulders damp with mist and clipboard held like a shield. Mark is at the range, red-faced and muttering about “another lot of oat‑milk pilgrims come to worship at the altar of chia.” He barely glances up as she slides the revised dietary list across the stainless‑steel counter.
“Don’t say ‘gluten journey’ to me, Soph. I’m fragile,” he warns.
“Perish the thought,” she says. “How about a deal? Fewer canapés tonight if you can conjure dairy‑free puddings for tomorrow’s enlightenment.”
They spar over budgets, suppliers, and the metaphysical properties of coconut cream. By the time she backs out through the swing door, she’s secured a workable menu and an extra tray of scones “for your bloody yogis,” as he mutters, already reaching for the mixing bowl, secretly pleased.
In the makeshift office off the drawing room, the illusion of country‑house ease falls away under the harsh glare of her second‑hand desk lamp. Sophie sinks into the sagging chair, taps the sulking printer in a half‑playful threat, and wakes her colour‑coded spreadsheets: occupancy in hopeful green, outstanding invoices in accusatory red, a narrow column of projections glowing in defiant yellow. Between batting back three enquiry emails and coaxing a stranded London yoga instructor onto a later train, she nudges the week’s cash‑flow forecast by a few painful pounds, tells herself it will all look better once the autumn wellness series lands, and very deliberately does not open Jack’s more brutal version of the numbers.
By mid‑morning she is back on her feet, phone wedged between shoulder and ear as she strides from office to barn, assuring a fretful HR manager that yes, there are enough breakout spaces, and no, their precious middle managers will not be traumatised by contact with the general public. She loops through the converted stables to verify that “seasonal wildflowers” are not, as last month, three heroic daisies in a jam jar, and that the Wi‑Fi booster’s fickle little light is actually green. A duvet is smoothed, a crooked print levelled with a practised thumb, a stray branded pen palmed before it can ruin the aesthetic. To the arriving guests she is all bright jumper and calm tour patter, rural competence incarnate; beneath the smile she is counting towels, sockets, and minutes, feeling how one late delivery or blown fuse could pull the whole day’s routine loose at the seams.
By late morning, the estate settles into its stitched‑together rhythm: soft mindfulness chimes drifting from the barn‑turned‑yoga hall, kettlebells thudding a counterpoint on the lower lawn, and the delicate clink of teacups on mismatched china in the conservatory. Somewhere, a woodpigeon contributes a morose bass line. Sophie moves between it all like a slightly harried conductor whose orchestra has not entirely agreed on the same piece of music.
At the back door she executes the now‑automatic changeover from muddy boots to indoor trainers, toe‑heel, toe‑heel, while still talking into her headset about “outcomes” and “team cohesion.” The moment she pushes into the cool stone corridor, her voice softens by a full octave. Corporate away‑day vocabulary stays by the boot rack; in here it is all “unwinding” and “holding space.”
She slips into the barn on the tail end of a sun salutation, easing the door shut so the old hinges don’t add an unsolicited gong to the sound bath. Twenty‑three mats, she notes in a glance; one less than on her spreadsheet. Late arrival from Paddington, she remembers, mentally moving an extra fruit bowl to the guest who will almost certainly need it. Emergency exits: one clear, one half‑blocked by an overly enthusiastic arrangement of pampas grass. She nudges the vase aside with her foot as the facilitator murmurs something about “releasing what no longer serves you.” If only, she thinks, moving the fire extinguisher so it’s visible.
By the time she reaches the lower lawn, she’s back to brisk, upbeat cadence, greeting a red‑faced manager in Lycra as if this is the most natural place in the world for him to be humiliated in front of his subordinates. She checks the spacing of kettlebells against the sprinkler heads and silently recites the risk assessment while laughing at a joke about “boot camp” versus “boot‑licking.”
In the conservatory, the air smells of damp stone, Earl Grey, and very expensive anxiety. She swaps to her softest smile, repositions a nervous guest away from a draught, and files her away in the mental grid: dairy‑free, conflict‑avoidant, likely to ask for a late checkout. Every person becomes a cluster of variables (fire exits, food, Wi‑Fi neediness, emotional volatility) constantly updating in her head like a quieter, more insistent version of the booking software.
On the surface, she appears to be merely pouring tea. Underneath, she is juggling a live estate‑wide spreadsheet, willing all the moving parts to stay just, just this side of chaos.
The midweek wellness guests are the easiest: on paper, at least. They arrive in breathable fabrics and anxious politeness, clutching reusable water bottles and ethically sourced notebooks as if both are part of the curriculum. They speak in low, well‑intentioned tones about burnout and boundaries, grateful for herbal tea, a quiet corner, and any sentence that contains the word “reset.” They drift in slow, purposeful shoals between yoga, journalling, and “guided reflections,” leaving neatly rinsed mugs by the sink and shoes stacked in unsmiling pairs that look as though they’ve never met mud.
Sophie matches their tempo, softening her consonants to blend with the facilitators’ gentle-voiced patter. She promises “space to decompress” and “time away from the noise,” all the while calculating how many of them could be persuaded into a follow‑up retreat, a corporate booking, a “bring your team next quarter” conversation before the end of the tax year. To them she offers lavender pillows and compassion; in her head she is colour‑coding their lanyards into future income streams, translating every grateful nod into a provisional line on a spreadsheet.
Weekends, though, insist on being gloriously untidy. The midweek hush gives way to small weddings that leak out of their allotted photo slots and into golden hour, writers’ workshops that colonise every plug socket and half the extension leads, and corporate away‑days whose trust exercises test not only patience but the plumbing and, once, a load‑bearing beam. By Friday lunchtime she has to spin the estate from soft‑focus sanctuary to “versatile events venue” in under three hours: fairy lights stress‑tested, extra loos flushed in sequence, extension cables snaked discreetly beneath threadbare Persian rugs and labelled in Lucy’s neat, judgemental handwriting. When a coach arrives forty minutes early or a bride’s aunt redrafts the seating plan, Sophie smiles, nods, and quietly rewrites three separate timetables on her phone, fingers moving as quickly as her brain.
Her days blur into a loop of micro‑negotiations and invisible triage: shifting room allocations when a couple materialises a night early, sweet‑talking a facilitator stranded between Swindon and here, rerouting a meditation session to the orchard when the Wi‑Fi in the stables chooses a crucial Zoom presentation to expire. Staff absorb the choreography by osmosis: housekeeping flipping the stables with military briskness, the groundsman plotting mower routes against “sound‑sensitive” sessions, the part‑time receptionist cleaving to a phone script Sophie revises weekly to sound both reassuringly selective and, if she’s honest, very slightly pleading.
It works, just. So long as the calendar looks plump and nobody utters the word “overheads” in a tone Jack would recognise from a client meeting. On paper it’s “boutique charm”; in reality it’s doors that require persuasive hips and showers that sulk in cold water. Guests call it “authentic,” “unspoilt,” and Sophie smiles, banking their misinterpretation as capital. She files away each five‑star review like collateral against the conversation she knows is coming, when Jack will arrive with spreadsheets and phrases such as “cashflow pressure” and “unsustainable trajectory,” and the hairline cracks will be subjected to his polite, unblinking audit.
On the first Thursday of the month, Sophie times the kettle almost to Jack’s taxi, listening for the crunch of tyres on gravel the way other people listen for the shipping forecast. She shoves a tottering pile of sample brochures and a vase of dying tulips to one side of the office desk, exposing just enough wood to imply order, then swipes a rogue biscuit crumb into her palm as his footsteps sound in the corridor.
He appears in the doorway. Creased shirt from the train, tie already loosened, laptop bag cutting a determined diagonal into his shoulder, printouts tucked under one arm. There is always that same momentary pause as he takes in the room, like a surveyor assessing structural integrity. Then the small, apologetic smile; the glance towards the same wobbly chair whose imminent replacement she has promised, theatrically, at least six times.
“Still standing,” he remarks, nodding at it.
“Like the British economy,” she replies. “Held together by denial and hope.” She talks over the scrape of its legs on the floor with a stream of bright commentary about full weekends, waitlists, and a suspiciously healthy uptick in corporate enquiries. By the time he sits, she has pressed a mug of tea into his hand as if caffeine can shore up the numbers, or at least make them more pliable.
He sets his stack of printouts down with the care of a priest laying out liturgy. She notes, automatically, the new colour of the folder tabs and files that away in the mental drawer labelled Things We Are Not Going To Panic About Today. While he pulls out his laptop and the charger that never quite reaches the nearest socket, she stretches the extension lead from under the desk with her toe, making a joke about health and safety to cover the tiny hitch in her breath.
They exchange the usual pleasantries, his train was late, her plumber was earlier than morality allowed, each one a courteous prelude to the real reason he is here, waiting patiently between them in black and white.
The meetings settle into their now‑ritualised steps, a kind of financial minuet conducted over lukewarm tea and the faint hum of the ancient radiator. Jack begins, always, with the numbers: line items marshalled in orderly columns, calm references to “cash‑flow pressure” and “short‑term liquidity,” his finger following the incremental rise of utilities, insurance, oil deliveries, the mysterious category of “urgent repairs” that never quite goes away. Sophie answers with colour. Highlighters bloom across her printed calendar; she brandishes enquiries from a yoga collective in Bristol, a leadership retreat that “loves the authenticity,” an as‑yet‑unconfirmed mindfulness festival that, if it materialises, might plug an entire quarter on its own.
They circle the darker territory. Overdraft extension becomes “breathing space.” Staff cuts are recast as “flexibility” and “seasonal adjustment.” Maintenance deferrals are “phasing.” Neither of them says what happens if the festival cancels, if corporate retreats decide the Wi‑Fi is too temperamental, if one more boiler gives up in a cold snap. Instead, they negotiate in percentages and contingencies, each privately testing the fault lines, how far payroll will stretch, how thin hospitality can be pared, before the whole delicate performance tips from improvisation into collapse.
When the sums grow too tight to ignore, Jack clears his throat, suggests a break, and escapes into the house under the pretext of “stretching his legs.” He moves through half‑stripped corridors and polished drawing rooms with the same measured gaze he turns on spreadsheets, noting peeling cornices and freshly buffed side tables with equal detachment. In the back hall he pauses to chat with the housekeeper about linen orders, letting her enthuse about thread counts and “future spa packages,” then listens while a gardener, hat in hand, explains which ornamental beds could be turned into a productive kitchen garden for retreat groups. Jack nods, pockets details, registers the gaps on the rota pinned above the staff kettle. Potential clings to every uneven flagstone (photo‑ready vistas, underused outbuildings, narratives begging for a brochure) yet each new idea lands against an inward flinch, because the ledger on his laptop carries a colder arithmetic than the benign sunlight on the terrace, and he is already calculating which of these dreams might be quietly unsustainable.
Lucy’s arrivals puncture the month with a different sort of energy: a car door slam, a gust of city air and burnt‑coffee fragrance as she shoulders into the kitchen with an overnight bag, a stack of proofs, and some remark about “heritage dust” clogging her lungs. Within an hour she has annexed the long table, laptop open, sketchbook splayed, redrafting brochure headlines while muttering about serif choices, rural fantasy, and “weaponised whimsy.” Her banter with Sophie is fast and barbed. Warnings about “charming disasters in expensive boots” flicked between them as casually as biscuits, jabs at influencer culture softened by shared grins. Yet when Sophie dashes off to greet guests, Lucy is the one quietly straightening cushions, evicting wilting flowers, nudging candles into better sightlines and framing shots on her phone until the estate matches, at least on screen, the dream they are selling.
On the edges of this monthly rhythm, Thomas moves like a shadow through his own narrow orbit. Jack might glimpse him crossing the courtyard with a crate of turpentine and canvases, offering only a curt nod before disappearing along the gravel path to the walled garden; Lucy occasionally finds him at the dining table, sleeves rolled, making a mordant remark about the way evening light flattens everyone’s faces and exposes bad paintwork. His interventions are brief, precise: an aside about how the old barn’s beams catch dusk, a dry suggestion that the new signage ruins the line of a wall, a muttered query as to why anyone would hang fairy lights where the stone does the work alone: then he withdraws to his studio, leaving behind an unsettled awareness that someone is watching the estate’s transformation with a painter’s eye and a recluse’s reluctance to be part of it, as if he is recording a slow, inevitable portrait he has no intention of signing.
The arrival of “Miles Devon” slots almost too neatly into this low‑level strain, like a new line item on an already crowded budget. Sophie meets him with her practised brightness even as, behind her eyes, numbers begin to march.
Suite three, she thinks automatically, the one with the working radiator and the view that makes people forgive the seventies carpet on the landing. Three extra hours for housekeeping, two for laundry; increased boiler usage if he takes long showers (and men in tasteful cashmere usually do); another breakfast to magic out of a food order she has already trimmed twice. The phrase “consultancy fee” hovers, politely unmentioned, over his leather overnight bag.
She tells herself that a modernisation expert is exactly what they need. This is what progress looks like: a discreet professional with a laptop and neutral jumpers, not some rescue fantasy in the form of a television crew or a reality series. “We’re really glad to have you,” she hears herself say, and decides that if she says it with enough conviction it might become true.
But she notices the way the housekeeper’s knuckles whiten slightly on a basket of folded towels when Miles asks, in that mild, courteous tone, how many rooms are “currently commercially viable.” She catches the groundsman’s jaw tighten as Miles stands in the half‑converted barn, gaze travelling up the old beams, down the rough flooring, out through the wide doors to the lawns beyond, and says something about “optimising event throughput” and “alternative configurations.”
Staff who usually breeze through his sort, London men with opinions and weekend bags, move differently around him. Conversation thins when his footsteps sound in a corridor. People straighten paperwork that didn’t need straightening, wipe surfaces that are already clean. His questions are never quite hostile, but they land like preliminary measurements: square footage, head counts, energy costs, capacity limits. Weighing. Valuing.
Jack watches from his accustomed place at the edge of things, hands in his pockets, expression politely bland. He has spent enough time in meeting rooms with men like this to recognise the particular concentration on Miles’s face as he leafs through the estate’s spreadsheets at the kitchen table, turning each page with a careful finger. It is not idle curiosity; it is assessment. There is no malice in it, only the steady, trained detachment of someone used to deciding fates from a distance and then catching a train back to town in time for another appointment.
In the gaps between Miles’s neutral questions, about occupancy rates, maintenance backlogs, insurance, access rights, Jack hears the muffled echo of phrases he has been, until now, careful not to voice aloud. “Rationalising the asset base.” “Unlocking tied‑up value.” Subdivision, long leases, partial sales; one wing spun off as luxury flats, the stable block leased long‑term to a wellness brand with nicer towels and more reliable plumbing.
Sophie hears something too, though she refuses to name it. She leans over his shoulder to point out a line on the budget where she is absolutely certain income will improve “once the spring packages land,” talks about loyalty programmes and repeat bookings as if confidence alone could turn red figures black. Miles listens, nods, jots down a note that is probably, she thinks uncharitably, just a more elegant spelling of “wishful thinking.”
By the time he closes the laptop with a quiet click, the room feels a degree colder, though the boiler has not yet noticed. The strain that had been humming just beneath the estate’s surface hasn’t increased, exactly; it has simply acquired a clearer outline, as if someone has taken a pencil to the faint sketch of their future and begun, with professional care, to ink it in.
Around the big kitchen table, where retreats are plotted between mugs of tea and half‑eaten slices of lemon drizzle, conversation acquires a faint, awkward lean whenever Miles’s role drifts too near. Sophie, with her organiser’s smile firmly in place, calls him “a fresh pair of eyes” in the same bright tone she uses for “minor snag” and “slight overdraft,” as if rebranding the worry might trim it into something manageable. Lucy, hunched over layout proofs, doesn’t bother to look up when she mutters about “management consultants in tasteful knitwear” and “PowerPoint in human form,” her pen scoring darker lines through a heading every time the word “strategy” is mentioned.
Even Thomas, emerging in paint‑spattered jumper to forage for coffee, stalls when he hears “advisor.” His expression flickers, recognition, distaste, a private catalogue of galleries and patrons “advised” into profitable mistakes, before he retreats with his mug, leaving behind the faint smell of turpentine and disapproval.
No one asks too precisely who engaged Miles, or what his terms are. They talk about “options,” “ideas,” “just seeing what’s possible.” The unspoken knowledge hangs in the warm kitchen air like steam from the kettle, briefly fogging the windows before disappearing, conveniently, from view.
Miles himself moves through the estate with a professional calm that only deepens the unease, like a surveyor taking measurements no one quite remembers asking for. He listens more than he speaks, head tipped slightly, pen poised, making notes in a discreet leather notebook while Sophie outlines her plans for weddings in the orchard and corporate retreats by the lake, her hands sketching hopeful futures in the air. He praises her vision in a way that sounds unnervingly like a preface, asks for occupancy figures, then falls silent at certain numbers, the pause saying more than any criticism.
Later, walking the overgrown edge of the walled garden with Jack, boots soaking through long grass, his cool questions about “non‑core assets” and “redevelopment potential” trail Jack long after they part, like the memory of a valuation no one wanted but now cannot unhear.
In smaller, more intimate moments, the strain shows as frayed patience and careful omissions. A housemaid jokes that if Miles likes them he might “save our jobs,” then laughs too quickly, as if to file it under banter rather than fear. Lucy, in the tiny office, rolling her chair between printer and desk, rolls her eyes at yet another email from a wellness facilitator demanding a “more aspirational aesthetic,” and almost types a reply pointing out that aspiration doesn’t pay electricians or roofers or the man who unblocks the drains. She deletes it, sends a blandly professional response instead, then spends an extra unpaid hour smoothing the design, nudging kerning and colour balance as if cleaner lines and better branding alone might hold off the kind of recommendations Miles is clearly here to make: and the cuts everyone is pretending not to picture.
Evenings that once ended with shared wine and loose talk now settle into a more careful quiet, the laughter thinning before the second bottle is opened. Sophie still spreads spreadsheets across the dining table after guests have gone to bed, but snaps her laptop shut at the creak of a floorboard, unwilling to let anyone see the red‑highlighted cells or the tab labelled “Overdraft Projections.” Jack catches the late train back to Birmingham with his jaw clenched, replaying Miles’s offhand comment about “exit strategies” and wondering whether he is being slowly manoeuvred toward the very decision he swore he wouldn’t take. In the guest wing, Miles lies awake in his immaculate room, tie folded with military precision on the chair, staring at the cracked plaster roses on the ceiling and listening to the old pipes tick and settle, feeling the weight of all the unasked, unanswered questions pressing in from the other side of the walls.
In staff meetings, when Miles gently steers the conversation toward “long‑term visions” and “succession planning,” Sophie feels the familiar prickle at the back of her neck and reaches, almost automatically, for the nearest deflection.
“Let’s start with surviving until Christmas, shall we?” she says, cheerful, tapping her pen against the table as if they are all in on the same harmless joke. “Then we can talk about what colour bunting we’d like for the ten‑year anniversary.”
She flips to a colour‑coded chart of upcoming wellness weekends with practised speed, the laminated spreadsheet a shield she knows how to wield. Teal for yoga, coral for corporate bookings, pale green for “creative residencies.” Columns march neatly across the page: projected occupancy, catering costs, linen turnarounds. Safe numbers. Near‑term, concrete, fixable. She talks quickly about waitlists and glowing online reviews, does not pause long enough for anyone, Miles with his careful pen, Jack with his furrowed brow, to ask what she wants in five years’ time. Wants is not a column. Wants does not balance.
Later, with the house slipping into the familiar creaks of night, she is alone in the kitchen with only the hum of the fridge for company. She stands barefoot on cold tiles, the overhead light too bright, its cone of yellow insisting on how tired she looks reflected in the dark window. The fridge door yawns open; she eats cold leftovers straight from the Tupperware with a fork, leaning over the sink because plates feel like commitment.
The silence presses in, thick as unspoken agenda items. Her mind, refusing the blank space, begins its usual trick: mentally allocating rooms. If she moves the yoga group to the converted barn in February, she can free the lake‑view suites for that tech start‑up retreat; the blue twin at the end of the corridor would suit the American novelist who travels with a dog; the half‑finished attic rooms could, with a lick of paint and two weekends of work, become a “writers’ loft” package.
She tours the house in her head, placing imaginary guests and future invoices, arranging other people’s temporary stays in rooms she has never allowed herself to imagine inhabiting for good. Each scenario tightens neatly, like well‑made beds. Each one keeps at bay the other, far less tidy flicker: a kitchen table with only one laptop on it; a Sunday morning without a checkout time; a life measured in something other than occupancy rates and seasonality.
The possibilities hover for a breath (shaky, formless) as if waiting to be acknowledged. Sophie snaps the fridge door shut. The light inside blinks out, and with it the fragile outline of any life but this one. She rinses the fork, stacks the empty container to re‑use, and tells herself, firmly, that what she wants is a fully booked spring. Everything else, sensibly, can wait.
On the late train back to Birmingham, Jack scrolls past work emails until the familiar subject line appears halfway down the list, as inevitable as the announcement for “the next station stop.” He taps it open. The offer is months old now, “Associate Director: revised package attached”, but the wording still has that blandly flattering weight. His thumb hovers over the thread, as it always does, before muscle memory steers it to Archive. Out of sight; never quite out of consequence.
He tells his colleagues it was “not the right fit,” cites “family obligations” with an apologetic shrug. Technically true, if one stretched the definition of family to include a draughty house, a tangle of inheritance clauses, and Sophie Carleton’s hopeful spreadsheets. The truth is less presentable: Hawthorn Grange has quietly become a second job, one he never applied for and cannot, apparently, resign from.
Out of habit, he opens a property app and thumbs through listings for neat city flats with secure entry systems and underfloor heating, all chrome taps and tiny balconies. He pictures himself in them, anonymous, efficient, scarcely leaving a trace, and feels, unexpectedly, not relief but a faint sense of fraud.
The tinny carriage speakers crackle to life, announcing connections onward to London, to places where people like him take promotions as a matter of course. Jack locks his screen as if the city itself might spill out, crowding his narrow table. He leans his head against the window, watching his own reflection blur into the dark, and decides (for tonight) not to imagine any cleaner escape route than the one that delivers him, reliably, back here.
When Sophie and Jack cross paths in the back corridor after a long day, she with a tottering stack of laundry bags, he with a lever-arch file splaying receipts like guilty confetti, their exchange barely grazes the surface.
“Did you survive the mindfulness lot?” he asks, stepping aside so she can edge past the laundry chute.
“Only just. They complained the wi‑fi was too fast to be truly restorative,” she says, bright, shifting the weight in her arms. “How was the train?”
“Late. Again. Good for my character.” His smile is wry, practised.
They touch on occupancy figures, the weather forecast, the promising noises from a corporate inquiry. The pause that follows is thick with what neither names: her dawning fear that she has quietly stitched her entire worth into stone that doesn’t belong to her, his growing suspicion that each “temporary” concession to the estate draws him further from the clean, anonymous life he once imagined. A flat with no history, weekends that belong to no one.
“We should actually catch up properly soon,” she says.
“Yeah. Soon,” he agrees.
Both offer quick, professional smiles and walk away in opposite directions, carrying, between them, most of the house’s unsaid sentences.
Lucy colonises the smallest table in the corner of the converted barn during events, back to the wall, nearest the exit, laptop and sketchbook spread like plausible deniability. When Miles or a guest sighs over the “romantic history” of Hawthorn Grange, she glances up, one eyebrow arched, and supplies a crisp rejoinder about “polished ruins for hire” and “heritage‑washed capitalism.” The laughter that follows is easy, appreciative; nobody asks why the phrases they coo over land in her chest with the exact weight of shouted Sunday‑lunch accusations in a North London semi. She books her return train as soon as the schedule allows, her calendar diligently overfilled with other commissions she can point to as proof of indispensability, not admission that staying longer here might dislodge something she’s worked very hard to keep neatly, safely numb.
Sometimes, doing her final rounds with a torch and a clipboard, Sophie pauses on the landing and feels the floor tilt, just a fraction, under the weight of it all. If she opened those boxes, hung those uniforms, printed those welcome packs, she would be admitting this might be permanent. Easier, for now, to let potential gather dust where no guest ever looks.
The unasked questions Sophie reopens
On Wednesdays, the retreat timetable prescribed “silent reflection by the lake” from seven until eight, which in practice meant couples meandering along the lawn murmuring in low, contented voices and the occasional solo guest journalling furiously on a bench. It also meant that, at ten past seven on this particular evening, Sophie found herself pinned for a moment between what she carried and what she refused to.
She had come to the drawing room doors with a tray of herbal tea and gluten‑free biscuits, hip nudging the handle, already composing in her head the follow‑up email to the organic supplier who had sent fennel instead of chamomile. Beyond the glass, a man and a woman from the mindfulness group wandered towards the lake, heads inclined together. His hand drifted to the small of her back without ceremony; she leaned into the touch as casually as if she had always known where his hand would be.
Sophie stopped. The tray’s weight bit into the crook of her fingers. The sight, unremarkable, domestic, the sort of thing her marketing copy called “effortless connection”, struck against a memory she had cordoned off so thoroughly it sometimes felt hypothetical.
Another terrace, not honeyed Cotswold stone but red brick warmed by July heat. Her then‑boyfriend, fiancé, technically, though she had started to detest the word’s smug roundness, standing with his hands shoved into his pockets as if to keep from reaching for her.
“You love this place more than you’ll ever love me,” he had said, with a half‑laugh that wasn’t one. The “place” in question had been a city restaurant she was trying to save, spreadsheets spread over their kitchen table at midnight, his patience wearing as thin as the margins.
She had replied something sensible about opportunity and timing and not throwing away everything she’d worked for. He had replied with silence and, eventually, a ring left on the windowsill.
Outside Hawthorn’s French doors, the couple’s shoulders brushed in that same absent‑minded intimacy. Sophie’s throat tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the steam rising from the peppermint teapot.
Three heartbeats then she blinked hard, unhooked the tray from the past and set it down on the nearest occasional table with a clatter just shy of careless. A biscuit slid, arrested at the rim. She rescued it with exaggerated precision, as if overcompensating for a clumsiness no one had seen.
Her phone was already in her other hand, thumb waking the screen. The comfort of the inbox flared up, orders and queries and numbers queuing obediently for her attention.
Hi Martin, just double‑checking tomorrow’s linen delivery. Could we add four extra sets of king‑size sheets?
She typed faster than she thought, fingers finding brisk, competent rhythms. An email to the yoga instructor about adjusting the timetable for the next group. A note to herself to chase the brewery about the summer tasting evening. A draft reply to a corporate enquiry, cheerfully authoritative about Hawthorn’s capacity for “bespoke team‑building experiences.”
By the time she reached the third message, the heat behind her eyes had ebbed into the familiar hum of concentration. The words “you love this place more than you’ll ever love me” retreated, filing themselves neatly under Ancient History, alongside other things she no longer allowed to dictate policy.
She straightened, rolled her shoulders once, and pasted on the expression the staff had come to recognise as “Sophie has it in hand”. A quick glance through the glass showed the couple now seated by the lake, their heads bent together over some private joke. Sophie locked her phone, lifted the tray again with practised ease, and turned away from the view, the old accusation settling back where she kept all unprofitable questions: archived, unnamed, and nowhere near the bookings calendar.
The inheritance Jack never chose
After the others drifted out of the late stakeholder meeting in a polite scrape of chairs and murmured apologies to trains and babysitters, Jack remained where he was, as if someone had pressed pause. The air still felt crowded with phrases like “legacy asset”, “unlocking value” and “what the family would have wanted”, bits of jargon clinging to the panelled walls like smoke.
He pushed back his chair at last and crossed to the sideboard on something like autopilot. A row of silver frames waited there, polished more faithfully than the silverware. His fingertips found the tarnished edge of one: a sepia assembly of Hawthorn ancestors squinting at the camera, the house a confident block of stone behind them, as if it, at least, had never doubted its purpose.
His aunt’s last voicemail unspooled unhelpfully in his head. It’s what your grandfather would have wanted, Jack. Said with the same brisk certainty that had once explained why there was no money for the school trip to France, why he would be “sensible” and take accounting, why holidays were postponed “for the sake of the house”.
He set the frame down more carefully than it deserved and, out of long habit, reached for the one thing he could still control: his calendar. Mentally, he began drafting an email to his line manager about “a little more flexible working around some… family obligations”, already calculating how many days a month he could bleed into Hawthorn without his carefully self-contained life in Birmingham noticing the loss: and how long before “flexible” quietly became “permanent.”
The inheritance Lucy refuses
In the makeshift office off the kitchen, where the smell of onions and printer ink waged a quiet war, Lucy leaned back from her laptop while a visiting yoga instructor drifted nearby, hands clasped in rapture.
“It’s the soul of the house, you can feel it,” the woman cooed. “All that lineage, all those generations… we have to honour that heritage in the branding, don’t we?”
Lucy’s mouth twitched. The pen in her fingers resumed its sharp staccato against a stack of mood boards.
“Heritage is just what they call it when rich people hoard nostalgia,” she said, airy as steam from the urn.
The instructor gave a brittle little laugh. “Oh (ha) yes, quite,” she murmured, eyes sliding off Lucy’s face and on to a safer topic, like font weights.
Later, when the kitchen had fallen back to the clatter of pans and the occasional burst of radio, Lucy sat alone with the glow of her screen and the ghost of that word. A draft logo waited: Hawthorn Grange elegantly entwined with the old family crest Sophie’s clients loved, all antlers and Latin and implication.
Her own surname floated up, uninvited, in chipped gold leaf above a North London doorway. HALE & SONS. The last time she’d stood beneath it, suitcase handle burning her palm, her father’s voice had followed her down the hall. Something about duty, about what they’d built, about ingratitude. The front door had answered for her, slamming hard enough to rattle the stained glass.
Her pen had stopped tapping. For a moment she simply stared at the crest, pulse ticking in her throat with the same useless, adolescent fury.
“Absolutely not,” she told the screen, too quietly for anyone to overhear, and began dismantling the design. The heraldic shield vanished with a click. In its place she sketched a clean, spare curve of a hawthorn branch: a few thorns, a scatter of blossom.
Still rooted, if clients needed the metaphor. But not shackled to anyone’s name; something that might, if required, be cut back, uprooted, moved.
“Better,” Lucy muttered, saving the file under a new version number. Heritage, rebranded as something you could walk away from and still recognise yourself when you looked back.
Thomas and the cost of being useful
In the dim light of his upstairs window, Thomas watches Sophie marshal a departing retreat group, her smile unwavering as she hefts luggage into car boots and waves off taillights. He recognises that particular brand of competence (the way she anticipates needs before anyone voices them) as clearly as he remembers the gallery openings where he played the tortured genius, all demand and no gratitude, women and patrons rearranging themselves around his storms.
There was a woman once who tried to want him beyond his paintings, to see the exhausted man under the myth, and he punished her for it with sulks and vanishings and, worst of all, indifference, until she left and the silence that followed felt less like freedom than exposure.
He drags his gaze from the gravel sweep below, jaw tight, and returns to the half‑finished canvas on his easel, the paint resisting him with an honesty he both resents and trusts. Better, he tells himself, to let Sophie believe her usefulness is what makes her safe here; better not to be the one to suggest that being wanted for herself is both more dangerous and, treacherously, exactly what she deserves.
By the time the house settles each night, these private flinches have soaked into the walls as surely as the damp: Sophie’s quick, averted looks; Jack’s measured silences; Lucy’s barbed asides; Thomas’s retreating footsteps along the corridor. Hawthorn Grange wears its charm like fresh paint over hairline cracks. Cracks that run through inheritance documents, old love letters in attic trunks, unanswered emails and unsent texts, and the ledger columns Jack updates with mechanical precision. The air seems to thicken with all the things unsaid, gathering in stairwells and behind closed doors, in the echoing pantry and the blind corners of back staircases, as if the place itself is bracing for the moment when some new arrival will lean, just a fraction too hard, on everything they’ve tried not to feel.
The first anyone sees of him is the glare of headlights smearing across the wet stone, the beam sweeping the front of the house as if searching for its best angle. The crunch of tyres on soaked gravel sounds indecently loud in the usual late-afternoon hush, bouncing off the old stone and up into the darkening beech trees. For once, even the rooks seem to have the decency to fall silent.
Sophie, halfway down the front steps with an umbrella and her most professional version of a welcome smile, pulls the handle of the big front door tight behind her so the draught doesn’t rattle the glass. The drizzle is the fine, clingy kind that goes straight for her fringe; she tucks a strand of damp hair behind her ear and reminds herself that this is, technically, good news. Potential sponsors loved a tortured musician in a picturesque ruin. Ideally without actual ruin.
Before the car door even opens, she clocks the phone held up in the passenger seat, screen already glowing red. Of course. Nothing in his world apparently happened unless it was filtered and monetised. The window slides down a fraction and a young woman in an oversized blazer leans towards the rain, beaming at Sophie with the fixed, over-bright look of someone whose job depends on enthusiasm.
“Hi! We’re just capturing the journey,” the PR assistant mouths through the patter on the glass, free hand fluttering in a reassuring little circle that suggests Sophie ought to feel honoured rather than mildly invaded. The phone pans over the façade of Hawthorn Grange, up the moss-softened stone and cracked pediment to the empty windows, then back to catch the reflection of the car’s interior lights, hazy and romantic in the drizzle.
Sophie angles her umbrella so the camera doesn’t get a full shot of the peeling paint on the front door. If the estate was about to become content, then it might as well be content with the good side showing.
Dylan unfolds himself from the car like he’s stepping through a curtain rather than onto wet gravel: one boot, pause, adjust. The leather jacket comes up in a smooth roll of shoulders, dark against the pale stone, the guitar case lifted with a careful performance of weight, as if he’s personally hauled it from some metaphorical gutter rather than an executive saloon. His chin tips, almost imperceptibly, to find the weak spill of light from the porch lantern.
The PR assistant scuttles back, phone aloft, murmuring something about “moody” and “raw.” The discreet photographer, who was apparently only discreet in the brochure, abandons his attempt at invisibility and begins hopping between puddles, crouching to immortalise “authentic” droplets on stone and, inexplicably, Dylan’s boots on the worn front step.
Sophie has already retreated a pace into the hall, welcome tray waiting on a side table. Dylan crosses the threshold and, before bothering with introductions or towels, turns his head towards the nearest lens to offer a faded, practised half-smile that will, Sophie can already see, be captioned later as something along the lines of “finally breathing again.”
Down by the events barn, the branded van shudders to a halt with all the grace of an articulated lorry attempting a curtsey. Its doors fly open and, like a magician’s trunk disgorging props, out spill collapsible cases, soundboards, coiled cables, and improbably delicate soft-box lights into the drizzle. Two technicians immediately begin a territorial dispute over sockets and “natural ambience,” while a third, with the air of a man born holding a gimbal, sends a drone skimming up into the wet grey sky. Its insectoid whine needles across the lake and along the roofline. Sophie, clocking both the sound and the liberties being taken with her risk assessment, marches out with her umbrella to explain (pleasantly, and with legal-sounding finality) that no camera goes near guest bedrooms or main-house windows.
With the drone grounded and cables discreetly rerouted through the service yard, Dylan is steered across the entrance hall, each hollow boot-fall sounding personally offended by the age of the flagstones. He tosses out a lazy compliment about the “vibes” that is clearly pitched to the phone as much as to Sophie, gaze skimming from cracked cornices to the sulking two bars of signal on his screen. Before she can reach for the teapot or her speech about the converted stable suites, the PR assistant has already spun to camera, breathlessly introducing “day one at the retreat,” nudging Dylan into a brooding lean against the staircase banister that, Sophie knows with a small, internal wince, has not been dusted for its social media debut.
Within the hour, their presence has threaded itself through corridors and outbuildings: gaffer tape on the barn floor marking shot positions, a portable speaker leaking half-finished tracks, equipment cases stacked in the stable-block doorway, cables braided along skirting boards with all the tact of invasive ivy. The usual late-afternoon murmur is punctured by shouted timings for “golden hour,” staccato camera bursts, and brief, theatrical silences while someone checks sound levels and mutters about “authentic ambient noise.” By the time Sophie finally delivers the cooling welcome tray to Dylan’s temporary base in the barn, the first “arrived at my country hideaway” posts have already gone live, Hawthorn Grange tagged, geolocated, and filtered into an aspirational haze for thousands of strangers.
Sophie spends the early evening in triage mode, red pen in hand like a field surgeon’s scalpel. The immaculate grid of her wall calendar (columns for rooms, colours for retreat types, neat stickers for deposits paid) is no longer a model of order but the scene of a genteel massacre. The foraging walk that has been on the board for six weeks, ringed in hopeful green, takes the first hit. She draws a line clean through it, writes “postponed” in the margin, and immediately softens the blow with an email about “unexpected filming commitments at the estate” and “a complimentary seasonal hamper as an apology.”
The reply pings back before she has even set the laptop down: polite, disappointed, heavy on the ellipses. She adds the organiser’s name to the mental list of people who must, absolutely must, be charmed back later.
Next, the sunrise yoga by the lake. “Atmospheric mist” has become, inconveniently, “closed set,” the prime stretch of lawn already staked out in her head by tripods and a moody shot of Dylan gazing soulfully at his reflection. She lifts the class from the lake with a decisive stroke of the pen and resettles it in the least inhospitable drawing room. High ceilings, excellent windows, a persistent draught, and a carpet old enough to pre-date Lycra. In the revised schedule she rebrands it as “Heritage Interior Practice.” Pilates people, she tells herself, like a challenge.
By the third phone call to a retreat organiser, this one a woman who has been “looking forward to this all year” and does not attempt to conceal it, Sophie’s voice has acquired that bright, apologetic note she recognises from her own worst customer-service memories. She offers alternative dates, upgrades on rooms, a discount on catering; she promises that filming will not intrude on “the integrity of your guests’ experience.” When the caller finally, reluctantly, agrees to shift to a quieter weekend, Sophie hangs up with a murmured thank you and turns back to the wall.
Arrows zigzag between days like desperate escape routes. Names are crossed out and rewritten in smaller, more anxious handwriting. In the space of an hour, her season, once a fragile but coherent strategy for saving Hawthorn Grange, resembles a battlefield map after an unexpected invasion: positions abandoned, lines redrawn, whole ventures quietly sacrificed so that one high-profile guest can have uninterrupted “creative space” and optimal natural light.
She caps the pen and steps back, arms folded, studying the carnage. Each compromise has been tiny, eminently reasonable, the sort of practical concession any grown woman in charge of a heritage property would make. Taken together, they feel like the first hairline cracks in something she has been shoring up with good humour and clipboards for years. Outside, a drone buzzes briefly, then cuts out on someone’s shouted order. Sophie exhales, squares her shoulders, and reaches for a fresh stack of “We’re so sorry for the inconvenience” drafts.
In the kitchen, the usual steady rhythm disintegrates into jazz. Vegan substitutes appear where cream and butter used to reign, oat milk and cashew paste landing on the stainless-steel counter like insulting pamphlets against civilisation. The evening’s menu is rewritten on the fly, biro scars slashing through “butter-basted” and “honey-glazed,” replaced with “roasted” and “maple-infused” in increasingly desperate handwriting.
Gareth, who has survived three head chefs and one Michelin inspector in a previous life, mutters darkly over a saucepan as a PA materialises at the hatch to request “something light but photogenic” in twenty minutes’ time. “Tell him we don’t plate feelings,” Gareth growls, but his hands are already moving, hauling trays, scanning the pantry for anything that can be stacked, drizzled, or otherwise aesthetically redeemed. Sophie slips between them with the ease of long practice, one hand on Gareth’s arm, the other on the PA’s agenda, translating.
“We can do quinoa without selling our soul,” she assures him quietly. “We’ll just hide it under something respectable.”
Upstairs in the stable block, housekeepers strip and redress Dylan’s rooms twice over, then a third time when someone decides the first duvet looks “too hotel” and the second “too cottagecore.” Lamps migrate from bedside to windowsill and back again; throws are folded, unfurled, and artfully “rumpled” to suggest a man who rises at dawn to journal, rather than one who stumbles in at three a.m. A ring light glows in the hallway as they test angles on the stone staircase, bleaching the old flagstones into something almost Californian. Sophie hovers just out of shot, briskly vetoing attempts to open doors. “That’s staff,” she says. “That’s storage. That’s not a mood board, it’s a fire exit,” she adds, drawing a firm, politely smiling line the crew keeps worrying at with innocent-sounding requests for “a bit more access.”
Outside the main gates, the village’s curiosity gathers like mist: dog walkers who never usually venture this far loiter by the cattle grid, leads slack, conversations unnaturally loud. Teenagers pretend to photograph the sunset while their phones are unmistakably angled toward the drive. A local blogger DMs Sophie, chirpily enquiring whether “Hawthorn’s own rock legend” might pose with the fete committee and perhaps judge the Victoria sponges. Sophie drafts and redrafts a diplomatically opaque reply, trimming adjectives like detonators, acutely aware every syllable is a potential screengrab, caption, and ensuing parish WhatsApp storm.
Across the rest of the estate, the disruption radiates in subtler ways: a pair of retired guests abandon their crosswords to peer through the lounge windows when a burst of laughter ricochets from the courtyard; a corporate group complains their mindfulness breakout was invaded by a bassline; the yoga retreat leader wonders if “vibrational interference” is deductible. Jack, wandering the half‑lit corridors with his tablet, discreetly converts everyone’s irritation into numbers, updating cost projections as overtime hours mount and complimentary Proseccos are silently authorised. By the time the sky turns indigo, Hawthorn Grange feels less like a retreat and more like a stage hastily rigged for an unscripted performance in which no one is entirely sure who is meant to be in the front row.
By seven the next morning, the enquiry inbox has developed ideas above its station.
Where there are usually three or four polite notes about anniversary stays and yoga packages, Sophie finds a small avalanche. Her standard “country wellness weekend” templates have been shoved gracelessly down the page by subject lines shouting “THE DYLAN PACKAGE???” and “Retreat collab – URGENT.”
She curls one bare foot under her on the chair, sips coffee that went tepid an hour ago, and opens the first. A woman from Brighton wants to “book the same room he’s in, if possible, for the creative energy.” Another, from a London agency, enquires whether their client can “write in the library where Dylan is currently finding his muse,” as though inspiration were a plug socket they might share.
A management company suggests a “songwriting intensive” at Hawthorn Grange, provided there’s space for a small film crew. They attach a deck full of buzzwords, authentic, rustic, unplugged, and mock-ups of Dylan-esque silhouettes against the stable block. Sophie’s own carefully photographed images of dewy lawns and handmade scones have been replaced with someone else’s idea of what her estate looks like.
Then there is the lifestyle influencer, with a million followers, an all-lowercase name, and an offer of “a collaboration.” In exchange for a heavily curated weekend, she promises “subtle coverage” and “discreet access,” phrases which make Sophie’s shoulders tighten. Discreet in influencer terms, she suspects, involves drones.
Every third email mentions Dylan by name. A few are baldly transactional: “We’re prepared to pay premium rates for exclusive use while Mr Hawkes is in residence.” Others are gushing manifestos about “following his journey” and “reconnecting to nature the way he is.” Not one asks about Hawthorn Grange’s history, or the walled garden, or whether the lake path is suitable for older guests with bad knees.
Sophie scrolls and scrolls, fingers hovering over reply, then retreat. Somewhere between the fifteenth “Dylan package” request and a query about whether their dog could be photographed “frolicking where he walks,” the truth settles in her stomach like a stone: they are no longer booking Hawthorn Grange. They are booking a backdrop to somebody else’s story.
She closes her eyes for a moment, the glow of the screen painting her lids an exhausted orange, and wonders, briefly, treacherously, how much of that story she can sell without losing the plot of her own.
In the abstract, on paper, in tidy columns and coloured graphs, the shift looks almost indecently tempting.
Jack, hunched over his laptop at the end of a corridor where the Wi‑Fi behaves, watches the bookings dashboard spike in strange, asymmetric patterns: two-night stays at full rate with no haggling, all from media agencies or production companies; provisional block bookings for entire weekends cheerfully noting “we can be flexible on price if you’re flexible on access.” A PR firm asks about “exclusive creative residencies with optional behind-the-scenes content.” Another wonders, with ghastly breeziness, whether Hawthorn Grange has “a policy on embedded crews.”
Then the email from a minor investor lands in his inbox, subject line: Thought you’d enjoy this!!! There is a link to a breathless tabloid column crowning Hawthorn Grange “the new celebrity bolt‑hole of the Cotswolds,” followed by a chirpy paragraph about “striking while the iron’s hot. Could be your salvation!”
Jack stares at the exclamation marks until they blur, the familiar knot of obligation and impending decision tightening beneath his ribs like a badly cinched belt.
In theory, everyone had signed the updated media policy. In practice, it turned out to be more of a creative writing prompt.
The culprit was Mia from housekeeping, normally shy to the point of invisibility. Caught in a rare overlap between Dylan and an unoccupied library, she froze, lifted her phone, and, with the fatal confidence of someone who had never dealt with a cease-and-desist, pressed the shutter. The caption, “country escapes with icons 🌿✨”, did the rest.
By the time Lucy appeared, hair skewed, boots half‑laced, brandishing her own screen like an incriminating exhibit, the image had accrued heart‑eye emojis, speculative location tags, and one comment helpfully zooming in on the spines behind Dylan to triangulate which county he must be in.
By lunchtime, the near miss has settled over the estate like cordite after a misfired gun. Word of the almost‑viral photo travels at different speeds: a housekeeper muttering about “no one respecting doors anymore,” the pub suddenly full of questions about “celebrities up at the big house,” the village florist emailing to ask if she can boast about her “star‑studded client” on Facebook. Each new ripple makes Sophie’s mantra about Hawthorn Grange being a sanctuary sound less like a statement of fact and more like a marketing aspiration she hasn’t actually earned, a promise she’s in danger of breaking every time Dylan opens a door.
On the far side of the grounds, the consequences feel more visceral. Thomas, collar turned up against the wind, spots the visiting photographer loitering near the walled‑garden gate, testing angles through a long lens as if the bricks themselves might yield a scandal. He veers off the path without breaking stride, plunging through wet laurel and snagging bramble, circling the garden’s outer wall like a trespasser on his own life. His breath comes faster than the short detour warrants, fingers tingling, an old, familiar terror pressing in as he imagines a single out‑of‑focus shot tagged, shared, cross‑referenced, his pseudonym peeling away pixel by pixel until “Tom Ellis” dissolves and the ghost of Thomas Ellery is dragged, unwilling, back into the light.
She became aware of his arrival as one is aware of a storm on the horizon: a change in the light, a faint commotion at the edge of vision. Through the side window above the scullery sink she caught it: the sleek gleam of a black car easing through the gates, the insect‑flutter of cameras as two men in dark coats stepped sideways in perfect unison to capture the moment. Instinct tugged her towards the front hall, towards whatever charming chaos Dylan Hawkes was currently unleashing on the gravel.
She turned her back on it.
Her boots rang briskly along the flagged passage towards the back of the house, where the air smelled of toast crumbs and furniture polish rather than perfume and performance. Managing a crisis, she had learned, was nine parts resisting the urge to gawp and one part writing a plan.
By the time the first tripod leg clicked out on the front steps, she had shut herself into the tiny office off the kitchen, the door protesting with its usual sticky hinge. The room was barely wide enough for the metal filing cabinet and the desk that had once been a sideboard, but it held the most important luxury Hawthorn Grange possessed: a borderline‑reliable Wi‑Fi signal.
She dropped into the chair, woke the computer with a slap, and reached for her phone. The old “HG Staff” WhatsApp group sat there like a disused corridor: last message sent six months ago, a photograph of someone’s impressive Victoria sponge. She jabbed into the thread and typed, thumbs moving faster than her thoughts:
“Morning room. Ten minutes. Mandatory.”
She hovered for a second, then tacked on a cheerful yellow smiley, as if that might soften the blow of the word “mandatory” and not, say, signal impending doom. It looked alien on the grey screen, too bright, like a balloon at a funeral.
Still. Optics.
She hit send, watched the little ticks appear, and imagined the ripple of reactions: Mia reading it with round eyes and immediate guilt; Will from maintenance muttering something about “fire drills” and putting down his bacon sandwich; the two weekend bar staff frantically calculating whether “ten minutes” allowed for finishing eyeliner.
She slid the phone into her back pocket, stood, and straightened her jumper as if it were armour. On her way out, she snagged the battered clipboard from the shelf, a relic from some long‑ago wedding tasting, and tucked it under her arm. She didn’t need it; the talking points were already lined up in her head. But the satisfying weight of it in her hand made her feel less like a woman about to improvise and more like one about to chair a meeting.
As she climbed the back stairs, taking them two at a time, her mind flicked through the faces she was summoning, stacking them into neat internal columns. People who would need soothing: Mia, obviously; Sandra from laundry, who regarded any celebrity presence as a prelude to the end of days; young Josh, whose idea of discretion was turning his TikTok to “close friends only.” People who would need, if not a firm hand, then at least a sharply raised eyebrow: the bar staff, both of whom had been extremely interested in the rumour of “some musician bloke” before Dylan even crossed the county line; Brian the gardener, who fancied himself a local historian and would cheerfully provide a potted biography of every Hawthorn Grange inhabitant to anyone with a microphone.
And then Lucy, who did not technically count as staff but very much counted as trouble if she got bored.
Reassure, redirect, contain, she told herself, pushing open the baize door towards the main house. Outside, a burst of laughter skated in from the front drive. She refused it the courtesy of a glance.
Let Dylan have his entrance. Her job, as ever, was everything that happened after the applause.
The morning room smells faintly of damp wood and over‑brewed tea, the electric heater’s orange bars doing battle with a draught that has known the family since 1893. Staff drift in by twos and threes, in fleeces and half‑buttoned shirts, clutching mugs, rubbing sleep from their eyes. Someone has left a bucket of daffodils on the piano; they lean towards the weak light as though hoping for better management.
Sophie takes her place at the end of the long table with a clipboard she doesn’t strictly need, its battered edge digging reassuringly into her palm. Her voice, when she begins, is quick, clear, and kind but uncompromising.
“Right. You’ve probably seen the car. And the cameras. And heard the rumours. Most of them are even true.”
A ripple runs round the room; Lucy, perched on the window ledge, raises an eyebrow but keeps mercifully quiet.
“Here’s the thing,” Sophie continues. “Dylan means exposure, exposure means risk, and risk is managed with rules. So. No taking your own photos of him on‑site. None. Not even the back of his head because your sister ‘won’t tell anyone’.”
A couple of the younger staff smirk, caught.
“No giving directions to ‘just one’ blogger who drops in. They go to reception, they get the same polite no as everyone else. And if anyone from the village wants gossip” (she lets her gaze travel deliberately towards Brian, whose knowledge of local history has been known to encompass last night’s bar receipts) “they all get the same line: ‘He’s here for quiet; we’re here to work.’ That’s it. Memorise it. Cross‑stitch it on a cushion if you like.”
Hands go up, questions following in untidy succession. “Can we repost the estate’s Instagram if we’re tagged?” “What if my cousin works for a magazine?” “What if I’m already mid‑DM with a podcaster?” Sophie fields each one with patient, almost cheerful precision, grateful for the familiar rhythm of problems slotting into solutions. Yes to resharing official posts, no to offering extra angles; cousins who are journalists are to be treated as strangers with better stationery. She appoints Mia as liaison with Dylan’s PR team for any sanctioned content, and quietly deputises Lucy to keep an informal eye on staff socials for anything that might need a tactful nudge.
“Bottom line,” she finishes, softening, “we do this right, we look after him and the estate. We do it wrong, we’re a meme by Monday.” A ripple of strained laughter loosens shoulders; she catches it, briskly doles out tasks, and adds the clinching incentive of time‑and‑a‑half if the week overruns.
By the time she crosses to the stable block to meet Dylan’s team, Sophie has swapped her muddy boots for cleaner ones and pulled on a brighter jumper, armour in cheery wool that photographs well. She greets his PR handler and the discreet photographer with practised warmth, offering coffee, biscuits, and a quick, curated tour of “approved vistas.” Her tone stays unfailingly pleasant even as she draws firm red lines on the laminated estate map she unfolds over the kitchen island: shaded areas for guest‑only, hatched stripes for absolutely no cameras, circles for where reception dies entirely. “We’re very happy you’re here,” she says, tapping the paper where the lawns slope to the lake, “but we can’t have neighbours’ cottages or staff corridors in the background of anything. No bedrooms, no car registrations, no children. And any performance, however spontaneous, needs to be scheduled with us first for safety, licensing, and basic crowd control.” Their pushback is light but real and she absorbs it, repeats herself with a brighter smile, and does not move a single line.
That evening, long after the last cable case has thumped shut and Dylan has vanished into one of the quieter guest suites, Sophie sits at the scarred desk in the office with a mug of cold tea by her elbow, the taste now purely theoretical. The glow of her laptop screen throws estate figures into harsh, unromantic relief as she toggles between the bookings calendar, projected maintenance costs, and a fresh tab tracking the estate’s surging mentions online: hashtags breeding like rabbits. She starts a new spreadsheet, “Retreat package: artist residency?”, and types faster as ideas sparked by the day’s chaos arrange themselves into bullet points: tiered pricing, off‑season discounts, local suppliers. Then she clips them back under a hard question in bold: can any of this be replicated without a famous name attached, or is she reorganising deckchairs on a very pretty, very doomed ship? The house creaks as the wind picks up outside; somewhere a sash window rattles resentfully. She rubs at the tired ache between her eyes, forces herself to stop fiddling with fonts, and sets a private deadline. One week to turn this from spectacle into model, or consign it to the column of one‑off miracles they cannot afford to chase, however flattering the light.
In the first forty‑eight hours, the impact is impossible to ignore. Website traffic graphs spike in jagged neon, enquiries triple, and a tentative corporate wellness group suddenly upgrades from “considering” to “can you accommodate fifty instead of thirty?” The booking software, usually a model of rural decorum, starts sending her flustered automated alerts about “unusual activity.” Sophie, who has learned to live in ten‑pound increments, watches four‑figure estimates stack themselves neatly in her inbox.
She colour‑codes the calendar until it looks like a particularly optimistic patchwork quilt: yoga teachers in soft greens, writing retreats in blue, hen weekends in a cautious pink. Dylan’s block sits like a bright, volatile orange flare in the middle of the week. Around it, smaller reservations gather, as if drawn to the light and heat.
Then she opens the maintenance spreadsheet, that grim ledger of “things the house needs” versus “things the house will get.” For the first time in months, she dares to adjust a few numbers upwards. Heating for the east wing through winter, not just for the rooms currently occupied. A proper inspection of the ancient plumbing instead of another note to “monitor the situation and keep buckets handy.” She adds a tentative line for “Roof. Each small change feels like pulling the house a fraction back from the cliff edge. She pictures radiators ticking to life in long‑shuttered corridors, frost not quite making it through thin panes, guests waking up to something other than their own breath misting in the air. It is absurd, she thinks, that one man’s desire to brood in picturesque surroundings might mean Mrs Haversham in Room Five finally gets a ceiling that doesn’t drip on her overnight bag. Absurd.
But alongside the hopeful figures, a new pattern appears in her inbox. Subject lines that once read “Cotswold retreat enquiry” now arrive as “Saw Dylan at your place…” and “Is this where that musician is staying?” A lifestyle blogger wants to “pop down for a quick, authentic peek behind the scenes,” which Sophie translates as free content and no revenue. A PR intern from a London agency asks whether “celebrity residencies” are a regular feature, as if she has a cupboard full of brooding artists she wheels out between yoga retreats.
Her cursor hovers over each mention of his name, a sour twist low in her stomach. She drafts and redrafts, deleting anything that sounds either thrilled or apologetic. In the end, her replies settle into a careful middle register: delighted you’re interested in Hawthorn Grange; we host a range of creative retreats; we don’t comment on individual guests. She answers promptly, politely, but sidesteps every invitation to brand them as a wellness backdrop for famous breakdowns and healing arcs. The estate is supposed to be the story, she reminds herself: not the latest man passing through, however profitable his shadow.
In the quiet pockets she runs alternate scenarios in her head until the numbers blur. One spreadsheet models the next six months with Dylan as a one‑off anomaly: modest uptick, polite interest, then the graph droops again. The margins are so thin they might as well be theoretical; every hopeful upgrade is nudged into a column called “later” that she knows too well. Another models a world where his stay becomes a template and other high‑profile guests follow. There, the numbers sing in full chorus, roof repairs, proper insulation, staff paid on time, but every bright cell feels booby‑trapped. If he spirals, if a photo leaks from some unguarded corner of the grounds, if his fanbase turns or decides Hawthorn Grange is the villain of the week, their newfound visibility could harden overnight into a target they can’t afford, painted squarely on the front door.
The tension threads into more private calculations. She finds herself, mid‑email, almost promising “flexible access” because a producer “sounds nice” on the phone, then snaps the sentence back into something firm and non‑committal. Later, over tea in the half‑lit kitchen, Lucy tosses off a remark about “men with guitars and chaos in their wake,” and Sophie laughs too quickly, the sound too bright in the tiled room. The rules she wrote for her heart after that last implosion, no charming drifters, no scaffolding your life on someone else’s mood, suddenly look like sensible business policy. Celebrity residencies begin to resemble relationships: thrilling, unsustainable, and liable to leave you holding the bill when the music stops. She can feel the old temptation at the door, sugar‑voiced and persuasive: ride the rush, trust the heat, solve today with a man who will be gone by winter.
At the office window, watching floodlights flare over the barn as Dylan’s crew thump through a late sound check, she understands she’s no longer merely guarding spreadsheets and guest lists. The estate is the solid, stone‑walled shape of the life she clawed her way into: independent, self‑reliant, answerable to no one’s temperament but her own. To let Hawthorn Grange swing on the erratic orbit of a famous man would be to hand back the reins she once reclaimed in a rented flat with thin walls, discount furniture and a heart that bruised if you looked at it. The columns on her screen and the old ache in her chest line up into a single, obstinate truth: this time, protecting the house and protecting herself are exactly the same fight.
In the hush that follows, when the last echo of bass has stopped shuddering in the rafters and the barn is left with only the thin whirr of distant circuitry cooling, Sophie stays where everyone else has already decided there is nothing left to see. The fairy lights along the beams click as they settle in their sockets. A coil of cable, carelessly dropped, loops like a sleeping snake at her feet.
She plants her hands on the nearest trestle table, feeling the ghost of vibration in the wood, and hears herself say, quite distinctly, into the empty space, “We use him. He doesn’t use us.”
The words sound uncomfortably ruthless in her own ears, as if someone older and harder has borrowed her mouth. All the same, once spoken, they refuse to be recalled. Hawthorn Grange will take what it needs from Dylan Hawkes. The photographs of him against their honey‑stone walls, the curated impression of rustic redemption, the investors who prefer to tour properties only if there is a famous face to nod at them from a distance: and then it will go on existing when his van has rolled back down the lane. They will not be a colourful anecdote in his next interview about “that mad little country place where it all got a bit intense.”
The decision doesn’t come with any accompanying surge of triumph. It lands in her chest with the dull, inevitable gravity of a bill you knew was on its way. Still, underneath the weight, there is shape: one clean line she can follow. Every ask from his entourage, every proposed photoshoot in “just one more picturesque corner,” will have to pay rent. Either it nudges the estate a fraction closer to paying its staff, fixing its roof, outliving its overdraft. Or it simply doesn’t happen.
She straightens, rolls her shoulders back, and tries the rule on again in her head the way she might test a new pair of boots: does it pinch? Can she walk all day in it? It feels bracing, almost cold, but it holds. The barn suddenly seems less like a stage temporarily borrowed by strangers and more like what it has always been: theirs. Theirs to hire out, to price properly, to protect.
If Dylan is bringing a circus, then she, not he, will write the programme.
Back in the office, she translates that rule into something the estate’s ageing desktop can understand. A new spreadsheet tab appears, “Hawkes‑related revenue” in tidy, unromantic Arial, its columns briskly labelled: location fees, catering upgrades, additional room nights, media usage. Every time his name requires someone to move a chair, plug in a socket, or smile for a camera, it will acquire a line, a date, a projected figure.
She drafts a tiered package for “creative residencies”: Bronze, Silver, Gold, each dressed in soothing language about “artistic focus” and “rural inspiration,” each hiding a very clear minimum spend. Another tab becomes a colour‑coded calendar, Dylan’s stay blocked out in a decisive red that must, at all costs, not bleed into the soft green of weddings or the earnest blue of pre‑booked yoga retreats.
Then she turns to his PR liaison. Three versions of an email march across her screen, each a shade bolder about sponsorship, cross‑promotion, investor introductions. She reads them like tarot cards, chooses the strongest, and hits send: filing the others away as proof that, if needed, she can push further.
At the same time, she sketches the “invisible perimeter” in practical terms, building it into policy rather than prayer: no access to the old family wing, which she diplomatically renames “structurally restricted”; no filming in service corridors where fire doors sulk off their hinges; no cameras in staff‑only areas, even if a make‑up artist swears the light is “perfect”; and no unsupervised use of the walled garden, which is Thomas’s sanctuary whether he knows it or not. For herself, she drafts quieter clauses: no one‑on‑one late‑night drinks with Dylan, no hovering in doorways when he’s playing, no sharing anything about her past beyond the polished, brochure‑ready version. She pins the rota with these boundaries embedded, a private line of defence disguised as logistics and health‑and‑safety.
The first test comes fast. Dylan’s assistant texts asking for a last‑minute, “super chill” acoustic set in the barn for a handful of “industry friends” driving down from London, all fire emojis and faux‑apologies. Sophie’s fingers hover over a reflexive yes before she forces herself to cross‑check: capacity, insurance, noise curfew, staff availability, impact on the yoga retreat already booked in the stable block, the cost of extra heating and a midnight clear‑up. Her reply is brisk and specific, yes, within these hours; yes, with an additional fee; yes, only if his team signs the updated usage terms she attaches, in triplicate if necessary, and she feels a flicker of vindication, almost giddy, when the answer pings back: “Perfect, thanks!” with no pushback at all.
The more she operates this way, fielding requests, attaching conditions, massaging Dylan’s “spontaneous” ideas into scheduled, chargeable events, the more the tightrope turns into a narrow, habitual path. She finds herself anticipating what his presence could leverage for the estate before he or his team voice it, drafting proposals between emails and side‑stepping long lenses in the hedgerow. Yet each time she deletes a more personal reply to one of his late‑night messages or redirects a conversation back to logistics, she feels the strain of holding that perimeter; her body is running on caffeine, paracetamol, and adrenaline, and her resolve, though intact, is already being tested by the constant, flattering drag of his orbit and the unwelcome thrill of knowing he keeps returning to her inbox.
She also, with a ruthlessness she would have admired in someone else, redraws the social map of Hawthorn Grange. The nice, unthreatening yoga retreat from Surrey is nudged nearer Dylan’s orbit; the stag party in the stable block is gently encouraged towards the village pub and away from the lake at sunset. Couples likely to squeal and ask for selfies are booked into day trips at precisely the hours Dylan has requested “unstructured reflection time”.
She tells herself it’s logistics, not choreography. Still, when she is pencilling in “chance” encounters and “organic” conversations on her board in faint pencil, a small, sardonic part of her brain mutters that there is a word for people who script other people’s lives.
By the third day, even her sleep is scheduled. She wakes before dawn to check that the route from Dylan’s room to the lake is clear of dog-walkers and stray gardeners, crossing the dewy lawn in her dressing gown while the house is still soft with silence. At midnight she is still in the office, half-listening to the dishwasher hum while she emails Dylan’s manager about “expectation management” and updates the risk assessment for impromptu acoustic sets in a barn with suspect wiring.
Her phone becomes an extra limb, buzzing with group chats she never meant to create: STAFF (CONFIDENTIAL, SUPPLIERS) URGENT, DYLAN DAY 4. She replies faster than anyone, thumbs flying, because if she stays a message behind the whole fragile structure seems at risk of tipping.
Whenever Dylan himself appears she pastes on her brightest professional smile and treats him as another moving part to be slotted into place. He, infuriatingly, refuses to stay where she puts him. He lingers in doorways, wanders off the prescribed paths, strikes up conversations with the one guest she has mentally tagged as “unpredictable”.
“You’re very organised,” he tells her once, catching sight of the colour‑coded board when she forgets to close the office door. There is a glint in his eyes that suggests he finds the whole thing both impressive and faintly amusing.
“Someone has to be,” she says briskly, nudging the door shut with her heel. “Chaos doesn’t run itself.”
And then she goes back to her schedules, because the alternative is admitting that underneath the colour‑coding and contingency plans, she is no longer entirely sure who is managing whom.
To meet each new demand, she quietly rewrites the estate’s internal rulebook, not in policy documents but in scribbled notes on the staff rota and murmured instructions in the kitchen. Housekeeping is shifted to odd hours so corridors are empty when Dylan moves between rooms; pillows are fluffed at dawn, bins emptied at odd half‑hours, hoovers banned from his corridor until he is safely at the lake. Breakfast service is staggered so his table by the window can be “spontaneously” discovered by a select set of low‑risk guests, carefully briefed on not asking for selfies before coffee.
She barters favours with village suppliers, promising future bookings and “great exposure” on the estate’s soon‑to‑be‑revamped Instagram, in exchange for last‑minute deliveries that fit the aesthetic Dylan’s team wants. A particular brand of oat milk appears as if by magic; the florist somehow produces wild‑looking arrangements that have never seen a hedgerow.
It all works, more or less, but only because she is constantly, invisibly, holding the pieces together, fingers wedged into gaps no one else has noticed, praying no one tugs too hard.
With every adjustment, Sophie nudges existing bookings out of the way, rescheduling yoga retreats and postponing a charity craft fair so Dylan’s camp can have clear backdrops and quiet soundchecks. The calendar, once a cheerful mosaic of village events and low-key retreats, starts to look like a supporting document for One Important Man and His Feelings. She apologises to local organisers with polished emails about “operational clashes” and “unexpected opportunities for the estate,” knowing it’s only half the truth and that everyone in Hawthorn-on-Lea can smell half a truth a mile off. In staff briefings, she sells the changes as a short-term pivot that will pay off later, even as she feels a pinch of guilt at how briskly community events are being nudged to the margins.
Small frictions start to surface, hairline cracks in her immaculate timetable. A family on a weekend break is abruptly moved from a lake‑view room to a draughty attic suite “while we address a maintenance issue”; the parents smile tightly and say of course, but the teenage daughter looks at Sophie as if she personally cancelled their holiday. A long‑time gardener is told to avoid the walled garden during peak daylight hours because a photoshoot might be happening “at some point,” and he mutters something about “bloody influencers” as he shoulders his tools elsewhere. When Dylan’s entourage complains about the Wi‑Fi or the coffee or the draught under a door, Sophie responds with professional brightness, smoothing it all over before anyone has time to stew, handing out upgraded coffees and free dessert vouchers like emotional sticking plasters. Afterwards, alone in the office, she rubs at the tension in her temples, reopens the spreadsheet of house rules, and types yet another “temporary exception” to the standard procedures she wrote herself, realising the exception column is quietly outgrowing the rest.
By midnight the “celebrity retreat” deck looks unnervingly like a love letter to a man she keeps referring to as “our headline creative partner.” Bullet points bloom, bespoke acoustic evenings, curated photo walks, “creative rest” weekends, each carefully stripped of anything that sounds star‑struck and re‑dressed in terms like “brand synergy” and “strategic alignment.” She tells herself it’s just clever diversification, just another revenue stream, even as whole weeks on the calendar quietly turn Dylan‑shaped and the hand‑drawn plans for village craft markets and low‑key writing circles are shunted into the white space at the bottom, where dreams go when they’re no longer strictly billable.
Sophie starts slotting Dylan into her colour‑coded spreadsheets as if he’s just another supplier, another moving part to be coaxed into alignment. “Acoustic set, seven till eight p.m., low lighting, no phones,” she mutters around a pencil, flicking between tabs labelled BARN – TECH and VIP – HOSPITALITY. Her fingers fly; her jaw is tight.
Dylan, having wandered into the estate kitchen on the promise of coffee and “a glimpse behind the curtain,” has installed himself at the far end of the scrubbed pine table. He’s perched sideways on the bench, boots hooked on the rung, looking absurdly comfortable for someone who has just been informed he constitutes a health‑and‑safety risk. “You’re underselling it,” he says, squinting at the screen. “Put, I don’t know, ‘transformative sonic pilgrimage’ instead of ‘acoustic set’. Much more spiritual.”
She pulls the pencil from her mouth. “The fire officer prefers ‘acoustic set.’ So does the insurer.”
“Ah, the insurer.” He picks up a napkin and a hotel‑issue biro, writing with elaborate seriousness. “What about: surprise midnight encore on the roof? With flares. We could get the sheep involved.”
“No flares,” Sophie says crisply. “No roofs. Absolutely no sheep. Also it won’t be midnight because people here have jobs in the morning, and the council has views on noise after ten.”
He glances up through his lashes, apparently delighted. “You’re killing my art, Carleton.”
“If your art depends on pyrotechnics and livestock, it can take the hit.”
He laughs, actually laughs, and then, instead of arguing, asks, “Okay, what’s my maximum decibel level, then?”
She should be gratified by his capitulation; instead she’s wrong‑footed. “Eighty‑five inside, eighty outside,” she says, automatic. “And no more than sixty guests at any one time in the barn. Sixty‑five if we open the side doors, but then we have parking issues, so, ”
“So no to my idea about a pop‑up camping field.” His biro stills; he studies her, not the spreadsheet. “Do you have colour codes for everything?”
“Yes.” She hears the defensiveness and hates it. “It means I can see risk at a glance.”
“Risk.” He leans his chin into his hand, elbow on the table, napkin forgotten. “So I’m… what colour?”
“You’re four separate colours,” she says before she can stop herself. “Performance, PR, catering, insurance. And a bit of red because you’re a fire hazard.”
He grins, slow and pleased. “Complicated. I’ll take it.”
She pointedly returns to her laptop. “This is just logistics. You’re not special, you’re a time slot.”
“Sure,” he says softly. “Seven till eight, low lighting, no phones. Sounds fairly special from where I’m sitting.”
There’s a beat where she feels the remark land somewhere inconveniently close to her sternum. She refuses to look up. “From where you’re sitting,” she says, “you’re also in the way of the pastry delivery.”
“Terrifying.” He scrapes his bench back, making an exaggerated show of clearing a path, but when he steps aside he doesn’t leave. He hovers by the dresser, mug in hand, still watching her with that amused, intent curiosity. As though the columns and colour blocks marching across her screen are more revealing than any lyrics.
She’s used to people seeing the end result: smooth dinners, effortless weekend retreats. Not many are invited to observe the underlying chaos being bullied into order, the way she wrestles with variables until they submit. Being watched in the act makes her skin prickle. It also, annoyingly, makes her work faster.
“Do you do this for everyone?” he asks eventually. “All your guests? Or just the ones your deck calls ‘headline creative partners’?”
She misses a keystroke. “I do this for the estate,” she says. “You just happen to be particularly… operationally demanding.”
He hums, non‑committal, then scribbles something on the napkin and slides it down the table towards her. In thick, looping letters he’s written: DYLAN – 7–8 P.M. – NO FIRE, NO SHEEP, PROMISE.
Against her better judgement, a laugh escapes her. She files the napkin under the edge of her keyboard like a temporary Post‑it, tells herself it’s only because it’s useful, and resolutely does not examine why his promise, written in biro on a paper serviette, feels like the first thing all day that isn’t an exception clause.
Their inaugural “mood‑spot” tour of the grounds begins with Sophie marching ahead at a purposeful clip, clipboard in hand like a shield. She points out natural sound baffles, prevailing wind directions, and the precise angle at which Mrs Pritchard in the village will begin phoning about “that racket”. Dylan, nominally listening, keeps peeling off the path: ducking into the barn to clap under the rafters, yodelling a fragment of chorus to hear it bounce off stone, wandering dangerously close to the lake’s edge to test how the water carries a whistle.
When he objects, for the third time, to the notion of an eleven‑o’clock cut‑off (“Creativity doesn’t wind down with the parish council, you know”) she doesn’t bother to sugar‑coat. “Neither do noise complaints,” she retorts. “The rural planning officer has never, in my experience, been swayed by a BRIT Award.”
Instead of sulking, he looks delighted. “Say it again,” he says. “Slower. I might write it down.”
The back‑and‑forth settles into an easy, combative rhythm: his mock‑outrage, her brisk corrections, his theatrical sighs at every boundary she draws. Somewhere between the orchard and the walled garden, Sophie realises, with a start, that she’s enjoying herself. The air feels sharper, colours brighter, as if the estate has been quietly holding its breath and has finally, rudely, been made to laugh.
As these scouting walks multiply, the patter between them loosens. Alongside questions about extension leads and access routes, Dylan starts sliding in more personal probes. Who taught her to stare down suppliers until they blink first, whether she was born talking in bullet points, why she always walks exactly ten paces ahead instead of beside him. Sophie parries with throwaway lines about overbooked summers and caterers with vendettas, about how someone has to act like a grown‑up around here, but he keeps circling back, testing the edges of her carefully laminated defences. One pale afternoon by the lake, when he offhandedly suggests she must be a nightmare to date with all her lists and contingency plans, something raw flickers across her face before she laughs it off. The change is brief, but unmistakable. Dylan, who usually charges cheerfully through other people’s boundaries, recognises, for once, a line he can’t cross without rewriting whatever this is between them, and, uncharacteristically, lets the moment pass.
Miles becomes a quiet fixture at the other end of the same scarred kitchen table, laptop open, sleeves rolled, calmly translating Sophie’s ambitious packages into watertight clauses. They work side by side through rain‑blurred afternoons, Sophie pacing and thinking aloud while Miles nudges her toward clearer cancellation policies and liability caps, occasionally offering a wry, oddly comforting anecdote about nightmare clients in Mayfair boardrooms. His tone stays steady even when she’s frazzled, a low, even counterpoint to her quickfire agitation. When takeaway containers start appearing between them and they’re still debating force majeure wording at ten at night, she realises she’s begun to rely on his measured nods and dry reassurances as part of the estate’s daily scaffolding: an invisible support structure she hadn’t meant to install.
Late one evening in the half‑renovated barn, surrounded by extension leads, paint samples and a heater that groans more than it works, Miles walks Sophie through a risk assessment for Dylan’s “intimate” sets. What happens if a guest posts footage, if a sponsor panics, if timings slide. As they map out worst‑case scenarios, their talk drifts into half‑remembered city deals, office all‑nighters, throwaway mentions of boardrooms and broken printers. A shared, quiet fatigue settles between them, oddly companionable. Sophie catches herself finishing his sentences, relaxing into the sense that someone else is finally carrying part of the load, and the recognition of that old, dangerous habit (leaning too hard on one sensible, steady man) lands in her chest like a warning she’s already half ignored.
The next morning, with her clipboard propped on one hip and steam curling from the takeaway mug she’d already reheated twice, Sophie ran through the day’s schedule in the stable courtyard. The gravel was still damp from overnight rain; someone in housekeeping had hung bedlinen over the low rail to catch what sun there was, and it flapped faintly behind Dylan like a very domestic set of wings.
“So then,” she said, tapping the page, “we’ve got the lake walk at eleven, acoustic run‑through in the barn at three, and I’ve left you a blessed hour of unstructured time after lunch. Do try not to cause an incident with it.”
Dylan squinted at the clipboard as if it might bite. “You organise like someone who’s had their heart broken by a spreadsheet,” he remarked. “Or by a person who needed spreadsheets to survive a person.”
He said it lightly, with that lazy, sideways grin that usually bounced off people and left them chuckling in its wake. For a moment, it landed with surgical accuracy instead.
Sophie snorted, flicking the edge of his printed itinerary with her pen. “I’ll put that on the website. ‘Hawthorn Grange: Where Control Freaks Come To Heal.’”
“Catchy,” he said. “Bit long for merch.”
She made her mouth curve in amused agreement, but the words had already tugged at an old, unwelcome reel: the half‑finished business plans on her ex’s laptop; the cheerful “We’ll sort it, Soph, promise,” as he sprinted for another showcase gig; the way she’d sat up alone at a sticky kitchen table, moving columns round until the numbers stopped screaming.
Her chest tightened, sharp and brief, as if she’d swallowed too cold air. She shut the folder with a snap that was just this side of professional.
“Sorry, it’s freezing,” she said, tucking the clipboard under her arm as if that explained everything. “If we stand here much longer your vocal cords will seize up and I’ll have to offer refunds. Right. Walk first. The Taylors and the couple in the blue room are keen for ‘candid countryside moments,’ whatever that means. You can be atmospheric in the background and talk about trees if they corner you.”
He watched her a beat too long, the joke clearly not quite having obscured whatever had flared across her face. “You’re very determined to keep me walking, Carleton. Afraid I’ll sit still and start thinking?”
“Terrified you’ll sit still and start tweeting,” she countered, brisk now, pushing open the stable gate. “Come on. They’re waiting by the folly, and if I’m late Lucy will start redesigning the entire marketing plan out of spite.”
She set off down the path at her usual businesslike clip, boots crunching over grit, counting automatically, one, two, three, into the familiar ten paces that kept her just ahead of him. Behind her she heard Dylan fall into step, his longer stride reined in, a half‑hum beneath his breath as he rehearsed some half‑formed melody or simply filled the silence.
She fixed her attention on the day’s jigsaw instead: which guests could be trusted with proximity to a famous musician without attempting a selfie ambush, which routes around the lake avoided the marshy patch that tried to eat city shoes, how to time their return so he could be “spontaneously” discovered in the barn later with a guitar and very good lighting.
By the time the ornamental lake came into view, flat and pewter under a washed‑out sky, she had smoothed the spike of memory back into something almost indistinguishable from efficiency. Almost.
Later that day, Jack sat alone in the small office off the main hall, the journalist’s email open on one screen and the scanned pages of the will on another. Outside, the faint thud of someone dragging chairs across the flagstones came and went; in here, the only sound was the low whirr of the ancient radiator and his own, annoyingly audible, breathing.
The journalist had been disarmingly breezy, “Loved some of the old society pieces featuring a certain Mr Sutton, thought you might offer colour?”, with three attachments helpfully labelled TERRACE PARTY 1998, SUMMER BALL, and FAMILY FÊTE. Jack clicked, then wished he hadn’t. There was his great‑uncle on Hawthorn’s terrace, laughing with people Jack had never met, his hand resting on the very balustrade now flecked with lichen outside the drawing‑room windows. The familiarity of the stone and the unfamiliarity of the man produced a strange double vision, as if Jack had been photoshopped out of a life that was somehow supposed to be his.
He scrolled back to the will, through clauses he already knew by heart, life interests, conditional rights of sale, obligations to “preserve the character of the estate in perpetuity”, and felt, again, the quiet outrage of discovering how much of his future was pinned to decisions made in rooms he had never been in, by people who had never had to commute to an accountancy office or worry about rent.
His jaw tightened as he drafted a cautious reply, fingers moving slower than usual: thanking her for her interest, offering bland “background context” about diversification and heritage, carefully avoiding any sentence that might be lifted as a quote and turned into a headline about “reluctant heir embraces country legacy.” He deleted “happy to chat by phone” twice before leaving it out altogether.
After a moment, he added one final line and stared at it, weighing whether it sounded measured or cowardly. Then he hit send, closed the photos with a little more force than necessary, and sat back, feeling the weight of a place he hadn’t chosen settle, again, on shoulders that had never applied for the job.
In the barn, Lucy rifled through a sagging cardboard box labelled “Marketing – pre‑2010,” dust blooming up like disapproval. She laid the faded brochures out on a trestle table beneath her sleek new mock‑ups, creating an accidental before‑and‑after. Glossy images of champagne coupes on the lawn, anonymous torsos tangled in white dressing gowns on four‑poster beds, and copy promising “second‑honeymoon bliss” and “reignite your forever” stared back at her, all soft focus and heterosexual smugness. The aesthetic was dated, sepia filters masquerading as romance, but the underlying story hadn’t aged at all: sell them a fantasy, don’t ask who’s driving home in brittle silence. Her pen dug a little too hard as she scrawled, block capitals gouging the page: “NO HEARTS / NO SCRIPT FONTS / NO ‘FOREVER’ LANGUAGE / NO MIRACLE COUPLES.” Whatever Sophie thought she was doing with Dylan’s presence, Lucy decided, it would not be packaged as some effortless love cure for the chronically disappointed.
That evening, Sophie and Lucy perched at the scrubbed‑pine table with leftover crumble, while the clatter of plates faded into the background hum of the kitchen. Lucy slid one of the old brochures across, spoon dangling. “Recognise the vibe?”
Sophie took in the soft‑focus couples, the breathless promises of transformation in seventy‑two hours, and felt her stomach tilt: half professional distaste, half the old, stupid ache of having once believed in exactly that sort of copy. “We’re not doing this,” she said, a little too crisply. “Hawthorn’s about retreats and creativity. Space to think. Not this honeymoon‑hangover nonsense. Dylan’s residency is about songwriting labs and industry buzz, not. Sophie rolled her eyes. “He’s a marketing asset, not a…plot point. If the couples want to stare at him over risotto, that’s their business.”
She heard herself say “Dylan” again, light and offhand, as if repetition could make him purely logistical. Lucy’s gaze sharpened. She watched the way Sophie’s tone went bright and brisk whenever anything edged toward feeling, clocked the tiny flinch when an airbrushed groom’s grin caught the light. She only shrugged, tucking the brochure back into its box, but the unease lodged, quiet, protective, and not at all reassured.
The journalist’s follow‑up lands in everyone’s inboxes just as Miles appears in the kitchen doorway with his laptop bag and that faintly apologetic smile. Jack lingers, half‑inclined to brandish the email at him as a neutral “media query”, half‑determined not to give the lawyer any excuse to start talking about “narrative positioning” and “maximising asset value.” Lucy, sweeping through with mood boards and a biro between her teeth, snorts, “Vultures, the lot of them: can’t wait to turn your life into a three‑part feature.” Sophie, catching the flickers of tension, feels the old familiar tug: be charming, be strategic, turn everything messy into a story investors will find reassuring. Underneath, though, something colder stirs: a sense that the more they invited people to peer fondly backwards, the more likely it was that buried names, discarded selves and abandoned futures at Hawthorn Grange might start clawing up through the floorboards just as new desires, inconvenient and unbudgeted for, began quietly arranging themselves in the present.
By the time the kitchen had emptied of staff and the dishwasher had settled into its watery sighing, Sophie had colonised the far end of the pine table with her laptop, a legal pad, and three half‑drunk mugs of tea. Lucy’s latest mock‑ups glowed on the screen like something from a life in which she slept eight hours and had a marketing department: clean typography, bold colour blocks, photographs that made the barn look intentionally rustic rather than worryingly unfinished.
“‘Dylan Weekends’,” Sophie murmured under her breath, testing the phrase as she tapped it into a header. It looked absurdly glossy in the font Lucy had chosen, all sleek confidence and no hint of the overdraft. Her cursor blinked, impatient. Behind it, a spreadsheet tab waited, a little green liferaft.
She clicked across. Numbers lined up obediently: projected package prices, average occupancy rates, cross‑selling from catering and spa‑adjacent “wellness add‑ons” they didn’t quite have yet. It was part fantasy, part forensic hope. When she plugged in the figures for four exclusive weekends per quarter, the total at the bottom of the column jumped into a range that made her heart give a disloyal little leap. Staff wages paid on time. Heating bills that didn’t require pleading calls to the bank. Repairs done before ceilings actually fell in.
Her pulse raced, an almost giddy sensation; for the first time, solvency wasn’t an abstract virtue, it was a line on a graph trending upwards, attached to a name she could picture leaning against a barn wall with a guitar.
She traced the income column with her fingertip, as if she could will it into solidity. Then, because she knew better than to believe unbroken columns of green, she opened a second tab and began a list in stark, unromantic bullets: What if Dylan cancels? What if he storms off halfway through a weekend? What if the tabloids decide Hawthorn is a punchline? What if a viral clip of him falling into the lake does more for Dylan’s brand than for her booking calendar?
Each contingency spawned two more: refunds, reputational damage, emergency PR. Insurance premiums that would chew through her margins. The vulnerable line where the estate’s name sat beside his in every draft of the proposed copy, “Hawthorn Grange in collaboration with Dylan Hawkes”, and how quickly collaboration could start to look like dependence.
On the design draft, Lucy’s placeholder text promised “creative immersion” and “intimate acoustic moments.” Sophie, lips pressed thin, amended it to “subject to artist availability” in a smaller, cooler font. A tiny, sensible caveat in a sea of seduction.
It felt, as she toggled between tabs, like trying to build a lifeboat out of kindling: light, buoyant, and one stray spark away from becoming the problem instead of the solution. The estate’s future balanced on a man who could, with a shrug and a text from his manager, decide he preferred some other picturesque ruin.
She sat back, flexed her cramped fingers, and forced herself to type the opening line of the proposal in her briskest house‑style: “Hawthorn Grange is pleased to present a limited series of creative retreat weekends featuring acclaimed artist Dylan Hawkes.” Professional, unruffled, not remotely like a woman who had just mortgaged her peace of mind to a stranger’s whim.
“Asset, not plot point,” she reminded herself softly, as if language could redraw the risk. Then she hit save, twice, and watched the little spinning wheel turn, holding her breath as though the estate’s beams and bricks were waiting too.
The trial runs started small enough to look accidental. An “informal” acoustic evening in the half‑converted barn, twenty chairs, mismatched rugs hiding the worst of the concrete, fairy lights Lucy had sworn at all afternoon, sold out within hours of Jack quietly putting the link on the website. Sophie stood at the back with a clipboard and a fire‑safety plan, timing the bar queue, noting which angle made the barn’s bare stone look atmospheric rather than unfinished. Dylan, on a stool under the beams, told a story about writing his first song in a shed and somehow made Hawthorn sound like the spiritual sequel.
The next afternoon’s lake walk was billed as “landscape inspiration”; in reality it was Sophie’s carefully curated guest list: two low‑risk journalists, one potential investor, and nobody likely to squeal. She kept them moving, laughing, taking photographs of Dylan against willows at exactly the points where the house looked its best.
When the boutique agency’s email arrived her breath hitched. She drafted, deleted, redrafted, every “exclusive” and “first refusal” suddenly a shackle or a lifeline. One misplaced clause and she wasn’t just selling weekends; she was mortgaging the estate, and herself, to a man who hadn’t signed up for anything except a temporary escape.
By the time the last phone had been tucked away and the final “that was amazing, honestly” drifted out into the car park, Dylan had already slipped through a service door and taken the back stairs two at a time. The attic, when he shouldered it open, smelt of dust, old linen and cooled day‑heat. No cameras, no Lucy hovering with a politely murderous expression, no Sophie with her clipboard and her bright, terrifying competence.
He sat cross‑legged on a paint‑splattered trunk, guitar balanced against his knee, and waited for the usual restless blankness. Instead, melodies came unbidden, small and insistent. Phrases surfaced he hadn’t put near a mic in years: rivers backing up and spilling their banks; Christmas dinners that went silent halfway through the roast potatoes; a line about a woman downstairs “counting chairs, not hearts” that landed so cleanly he flinched.
The attic’s stillness seemed to press the words out of him. He recorded a voice note, listened back once, then jabbed delete with something close to alarm. Another idea, another note: gone. He kept erasing, as if the mere existence of these songs might indict him: proof that he could, if he was careless, start writing about somewhere instead of just passing through it.
She met him on the back stair, hair mussed, eyes too clear, guitar case banging his knee. His grin was crooked, oddly shy. “You realise this place is dangerously good for my head, right? Bad for the brand.” Their usual sparring faltered, edged into something unguarded. Pride flickered then panic followed, sharp and cold. If Hawthorn became his sanctuary, what did that make her? A custodian? A crutch? She’d spent years constructing a life where no one’s recovery, least of all some mercurial star’s, could possibly depend on her keeping the lights on and the ghosts at bay.
The makeshift office smelt faintly of printer toner and cold coffee. Miles and Sophie went over risk assessments for celebrity‑focused packages, talk of indemnities and cancellation fees slipping into an easy, practised rhythm that felt dangerously like friendship. When Sophie, tired and unguarded, admitted that tying the estate to Dylan scared her because “people like that leave,” Miles felt a fierce, almost physical urge to contradict a lifetime’s evidence and promise he wasn’t like that. Instead he tightened his grip on the file, knuckles whitening, hearing the unspoken truth that if his hidden brief succeeded he’d be the one drafting the elegant exit clause that proved her exactly, humiliatingly right.
The drawing room had been temporarily repurposed as a waiting room for Important People: fresh flowers, polished side tables, a silver tray of coffee that hadn’t quite gone lukewarm. Sophie had been on her way through with a stack of revised menus when Dylan’s manager intercepted her with the smooth accuracy of someone who treated human beings as diary entries with legs.
“Got a minute?” he said, already shepherding her towards a low table near the window. “This is very informal, promise.”
Informal arrived in the form of a leather portfolio and a glossy document slid across the table with the faint, obscene whisper of expensive paper. Sophie set the menus down carefully, as if they might scuttle away, and glanced at the cover: soft-focus photograph of the lake, a guitar case propped artfully against the boathouse, and (God help her) a mock-up silhouette of a woman at the edge of the frame, head tipped back in laughter.
“Working title,” the manager said. “‘Retreat: Writing It Back Together.’ Dylan’s label love it. So does the streamer. The idea is: an intimate, documentary-style look at the creative process, here, in this extraordinary place.” He smiled in a way that suggested he was used to people saying yes before they knew what to.
Sophie’s stomach did a neat little dip. “The estate as a backdrop,” she said, professional brightness clicking on. “We’ve talked about that sort of thing, in principle, yes.”
“Not just a backdrop.” His finger tapped a heading: THE WOMAN SAVING HAWTHORN GRANGE. “Audiences adore authenticity. It’s Dylan, absolutely, but it’s also you. The brilliant young woman revitalising this historic estate. Sunrises, checklists, trials and triumphs. That whole arc.”
She flicked through the pages. Bullet‑pointed access requests marched down the paper: “shadowing morning briefings”, “fly‑on‑the‑wall in catering meetings”, “candid moments in Sophie’s office”, “joint walks on the grounds discussing creativity and resilience”.
“How generous,” she said lightly. “You’ve thought of everything I do before I even do it.”
He laughed as though she’d complimented him. “We want to capture the reality. Obviously we’d be sensitive. We’d keep crews minimal: two cameras, sound, a small doc team. We’d clear everything with you first.”
Two cameras. Sound. A small team. In the kitchens that ran on cramped choreography and shouted timings. In staff briefings where the junior housekeeper occasionally burst into tears over the laundry backlog. In her own office, where the printer made a noise like an asthmatic goat and she sometimes had to shut the door and breathe into her hands.
“And the financial side?” she asked, because that was safer ground; numbers didn’t demand that she bare her soul in high definition.
He slid another page over, this one with more zeroes than she saw in an average month. “Location fee. Plus a percentage of backend revenue. We’d brand Hawthorn as Dylan’s creative sanctuary. A place artists come to recharge, reconnect. You’d be turning people away within the year.”
There it was: the glinting hook under all the flattering language. The promise that if she just let them turn her life into content, the estate might finally have the waiting list she fantasised about when she couldn’t sleep.
Sophie arranged her face into professional enthusiasm, the one she used for bridal parties with unrealistic Pinterest boards. “It’s certainly… ambitious,” she said. “My main concern would be safeguarding the guest experience. Our priority is always that people feel they can relax here without worrying who’s about to appear with a boom mic.”
“Of course,” he said, already pencilling a tick in an invisible box. “We’d position it as a special, time‑limited thing. And remember, this isn’t just about Dylan. It’s about you. Your story. People love a turnaround.”
She pictured Lucy’s expression if she suggested being followed around by documentary crews. She pictured the staff, already stretched, suddenly performing “charmingly rustic competence” on cue. She pictured herself on someone’s television, laughing by the lake at dawn with a man whose life was built on leaving before the credits rolled.
“Why don’t I take this away,” she said, tapping the proposal with her fingernail, “and discuss it with the other stakeholders? We have… structures.” The word tasted like a shield. “We’re very keen on doing things properly.”
“Absolutely,” he said, rising, the meeting already mentally filed under Done. “Just remember, opportunities like this don’t come along every day.”
When he’d gone, Sophie let her smile drain away. The glossy pages shone up at her: her estate, his narrative. For years she’d curated other people’s big days, other people’s transformations, keeping herself tidily out of frame. Now the price of saving Hawthorn seemed to be stepping into the shot, and, worse, doing it as a supporting character in Dylan Hawkes’s redemption arc.
They’d migrated to Jack’s corner of the office because his laptop was closest to the plug socket that actually worked. The strip light above them hummed with the faint, interrogatory buzz of a police drama.
Jack clicked to the next tab, jaw tight. “So. Scenario three.” Columns rearranged themselves with pitiless speed. “Assuming we don’t pursue more… Dylan‑adjacent clients, and assuming existing bookings hold, we hit a cashflow crunch by next spring. After that it’s… creative accounting and polite letters to creditors.”
“Charming,” Sophie said, though her voice came out thinner than she meant. The red line dipped like a rollercoaster she’d never have queued for.
“And with them?” Miles asked, leaning in, his cuff brushing the edge of Jack’s mouse mat. His tone was mild; his eyes were not.
Jack toggled another graph. This one rose, but only grudgingly, a shallow incline propped up by colour‑coded bars marked HIGH‑PROFILE RESIDENCY and CONTENT PARTNERSHIP. “Best case. We buy breathing space. But see here (” he highlighted a cluster of cells “) one cancellation, one scandal, one ‘creative hiatus’ and the whole thing judders.”
Sophie stared at the spreadsheet until the numbers blurred into a single, relentless fact: somewhere between column F and column K, Dylan had stopped being a charming complication and become load‑bearing infrastructure.
“We can’t build a business model on one man’s mood swings,” she said, because someone had to.
“No,” Miles agreed quietly. “But without men like him, there isn’t a business model.”
When Dylan’s team followed up by email, brisk and cheery about “locking shoot dates” and securing “authentic access to Sophie’s process,” she instinctively looped Miles into the thread before her better judgement could stage a protest. They ended up shoulder‑to‑shoulder at her laptop in the half‑lit office, drafting careful boundaries: no filming in staff‑only corridors, no private family rooms, limited hours, everything pre‑cleared.
Each compromise felt, to Sophie, like leaving a window on the latch.
Miles, scrolling through the attached draft contract, could see exactly how “limited access” might, with sufficient creativity and a sympathetic judge, expand into something far more invasive. He suggested sub‑clauses and penalty provisions in a voice of smooth, impersonal competence.
But Sophie saw the quick, tight flicker at his jaw.
If she refused outright, they both knew, the estate risked losing not only Dylan’s patronage but the sudden, skittish investor interest now circling his name like birds over ploughed fields.
Meanwhile, Lucy moved through these negotiations as the estate’s unofficial watchdog, all sharp eyes and feigned indifference. Perched on the back steps, cigarette unlit between her fingers, she watched Dylan seek Sophie out after rehearsals with a wary fascination, their barbed exchanges thinning into something unexpectedly gentle when they thought no one was listening. She also clocked the late nights Sophie and Miles spent in the barn with blueprints, contracts and cooling coffee mugs, their silhouettes bowed together over the same page. The more Lucy saw Sophie’s bright, controlled focus blur at the edges in their company, the more she traced emotional fault lines across the estate’s already‑cracked plaster and temperamental wiring, as if heartbreak might be another line item in the risk assessment.
The fairy lights made puddles of gold on the flagstones as they crossed the courtyard, their breath fogging in the cold. Sophie’s words spilled out in bursts between boot-scrapes: how she loathed cameras, how necessary they’d become, how the air steadied when Miles sat beside her, how Dylan, unguarded, was infuriatingly…human. Lucy listened, stomach sinking, and saw it clearly: the estate’s future now mortgaged against Sophie’s heart, to two men professionally trained to leave before anything broke.
The evening begins with a kind of brittle perfection: candles in old jam jars along the barn walls, Lucy’s hand-lettered “Hawthorn Sessions” sign propped by the door, the fairy lights disguising the missing roof slates and the bare patches where plaster simply gave up. Someone’s put a sprig of rosemary in each jar “for atmosphere”; Sophie has already clocked that two are too close to the drapes.
She’s abandoned the headset for once, the plastic loop and dangling mic hidden in a back pocket like a security blanket she is pretending not to need. Instead she moves through the arriving guests in a soft blur of murmur and smiles, her boots quiet on the swept flagstones. She checks the sound levels with the local tech, Ben from the village, who insists on calling her “boss” and blushes beetroot whenever she thanks him, then quietly steers the more excitable influencers toward the complimentary prosecco and the corner with the best light for their phones.
“Hashtag it with the sign if you can,” she adds lightly, gesturing to Lucy’s board. “Hawthorn Sessions. No apostrophe. We’re not yet at the stage where we can afford punctuation.”
They laugh; their bracelets jangle; one of them asks if Dylan will “do a surprise duet with anyone.” Sophie smiles in the practised way that says of course anything is possible and absolutely not on your life.
She positions the few potential investors with the precision of a general laying out cannon. This one with a line of sight to the bar so he can note the healthy spend, that one where she’ll catch the way the crowd listens, all of them with a clear view of both stage and faces. Jack hovers by the makeshift cloakroom, doing something apparently mesmerising with a clipboard that is, Sophie suspects, ninety per cent avoidance strategy.
When Dylan wanders in late, guitar case in hand, he smells faintly of cold air and someone else’s cigarette smoke. He stops just inside the doorway and takes in the transformed space with a low whistle, head tipped back, eyes tracking the fairy lights as if they’re constellations and not borrowed from the Christmas box.
“Bloody hell,” he says under his breath, more to himself than anyone, but the nearest row hears and ripples with pleased amusement.
He surveys the jam jars, the sign, the crowd already turning towards him like flowers to the sun. Then his gaze finds her across the barn. For a heartbeat too long, everything else falls out of focus. There’s an unreadable look on his face: curiosity, a flicker of respect, something almost like nerves. It lands on her and holds, a dangerous extra beat that steals a breath she had not consented to give.
She responds with the smallest movement. A raised eyebrow, the ghost of a professional smile that says, You’re late, but we’ve made you look good anyway. He huffs a sound that might be a laugh, might be a surrender, and lifts the guitar case in a half-salute before letting himself be swallowed by the low thrum of anticipation, the murmur of guests rearranging themselves now that the evening’s axis has walked into the room.
The first half of the set runs on practised charm. Old favourites polished to a soft gleam, the sort of songs even the least musical uncle at a wedding would recognise. Dylan threads them together with ease: a self-mocking story about taking the wrong turn off the B-road and ending up nose-to-nose with a tractor, a throwaway line about “proper countryside darkness” that makes the Londoners titter, a lazy, flirty aside to a woman in the front row that sends her table into delighted giggles.
From her post near the side door, Sophie keeps count in quiet, satisfied beats. One: Ben nails the levels, no feedback shriek to puncture the mood. Two: not a single prosecco flute anywhere near the amps. Three: the heaters are, miraculously, winning their long war with the Cotswold damp. Four: the caterer’s canapés are vanishing at an investor‑friendly, Instagram‑proof pace.
Each chorus lands, the laughter comes in the right places, and she can almost feel Jack at the back, recalibrating spreadsheets in his head. When Dylan glances over mid-chorus and throws her a quick, conspiratorial half‑grin, she answers with a brisk, managerial nod that means We’re on schedule, we’re fine, while firmly pretending she doesn’t notice the tiny, treacherous bloom of warmth under her ribs that insists on answering anyway.
Then, without his usual rambling preamble about where or with whom he wrote it, Dylan only says into the mic that he’s going to try “something new I’ve been working on upstairs.” No title, no joke, just the bare statement. The barn shifts almost imperceptibly; phones lower, conversations die off at the bar as if someone’s turned down a dimmer switch. He adjusts the strap once, stares somewhere just above people’s heads, and begins.
The song that follows is stripped of all his usual shimmer. No clever hooks, no sing‑along chorus, just a slow, aching melody about being the noise in other people’s lives and the silence in your own. Sophie, halfway through reaching for the radio on her belt to whisper some instruction about heaters or wine refills, simply…forgets. Her hand stays pressed uselessly against her hip as her mind, treacherously, supplies a dozen faces to fit his words.
The usual flicker of performance in Dylan’s face is gone; he looks oddly younger, almost cautious, as if he’s brought something breakable out into the light and isn’t entirely sure the room deserves it. Even the influencers in the corner, trained to smile through anything, are utterly still. When a light gust rattles the loose slates overhead and the fairy lights sway, it feels as though the barn itself has leaned in, the old beams and new wiring and borrowed chairs all holding their breath with everyone inside.
The last chord hangs, and for a suspended second there is absolute quiet. No clink of glass, no rustle of programmes, even the heaters seeming to hold their breath. Sophie’s gaze sweeps the room on instinct, cataloguing reactions like data points: an investor blinking rapidly, jaw set as if furious with himself for being moved; Lucy frozen against a post, her sarcasm stripped away and replaced by a look that is all sharp, unguarded knowing; Jack’s folded arms loosening, his usual reserve cracked by a brief, astonished flicker of something that might, if she were reckless enough to name it, be belief. At the very back, Miles stands half in shadow, hands in his pockets, gaze fixed not on Dylan but on Sophie, as if studying the way the song rearranges her. When the applause finally erupts it feels less like polite appreciation and more like a collective exhale she has somehow orchestrated without quite meaning to.
The praise swells into a pleasant roar. Guests surging towards the makeshift bar, tossing around words like “transformative” and “format,” already workshopping future hashtags. Sophie stays rooted to the edge of the room, pulse thrumming, fingers curled tight around her clipboard. She can almost hear the outlines of a future assembling themselves, slotting into place with an audible click: press photos shot under these exact fairy lights; a glossy deck full of “Hawthorn Sessions” branding in Lucy’s sardonic, immaculate style; a regular calendar of dates colour‑coded across the year; partnership emails drafted in Miles’s precise, cool language; Jack’s spreadsheets edging, cell by cell, from red to black. But braided through those practical visions is something softer and far more dangerous. A sudden, fierce attachment to the way Dylan had looked when he thought no one was listening, the rawness smudging his usual grin; to the brief, astonished glow in Jack’s eyes; to the quiet, reluctant pride she sensed in Miles’s half‑hidden smile at the back. The understanding comes with such sharp, inconvenient clarity that she actually sways, one boot heel scraping the concrete. Hawthorn’s next chapter is no longer an abstract business plan she can abandon if necessary. It is this night, these people, this precarious alignment: and her own heart, now unmistakably, unforgivably, entangled with all three.
In the first flush of morning-after optimism, Sophie spread Jack’s latest reports and her own colour‑coded notes across the big kitchen table, laptop pinging with new messages like an over‑caffeinated woodpecker. Outside, the courtyard still wore its soft, post‑dawn mist; inside, the Aga hummed, the kettle muttered, and the estate’s future balanced on a scatter of spreadsheets and a mug ring on a printout titled CASHFLOW PROJECTIONS – REVISED.
She tried, very deliberately, not to look at the red columns.
An agency from London wanted to “partner” on a curated series of Hawthorn Sessions. The email was all lower‑case familiarity and exclamation marks, the attached deck full of artfully blurred fairy lights and people in expensive knitwear laughing around firepits that looked nothing like their somewhat temperamental stone fire circle.
The draft term sheet, however, had the breezy charm of a parking fine.
Phrases slipped in like nettles among the wildflowers: “primary branding control,” “exclusive promotional rights across all digital channels,” “first‑refusal position on associated sub‑brands and derivative concepts.” Sophie scrolled, stomach tightening, as “heritage asset” and “content pipeline” appeared on the same page as “Hawthorn Grange” in a font that clearly believed itself to be friendly.
“Of course you do,” she muttered at ‘primary branding control’, and took a steadying gulp of tea.
She clicked open a fresh page in her notebook, blue for Opportunities, green for Risks, yellow for Things That Will Give Jack Hives, and began her own list.
Pros: London agency, existing network, potential PR lift, professional infrastructure.
Cons: Want to own your actual soul.
Underneath, in smaller writing: Can we afford not to let someone?
The laptop pinged again. Dylan’s management, subject line: FOLLOW‑UP: RESIDENCY DISCUSSION. Another agency, this one with a name that sounded like a Shoreditch cocktail bar, proposing an “intimate documentary series capturing Hawthorn’s rebirth.”
Her calendar was already spattered with video calls. She could hear herself in her head, bright and brisk and terribly reasonable: So excited by your interest, absolutely, yes, we’re very protective of the estate’s character, of course we’re open to collaboration, we just need to ensure alignment with our core values. Alignment with our core values sounded suspiciously like something the cabin man from last night’s call had said while trying to bulldoze a boathouse.
What she actually had were bills, a decaying west wing, and Jack’s neat handwriting in the margins of the report. Things like, “We need ~£250k within 12 months to avoid asset disposal,” which, in her head, translated as: you have one year to save this place from becoming a spa with ideas above its station.
She rehearsed phrases silently, testing each for the right blend of grateful‑yet‑unyielding.
“Brand partnership could be interesting, but we’d be looking at co‑stewardship rather than primary control…”
“Digital rights would need to remain with the estate for flexibility going forward…”
“Heritage isn’t just an aesthetic for us; it’s a living community, so any agreement would have to respect that…”
Enthusiastic enough to keep them hooked, firm enough to keep them out of the bones of the place.
Somewhere overhead, footsteps thumped faintly. Down here, Sophie smoothed the crumpled term sheet, squared her shoulders, and clicked “Schedule Meeting.”
“Right,” she told the kitchen, which, like the rest of Hawthorn Grange, had heard its fair share of foolish promises. “Let’s see if we can flirt with London without marrying it off the premises.”
By the third day, the calls had acquired the antiseptic sameness of hotel corridors. Faces changed, logos rotated, but the phrases stayed eerily consistent. A boutique events firm rhapsodised about “immersive rural wellness weekends” which, on their deck, looked suspiciously like a re-skinned corporate off‑site with better cushions. A contact of Miles’s, introduced with careful off‑handedness as “a friend of a friend from the City”, slid onto her screen and, in tones as smooth as oiled walnut, inquired how emotionally attached they were to “underperforming heritage assets.”
Sophie imagined handing him the west wing’s leaky roof and telling him to bond with it.
One particularly polished investor spoke warmly of “light‑touch redevelopment” of the stables and lakeside into high‑end cabins, promising the estate’s “soul” would be “curated, not compromised.” Hawthorn Grange, in his vision, came with key cards and underfloor heating.
Sophie held her brightest smile to the webcam, said she was “open to exploring options,” and the second the call disconnected, jammed her pen into the margin of her notebook, gouging NO CABINS so hard the nib threatened structural damage.
Dylan drifted in and out of these negotiations like weather: appearing in the kitchen mid‑call to rummage for coffee, mouthing exaggerated sorrys as he banged cupboards and nearly decapitated himself on the low beam by the pantry. Once, halfway through a solemn discussion of “brand guardianship,” he discovered the jar of marshmallows Lucy had hidden behind the flour and silently mimed a hostage situation with one of them until Sophie, valiantly ignoring him, choked on the word “authenticity.”
Later, perched on the counter while she typed furiously, he flicked through a glossy pitch deck someone had printed and abandoned by the fruit bowl.
“We’re two steps away from branded bathrobes and a signature Hawthorn smoothie,” he announced, waving a mock brochure at Lucy. “Come rewild your inbox. Reconnect with yourself and your favourite burnout musician in a heritage spa advert. Daily cold‑water swims in the lake, assuming you sign the waiver. Optional gong bath with emotionally unavailable indie star.”
Lucy snorted. “We can put that on a tote bag.”
The joke landed; everyone laughed, the tension in Sophie’s shoulders loosening by a barely perceptible degree. It felt, for a moment, like they were all on the same side, gently mocking the London gloss attempting to colonise their collapsing gutters.
But the next morning he was up early, barefoot and quiet, moving through the half‑lit kitchen like a rumour, mug, teabag, kettle, no commentary. Sophie, coming down for the first pot of tea, caught only the back of him disappearing up the narrow service staircase, notebook and guitar tucked under one arm.
By the time the rest of the house properly woke, the attic room he’d claimed, once a forgotten lumber space with a view of the beech woods, was already beginning to look like a weather system of its own: drifts of crumpled lyrics, a scatter of guitar plectrums, half‑drunk mugs of tea cooling on the cracked windowsill, and, propped against an old trunk, the estate’s silence patiently absorbing whatever he was trying not quite to say out loud.
By mid‑week, those blurry images had acquired captions like “secret set in the Cotswolds” and “new era loading.” Blogs speculated about “Hawthorn Sessions”; one particularly breathless piece dubbed the manor “his countryside muse.” On the call, the manager’s laugh crackled through Sophie’s laptop speaker, genial and impenetrable. She closed it afterwards and stared at her own reflection, faint and ghosted in the black screen, feeling uncomfortably like an unpaid extra in somebody else’s carefully improvised mythology.
Inside the house, that slippery word (residency) starts to mean different things to different people, and none of them match. The kitchen staff joke about “Mr Hawkes’s usual” at breakfast, as if he were a new piece of permanent equipment; the gardener mutters about planning next season’s beds around “all these concerts” and whether the dahlias can cope with amplifiers. Lucy rolls her eyes at the hype, insisting this is a fling, not a marriage, and pointing out that men who live out of holdalls rarely sign long leases. Jack, looking over occupancy projections, cautiously builds in a “Dylan effect” without daring to label it dependence, pencilling in percentages as if they might evaporate. Sophie, caught between spreadsheets and mood boards, can’t tell if they’re riding a temporary wave or building a future on sand. Every yes she offers to an email or an off‑hand suggestion feels double‑edged: each small commitment potentially anchoring Hawthorn Grange to Dylan’s orbit. Or tying him, however lightly, to theirs, like a guest who’s never quite checked in but somehow acquires a drawer.
Jack arrives earlier than planned for their meeting, the folder already open under his arm, and lays out colour‑coded printouts on the long dining table, nudging aside Sophie’s scatter of fabric swatches and hand‑drawn floor plans. A sample menu for a “Harvest Supper Retreat” flutters to the floor; he stoops automatically, places it back on the edge of the table as if it were something fragile that might accuse him later.
As he talks through line items, roof repairs postponed once, then twice; insurance premiums creeping up; the tax bill circled in his careful handwriting, his voice stays level, but his finger taps an impatient rhythm against the deficit column. The soft, syncopated thud of nail on paper becomes its own bleak metronome. Sophie, arms folded, then unfolded, then braced on the table, keeps trying to fit his numbers into the story she’s been building in her head: weekend retreats with full waiting lists, artist residencies booked a year in advance, “Dylan effect” packages selling out before she can design the flyers.
She slides one of her mood boards back into the space he’s cleared, as if it might act as a counter‑argument. “If we confirm two autumn retreats and a winter song‑writing week, ”
“That assumes,” Jack cuts in, not unkindly but with the precision of someone trimming an equation, “that they all pay deposits, don’t cancel, and that your ‘winter song‑writing week’ isn’t one man and his guitar who doesn’t believe in itineraries.”
Her mouth tightens. “He also doesn’t believe in invoices until his manager nags him, but we’re working on that.”
The more optimistic she sounds, the more Jack’s shoulders knot, the fabric of his jumper straining slightly where tension hooks in. He adjusts his glasses, looks again at the red figures, then at the windows, where late light slants over the lawns as if they, at least, are effortlessly paid for.
“So,” he says, tapping the page once more, gentler this time, “even with your best‑case bookings, we’re still here. This isn’t me being gloomy, Soph. It’s just… arithmetic.”
“And this,” she counters, nudging a swatch of sunny yellow fabric back towards him, “isn’t me being delusional. It’s just… planning ahead.”
Between them, the table becomes a small battleground of competing futures: his neatly stapled forecasts, her curling edges of possibility, both refusing to give way.
The conversation tilts from numbers to definitions. What counts as “viable,” what “saving the estate” actually means, and for whom. Jack circles a figure with his pen; Sophie answers by jabbing at a header she’s scrawled on a notebook: future revenue streams.
“Viable,” he says, “is not going insolvent in eighteen months.”
“Viable,” she counters, “is not flogging off bits of the place until it looks like a heritage cheese board.”
She brandishes her phone, screen glowing with an email about a boutique agency wanting to “discuss partnership,” the subject line sprinkled with exclamation marks. “They reached out to us, Jack. That’s not nothing.”
He scans it, then looks back at her, eyes dulled by the late train and an earlier meeting with the solicitors. “How many of these ‘let’s chat’ emails have turned into signed contracts? Deposits? Anything that exists outside your inbox?”
Her usual easy humour slips. “You’re the one who told me you needed faith as well as spreadsheets, remember?”
“I never said faith could service a loan,” he replies. Too fast, too sharp.
Their old shorthand falters. In its place comes a careful, chilly civility, as if they’ve slid without noticing onto opposite sides of a negotiating table neither of them meant to set.
The tension lengthens into the next hour, not in raised voices but in the ways they both forget to soften. Sophie pours tea and almost forgets to ask how Jack’s job is going; when she does remember, the question sounds like an afterthought stapled onto the end of a sentence about overheads. Jack notices, tucks the observation away with the rest of his quiet resentments, and bends over the spreadsheets instead, pen hovering over a red circle he’s drawn three months from now: the point at which, without fresh capital, they will have to choose which limb of Hawthorn Grange to amputate.
When Sophie suggests they simply “hold on until the Dylan buzz peaks,” Jack’s reply, “Buzz doesn’t pay VAT”, lands heavier than intended, flattening the last of her bravado. Silence seeps in, filling the length of the dining table, broken only by the prim tick of the longcase clock and the faint clatter and laughter from the kitchen, where someone is clearly enjoying a world that does not yet include red‑ringed deadlines. Sophie straightens a fork that doesn’t need straightening; Jack caps his pen with unnecessary care. Neither of them quite meets the other’s eye.
Later, in the drawing room with the fire burned low to embers, Miles drifts into the conversation under the guise of idle curiosity, a whisky in hand and his consultant’s neutrality buttoned neatly over whatever he actually thinks. Sophie, seizing on a new audience, outlines tiered retreats, songwriting residencies, “Dylan weekends”; Jack, sounding tired even to himself, summarises his earlier warnings in measured phrases. Miles listens, head slightly tilted, asking the sort of precise, ostensibly harmless questions that make projections look like wishful thinking. Then, with the lightest of touches, he agrees that Jack’s assessment is “realistic given the current liabilities.” The word realistic stings more than any outright criticism. Sophie laughs it off, but her jaw tightens; when Jack adds a small, grateful glance towards Miles, it feels, to her, like they have quietly closed ranks on the far side of a line she didn’t know they were drawing.
By the end of the evening, the room feels faintly rearranged, though no chair has moved. In conversations splintering off after supper, phrases like “strategic divestment,” “selling off the worst‑performing assets,” and “not getting sentimental” begin to circulate, Miles’s calm baritone often somewhere in the mix. Tidying the deserted dining room, Sophie pauses between plates, staring at the red circle on Jack’s spreadsheet and the hopeful arrows on her mood boards. She realises, with a small, disloyal shock, that “saving Hawthorn” now seems to mean triage to some, opportunity to others. The slight ache in her chest might be anger at Jack, resentment of Miles, or the dawning suspicion that her vision is quietly becoming the outlier.
Jack sat at the head of the long refectory table with only the desk lamp and the blue glare of his laptop for company, telling himself, as he had in every carefully worded email to his boss, that he was “only here in an advisory capacity.” It had the tidy ring of something HR would approve of, and he liked the way it made him sound: sensible, detached, above the squabble of family drama and damp plaster.
The spreadsheet on his screen, however, was open alongside a PDF of the will, and the fiction frayed a little every time he shifted his gaze. His own name appeared again and again in the clauses about “consent of the majority stakeholders.” Jack scrolled past them briskly at first, index finger flicking the trackpad in a practised little shrug of disinterest, as if the repetition bored him.
It did not. The words “Mr Jonathan Sutton” seemed to loom in twelve-point Times New Roman, as obtrusive as if someone had underlined them in red. He clicked back, ostensibly to check a figure, and found himself highlighting a line about his veto rights instead. His lips thinned; his eyes lingered far longer than any neutral advisor’s ought, running once, twice, three times over the phrase “shall not be effective without his express written consent.”
He told himself he was only checking for errors. Solicitors made mistakes; it was practically a hobby. He zoomed in, read the surrounding paragraph, then the one before that, until the structure of the thing was unmistakable: there was no scenario in which anything major happened at Hawthorn Grange without his say-so.
Jack leaned back, the old chair creaking in faint reproach, and rubbed a thumb along the edge of the table where generations of more willing relatives had carved absent-minded grooves. “Only advisory,” he murmured, as if the oak and the laptop might be fooled, and drew a small, precise tick in his notebook next to the words: Veto clause. Note. He boxed the tick in, very neatly, and left it there.
When his phone buzzes with a message from the accounting firm, Could we bring Monday’s catch‑up forward? Just to keep things moving, Jack types out a brisk, efficient reply about “trains” and “family obligations at the Grange,” fingers moving with practised, office‑honed speed. He even adds an apologetic line about rural timetables and having to work around “limited services,” then pauses, the cursor blinking patiently at the end of the sentence.
The reader watches him tab, almost absently, to the browser window already open behind the spreadsheet. A journey planner sits there, mid‑search. He deletes a cheaper, earlier train option he’s already found, replaces it with a later one, then, after another long, motionless moment, closes the booking tab entirely instead of pressing “confirm.”
In the thick quiet of the half‑heated bedroom, he rubs the back of his neck and mutters something under his breath about “bloody country internet” and “patchy Wi‑Fi,” as if that explains anything. His overnight bag, open on the chair by the wardrobe, remains half‑packed: shirts folded, laptop charger coiled on top, zip gaping. He does not go near it.
He tells himself the extra day is “purely practical”: time to finish the report, straighten out a few discrepancies in the utilities column, sit in on one more discussion so he can be thorough and, crucially, unimpeachable. If anyone at the firm queried it, he could produce emails, minutes, tidy justifications. Yet, when he drifts down the corridor with a mug of tea gone cold, his steps slow almost imperceptibly outside the drawing room where Sophie’s laugh filters through the half‑open door, or near the window that overlooks Thomas’s walled garden, silvered under weak moonlight. The narrative makes it plain that Jack isn’t only delaying trains; he is postponing a return to the anonymous office kitchen where no one argues about orchards or follies or whether an old boathouse is worth saving, only about client codes and whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher.
Upstairs, in a guest room temporarily converted into a workspace, Miles sat at a neatly ordered desk, the glow of his laptop reflected back by the dark pane as if an extra, unsmiling version of himself were reading over his shoulder. The memo he was drafting for his anonymous client bore the bloodless heading “Preliminary Strategic Options,” and on its surface the language was impeccably cool, professional: “parceling off peripheral acreage,” “leveraging celebrity residency,” “luxury eco‑lodge development along the south boundary.” It looked, line by line, like every other document that had inched some other place one step closer to being unrecognisable to the people who lived there. He told himself this was just another file in a long queue, no different from any other distressed asset. But every time the cursor approached a sentence that would tie projected gains to “streamlining event management,” he hesitated, backspaced, restructured, found a way to fold the thought into passive constructions and market‑speak without ever typing Sophie’s name or title.
On screen, the pattern is almost prim, fastidious: she appears only as “existing arrangements,” “legacy commitments,” never as a person whose handwriting still labels half the pantry shelves downstairs. He leans back, rolls his shoulders, and reassures himself that omitting her from the sharpest phrases is merely a question of clarity, not conscience. Yet the careful evasions betray a crack in the armour of neutrality, even as outside his room the estate inches, quietly and inexorably, toward the kind of public decisions that planners, surveyors, and lifestyle editors will shortly expect to see in writing, laminated in proposals and slid across polished tables far from Gloucestershire.
The first ripples from London arrive as emails that Sophie stares at longer than she admits: an agency trumpeting “synergy” and “first‑mover advantage” wants a recce within the month, dangling the promise of locking in Hawthorn Grange as the flagship site for a new series of “immersive rural experiences.” The subject line alone (“Exciting Opportunity: Hawthorn as Hero Location?”) makes her stomach perform an undignified swoop. She reads it three times, then a fourth, mouthing certain phrases as if that might make them less absurd.
On the phone, their representative speaks briskly from some open‑plan office where you can practically hear the glass and the coffee machine through the line. He refers to Dylan by first name only, as if they are all on intimate terms and talks about “capturing content” at the Grange in the same tone Sophie reserves for discussing boiler maintenance. Dates are floated as though the estate’s calendar is already theirs to fill: soft launches, exclusive weekends, “partner activations” in the walled garden.
Sophie, pen hovering over her paper diary, watches the neat columns of cream‑coloured squares blur slightly. “We’re… considering options,” she hears herself say, the words slipping out like a dropped plate she is somehow still trying to catch. It is neither no nor yes, merely an open gate through which any number of glossy possibilities, and disasters, might stroll.
As the representative cheerfully offers to “pop down with the team for a quick walk‑through,” Sophie’s eye falls on the ink cross‑hatching her current commitments: village craft afternoons, a writing retreat that has paid its deposit in painstaking instalments, Mrs Jenks’s eightieth birthday tea. The agency man talks of “curating guest mix” and “premium tiers”; she thinks of Mrs Jenks’s delight at the promise of scones in the orangery and wonders if “legacy guests” is a recognised brand segment.
By the time she rings off, with a non‑committal “Send through the deck and I’ll review it with my colleagues,” her hand aches from clutching the pen without writing anything at all. The diary remains open, the week of the proposed recce a pale, expectant span of boxes. Around it cluster her existing pencilled notes like quieter, older planets suddenly aware that some bright new star has been announced and may, at any moment, demand they rearrange their orbits.
She caps the pen with unnecessary care, feeling the room tilt almost imperceptibly with the weight of what that single, careful ambiguity has invited in.
Almost in tandem, a glossy lifestyle magazine pitches a feature framing the Grange as part of “Britain’s New Creative Country Havens,” the subject line full of ampersands and breathless adjectives. They want high‑resolution images, a quote from Dylan about “reconnection with roots,” and “a short, human‑interest paragraph” from Sophie on nurturing community, as though such things can be produced to order between laundry runs and supplier emails.
Lucy, roped into pulling visuals “just for a look,” perches at the kitchen table with her laptop and an increasingly carnivorous scowl. Folder after folder yields atmospheric shots she took for the website: fairy lights threaded through the barn beams, easels in the walled garden catching late sun, Dylan laughing by the lake with his sleeves rolled up. Each image, she realises, can be sliced neatly into someone else’s narrative about authenticity and curated rusticity that none of them has consciously agreed to tell.
When the editor, all bright vowels and confident laughter, casually mentions a potential cover “if you can promise some ongoing developments,” Sophie hears the conditional as destiny. The phrase lodges behind her ribs like a signed contract. For a moment the kitchen seems to expand, national coverage, investor interest, bookings, and then contract, sharply, around Mrs Jenks’s tea and the writing retreat and all the small, scruffy loyalties that suddenly look terribly fragile beside the idea of glossy pages and headlines. She feels both elated and faintly, treacherously sick.
Dylan’s publicist, seizing on the rumours, begins emailing with the breezy certainty of someone for whom logistics are always somebody else’s problem. She wants provisional dates for “intimate showcase evenings,” capacity numbers for barn, lawns, and “overflow options,” and, Sophie has to read this twice, mood boards for staging concepts that assume full buy‑in, perpetual sunshine, and no such thing as Mrs Jenks’s tea.
On the conference call, her voice pours confidently out of Sophie’s phone on speaker. “We’ll sell this to investors as your long‑term home base,” she trills, “a press‑friendly soft launch, nothing too heavy.” At the far end of the library Dylan lounges on the sofa, guitar balanced on his knee, offering the occasional non‑committal “sure” while half‑smiling, half‑wincing at plans that turn his supposed retreat into a campaign.
Sophie, perched at the big table with her notebook open and pen poised, writes down phrases she doesn’t remember choosing to agree to. She feels Jack’s absence like a missing safety rail at the top of a very long staircase. Every airy “we’ll just” and “you can simply” lands in her stomach with the weight of future invoices and staffing rotas. Listening to the publicist talk as though everything is already decided, she hears how quickly a private experiment can harden into expectation. And how much harder it will be, later, to say no to something that has already been promised in someone else’s pitch deck.
On the ground, the changes are subtler but no less unsettling: a man in a hi‑vis vest is spotted methodically measuring the gravel drive and noting gradients, interrupting the view from the front steps with his tape and pegs; a woman from the council’s planning department leaves a politely worded voicemail about “early conversations” around increased commercial use and potential traffic management, her tone all apologetic cheer. Jack, listening to the message with arms folded, recognises the coded language of processes that, once begun, are rarely reversed, and Sophie clocks the way his jaw tightens before he deletes it. In the village pub that evening, before she can even order a drink, she overhears muttered references to “glamping fields” and “festival types clogging up the lanes,” along with a pointed joke about whether the manor will start charging for local dog‑walkers and a theatrical sigh about “them up there” finally cashing in. The gap between what they are discussing on paper and what everyone believes is already decided narrows by the day, until Sophie feels she is forever arriving late to a conversation about her own future.
Yet nothing quite erupts; instead, the pressure accrues in sideways looks, forwarded threads labelled “Just FYI,” and sentences that trail off whenever someone else walks in, until the house itself seems to hum with it. Sophie hears staff‑room chatter slide from “if this happens” to “when they do it,” and even Thomas, usually impervious, lingers by new survey flags as though committing their positions to memory. In evening sessions with Jack over cooling mugs of tea and stubborn spreadsheets, calls, features, and site visits are translated into cells and formulas, acquiring a chilly inevitability that makes every alternative, holding the line, scaling back, simply refusing, sound like the sentimental option. By the time the rain sets in and talk turns, with awful politeness, to what may be sacrificed to lure the capital they need, the knowledge that any choice will soon be public and very nearly irreversible has already settled, quietly, into the bones of Hawthorn Grange.
The numbers did not even have the grace to blur. They held their shape with brutal clarity, a neat parade of columns and cells that glowed coldly from Jack’s laptop, throwing a bluish sheen over the old pine table. Rain feathered against the kitchen windows in a steady, relentless hiss, as if the outside world were politely insisting on being let in on the conversation.
Sophie sat with her hands wrapped around a mug that had gone lukewarm half an hour ago, the ceramic cooling against her palms. “All right,” she said, too brightly, “so we trim staff hours in the off‑weeks, push a couple more corporate away‑days, maybe trial a winter wellness thing: log fires, mindfulness, soup. People adore soup.”
She could hear herself scattering possibilities like confetti and watched, with a detached sort of fascination, as each one hit the spreadsheet and slid off its surface. Jack, who had been patient through three variations on “if we just worked a bit harder,” pressed his thumb into the knot between his neck and shoulder and stared at the bottom row of red as if willing it to change colour.
“We’ve already modelled that,” he said, not unkindly. His tone carried the tired flatness of someone who had long since run out of euphemisms. “You can shave costs, sure. You can squeeze in another retreat weekend. It buys time. Months, not years.”
She tried again anyway, seasonal pop‑ups, a farm‑to‑table supper club, collaborations with local makers, and each suggestion died a smaller, quicker death than the last. The deficit figure sat there, unmoved, an unblinking third party at their midnight summit.
Jack exhaled, long and slow, then let his hand fall from his shoulder to the table. When he spoke, he did not bother with cushioning clauses or optimistic verbs. “Look,” he said, meeting her eyes at last, “we’re past the point where clever tweaks will do it. The only lines that move the dial fast enough are the ones that mean bringing in serious partners. Naming rights. Long leases. Letting go of bits of this place.”
The phrase hung there between them, absurd and enormous. Letting go, as if he were talking about an unused storage unit rather than the house she had been mentally papering and repainting since the day she first saw it. The rain obligingly grew louder, as though to cover the silence that followed.
“At first?” she said, with a laugh that sounded almost convincing even to her own ears. “That makes it sound as if we’re already halfway to flogging the place to a luxury candle brand. We’re just talking…creative sponsorships. Collaborations. Tasteful synergy.” She waggled her fingers in the air, as if italics could magic the numbers into compliance.
Jack did not so much as twitch.
He angled the laptop towards her instead, one forefinger settling on a particular cluster of cells. On the little plan he’d added to the tab, the corresponding section of the house glowed obligingly: the south‑facing bedrooms with their absurdly good light; the kitchen where she had argued, calmly and then not at all calmly, against ripping out the old dresser; the half‑tamed barn she and Lucy had once spent an entire weekend festooning with fairy lights and extension leads.
“It’s this,” he said. “The postcard. They don’t want the draughty service corridors or the far paddocks. They want the bits you’ve made irresistible. Weddings, branded retreats, maybe a semi‑permanent wellness set‑up. And they won’t just write cheques and vanish. They’ll want a say. In everything.”
The unadorned word dropped between them with a dense, domestic finality, heavier than any legal term he might have chosen. For a beat, the familiar kitchen sounds, the hum of the fridge, the central heating’s half‑hearted rattle, the clock’s prim little tick, rose up and seemed to close over it, as if the room itself were trying, and failing, to pretend she hadn’t heard.
The thought of ceding that control makes something in Sophie go cold, as if someone has opened a door to a winter she remembers too well. The highlighted cells on Jack’s spreadsheet swim, rearranging themselves into the outline of another kitchen years ago: laminate worktop, cheap wine in mismatched glasses, a man with careful hands and a reasonable voice explaining that certain decisions were “just practicalities.” They had been practical right up to the moment his practicality required an exit strategy that did not include her. Hawthorn Grange had been her rebuttal to that neat little speech, brick‑and‑mortar proof that she could build a life no one else could pick up and walk away with. And now Jack, perfectly calm, is suggesting she open the front door and invite in another set of charming, well‑intentioned strangers, hand them keys and veto power, and trust that this time (this time) the people promising to be in it for the long haul will not quietly redraw the plans and leave her standing alone in a half‑finished room.
Jack, who knows the outline of that story but not the sticky, humiliating particulars, mistakes her silence for mere professional stubbornness. He presses on, sketching safeguards (titles, minority stakes, break clauses, neat little lifeboats in tidy legalese) until his voice blurs into the remembered click of a latch. She hears herself say, too cheerfully, that of course she understands, that she’s “not sentimental about rooms,” while her fingers weld around the cooling mug. From a step back, it is painfully clear: the much‑admired self‑reliance she wears so briskly is less a philosophy than fortification, scaffolding thrown up in haste after a collapse, still shuddering whenever anyone suggests she let them tinker with the load‑bearing walls.
That armour has been hairline‑cracking ever since Dylan colonised the attic with cables and coffee cups, his very existence tugging light, cameras and speculative money toward the rooms Jack now proposes she parcel up. Investors and agencies aren’t courting Hawthorn Grange so much as “the birthplace of the new Hawkes record,” speaking blithely as if his whim could be ring‑fenced in a contract. For Sophie, hitching the estate’s survival, and her own carefully rebarred heart, to a man who might evaporate the moment the weather, the press, or his mood sours feels like staging her oldest nightmare on a grander set. The bruise beneath her independence darkens; from the outside, it may look like canny leverage, but from where she’s standing it is the dread of watching someone else walk away, leaving their glossy promises and unpaid emotional invoices scattered across her kitchen table.
In the first wave of excitement, Sophie tells herself that this is what she has been working toward: emails multiplying, phone ringing off the hook, Jack appearing in doorways with “quick questions” that turn out to be entire budget lines. She props her laptop on the scrubbed pine table in the morning room, spreads out notepads and colour‑coded pens, and begins to sketch.
On paper it looks almost elegant. A “Hawthorn Sessions” weekend where guests attend Dylan’s open soundchecks in the barn, followed by songwriting circles with local musicians. A residency package: three weeks in the stable block for emerging artists, catered by village suppliers, culminating in a public showcase on the lawn. She threads “community” through every heading – Farm‑to‑Table Suppers, Cotswold Makers’ Market, Village Choir – as if repetition alone will weight the word into the bones of the place.
But the agencies do not speak in that key. On the first video call, a woman with symmetrical hair and a view of the Shard behind her smiles and says “love the authenticity angle,” which Sophie tries to take as a compliment. By the third call, “authenticity” has acquired bullet points. They want naming rights for the barn (“Hawkes Hall” is floated, presumably in jest), guaranteed first refusal on all future music‑adjacent events, and a guest list curated to “premium demographics” that makes her think, unhelpfully, of designer luggage breeding in the boot room.
Whenever she mentions local day tickets or discounted slots for village teenagers, there is a polite, baffled pause, as if she has suggested seating a flock of hens at the top table. “Brilliant for optics,” one man concedes, “but we’ll need to ring‑fence that so it doesn’t dilute the core offer.” She hears herself say, “We’ll look into that,” voice bright, cursor hovering over phrases in her draft proposal that suddenly feel childish: pay‑what‑you‑can, open studio, community access.
After each call she adds another asterisk to her notes – small, precise amputations of what she thought Hawthorn Grange would be. The retreat weekends grow sleeker, more enamelled. The messy, inexpensive warmth she imagined is tidied out of the descriptions, relegated to the margins as “optional add‑ons” that no one is keen to underwrite. By twilight, her neat columns of figures show improved projections, and her stomach shows the hollowed‑out ache of having bartered away something she cannot name in any cell of Jack’s spreadsheet.
Jack is pushed toward hard lines
While Sophie improvises, Jack retreats to spreadsheets and projections, running scenario after scenario that all end in red without a substantial cash injection. He sits hunched at the end of the dining table, the good silver pushed aside to make room for print‑outs, his laptop casting a wan glow over neat little tombstones of negative numbers. Each fresh tab promises some clever combination of retreat packages, careful pruning of staff hours, and deferred maintenance; each one, in due course, presents him with the same blunt deficit, merely wearing a different font.
Family conference calls grow sharper. Relatives who once treated Hawthorn Grange as a charming backdrop for Christmas photos now speak urgently about “asset rationalisation” and their right to a return, the phrase “sentimental attachment” acquiring the tone of a diagnosis. Jack, who can quote the will’s clauses in his sleep, finds himself the reluctant arbiter between their impatience and Sophie’s quiet, furious insistence that selling off woodland or outbuildings will cripple the estate’s long‑term earning power. Every time he nudges a decisive vote onto the “next meeting” agenda, he feels the noose of responsibility tighten, aware that postponement is not neutral; it is simply choosing a slower, more ambiguous kind of damage.
Miles steers the conversation
Miles, watching from doorways and the safer ends of tables, begins to lace his preferred phrases into everyone else’s sentences until they sound almost native: “ring‑fencing liabilities,” “maximising under‑utilised parcels,” “strategic divestment of non‑core assets.” He talks about “unlocking value” in the same tone one might use for finding a forgotten crate of Champagne in the cellar. Potential sales of land and buildings are presented as tidy, almost virtuous measures to “protect the heart of Hawthorn Grange,” the phrase repeated often enough that even Sophie hears herself use it. He never mentions the corporate client whose desires align so neatly with carving off the most marketable sections.
In private, his emails grow steadily more confident. Jack’s increasing exhaustion, the fractious family calls, the estate’s mounting obligations, pension liabilities, insurance renewals, the looming boiler replacement, are logged not as misfortunes but as “pressure points.” With “appropriate narrative framing,” he assures the client, these will tip the group towards his recommended restructuring: a graceful, well‑compensated surrender dressed up as prudent stewardship.
From his corner of the walled garden and the studio that has become his entire world, Thomas hears enough snatches, “redevelopment options,” “repurposing outbuildings,” “studio spaces we could open up”, to realise that the quiet zones he relies on are being eyed as assets rather than shelters. Mentions of “maximising under‑utilised parcels” land like footsteps outside a locked door. Old instincts for reading subtext reawaken; he begins asking apparently idle questions about planning permissions and ownership boundaries, memorising the evasions in Miles’s answers and the way Jack’s mouth tightens when acreage is mentioned. Night after night, he walks the estate’s perimeter, mentally mapping which paths, sheds, and rooms would vanish or be overrun if the glossy visions on the table ever make it off the page, rehearsing how, and for whom, he might break his long habit of looking away.
Dylan becomes the unwilling fulcrum
Meanwhile, Dylan watches the estate’s mood warp around his presence: agents ring to “touch base” about the Hawthorn sessions, sponsors float ideas for branded listening parties, and Sophie’s proposals increasingly hinge on his availability months from now. The attic, once a refuge where he could scribble lyrics without scrutiny, starts to feel like a glass box as schedules, potential streaming tie‑ins, and VIP packages are discussed downstairs. He hears his name used as a line item, a lever, a promise to people he has never met. When he ducks meetings or shrugs off questions about commitments, tension ripples through the house; Sophie’s smile goes a fraction too bright, Jack’s pen pauses, Miles’s gaze sharpens. Plans that might rescue Hawthorn Grange, and drag it into someone’s version of the future, are already balanced precariously on whether he stays, plays, or walks away, and for the first time in years, walking away does not feel like the simplest option.
The more the festival gains traction online, the more Sophie feels time compress around her, as if the estate’s long corridors have narrowed into one endless, breathless to‑do list. The first glossy teaser post goes up on a Monday; by Wednesday her inbox behaves like a malicious hydra: every resolved query sprouts two more marked “urgent” or, worse, “friendly reminder :)”.
She starts triaging crises on instinct. At nine in the morning she’s in the kitchen, mobile wedged between shoulder and ear, reassuring the florist that yes, the final numbers will be confirmed “by close of play today, promise,” while her free hand scrolls through a spreadsheet she has not meaningfully looked at in forty‑eight hours. At the same time, her laptop on the counter dings persistently with new messages from the marquee company about revised payment terms, which she half‑reads and flags “to deal with properly later.”
Later recedes like the horizon.
By lunchtime she’s firing off apologetic emails and telling herself she’ll sit down properly with the budget after one more task. One more phone call. One more site walk to show a caterer where the generators can go so nobody trips over cables in a floaty linen dress and sues them into oblivion.
By early evening she is back at the long oak table in the little office off the hall, a cold mug of tea by her elbow, the light outside softening to that Cotswold gold tourists think is permanent. Her laptop pings with overdue reminders she pointedly minimises: accounting software nudging her about unpaid invoices, her banking app suggesting she “review your recent outgoings,” a terse note from a supplier whose subject line begins, ominously, “Final notice”.
She tells herself she’ll open them after she’s reworked the room allocations. People she can solve: move the influencer couple from the west wing because the shower pressure is unreliable; swap the wellness podcaster into a stable‑block suite with exposed beams she’ll post about. Numbers, on the other hand, sit there in uncompromising black and red, indifferent to charm, to homemade biscuits, to the fact that she is trying very hard.
So she adjusts menus instead, scribbling alternatives in Lucy’s notebook and debating whether they can stretch to the more photogenic canapés if she quietly downgrades the Saturday lunch wine. It all feels like visible progress (things she can point to, lists she can tick, staff she can brief) rather than the static horror of a cash‑flow forecast.
When Jack’s updated financial report pops up as a notification, she lets it hover for a moment, then clicks the little cross to make it disappear. “Tomorrow,” she says aloud, because saying it makes it sound like a plan rather than a postponement. The house, obligingly, says nothing back.
Out in the hall, she can hear distant laughter, Dylan’s voice among others, easy and untroubled, and for a split second her fingers drift towards the banking app icon. Then she drags the rooming chart closer instead, drawing firm, confident arrows on the page as if a perfect bed allocation might, by some domestic alchemy, transform all those red numbers into black.
Dylan’s image multiplies across the estate in ways he never approved: mood boards pinned in the kitchen, a mock‑up lanyard Lucy leaves on a table, a draft press release open on Sophie’s screen as he walks past. Someone’s found an old black‑and‑white promo shot where he looks moodily into the middle distance; it now presides over the noticeboard between the rota for washing up and a passive‑aggressive note about rinsing mugs.
Each iteration of his name and face as “headliner” makes the whole weekend feel less like a retreat and more like a tour date he never agreed to. He jokes about needing a rider, “three types of locally sourced hummus or I walk”, and earns a snort from Lucy and an eye‑roll from Sophie, but the sound of his own voice rings hollow in his ears.
When Lucy waves a printed schedule that blocks out his “intimate sunset set” and “informal fireside Q&A,” his smile flickers. The paper feels heavier than it should. He folds it once, twice, and pockets it without reading, as if not looking at the timetable might keep time itself from arriving.
Jack spends more afternoons stationed at the far end of the library table, headphones in but no music playing, supposedly compiling a clear summary for the other beneficiaries. The spreadsheet grows more elaborate instead of clearer; he starts colour‑coding cells and adding cautious footnotes that say things like “subject to further confirmation” and “contingent on projected revenue,” phrases designed to buy time rather than inform. Tabs multiply: one for “conservative assumptions,” one for “optimistic scenario,” one discreetly titled “do not circulate.” When his cousin leaves a voicemail asking whether Dylan is “essential to the business model,” Jack replays it twice, then drafts, deletes, and redrafts a non‑answer that promises clarity “once the weekend’s data is in,” as if data might decide for him.
In a quiet corner of the drawing room, Miles takes conference calls with his back to the windows, voice low and precise as he outlines milestones his client wants met before the festival ends. Provisional valuations, draft agreements, evidence of commercial viability and, delicately phrased, “exit strategies.” He notes each demand in his tidy notebook, then later flips it closed when Sophie appears with a question about signage or parking, assuring her they’re still “exploring options” and that nothing is urgent. The same bullet points that sounded neutral over the phone sit leaden on the page when he pictures sliding the notebook across the table to her, watching her read words like “subdivision” and “preferred bidder” in his careful hand.
The strain seeps into casual interactions. A light‑hearted debate over marquee layout judders to a halt when someone mentions capacity limits and late‑arriving licences; a throwaway line about “next year’s festival” hangs, embarrassed, as eyes slide to plates or phones. Even meals become minefields: Lucy derails talk of sponsors with a quip about composting toilets; Thomas rises and leaves the moment anyone says “legacy” or “long‑term vision.” Conversations skitter back to weather, bunting, and unreliable Wi‑Fi with almost comic haste. Beneath the small talk, everyone counts their own invisible ledger of unanswered emails, unsigned documents, and a festival now far too public to abandon without consequences: or headlines.
By mid-morning, the drizzle has settled into that fine, persistent mist that frizzes hair and dampens optimism. Sophie plants herself in the half‑converted barn as if sheer proximity might will it into a flawlessly curated venue. She has commandeered an upturned crate as a desk, her clipboard already bearing three versions of the same to‑do list, each one rewritten in neater handwriting in the optimistic belief that presentation equals progress.
She starts with the fairy lights. The strings have somehow knotted themselves into a philosophy of suffering overnight; she stands on a rickety stepladder, teeth digging into her lower lip as she picks apart impossible tangles, muttering, “We are not being beaten by ten metres of warm white, thank you very much.” When a bulb fails to light, she climbs down, rummages for the spare box, climbs back up. Her phone thrums against her hip, flashing up the familiar red of bank notifications and subject lines that begin, “Final reminder.” She presses the side button without looking and adds “check extension leads” to her list instead.
By eleven, there is a tray of canapés balanced on a trestle table near the doors. She tastes each variation with grave attention, offering brisk notes to the chef’s harried assistant who has been dispatched as a culinary envoy. “The beetroot one is gorgeous but needs salt. No one likes room‑temperature pastry. And we cannot afford olives that taste of nothing, literally and metaphorically.” Another vibration from her pocket; another cheerful scribble: “confirm vegetarian numbers,” “source biodegradable napkins,” “email Lucy about signage fonts.”
Outside, the gardening team tramp past the open barn doors in muddy boots, and she falls into step with them for a circuit of the grounds. They discuss “guest flow” as though choreographing a dance: where people might cluster, where bottlenecks threaten, which corner of the lawn can best disguise a generators’ hum. She gestures with the clipboard, sees in her mind’s eye neat arrows and serene crowds instead of queues and complaints. When her phone buzzes again, she pretends it is only a text about bunting and not another politely urgent reminder that time, unlike fairy lights, cannot be untangled by hand.
Back in the barn, the laptop she abandoned at eight o’clock sits accusingly on a packing crate, screen dark, power cable coiled like a reprimand. Sophie walks past it, deliberately, to re‑laminate the directional signs that everyone already understands. “If we run out of arrows, then we’ll really be in trouble,” she tells no one in particular, aligning edges with meticulous care. Chairs are shifted half an inch this way, half an inch that, forming rows, then circles, then more inviting haphazard clusters. She updates the staff rota with revised timings in three different pen colours and writes “review accounts” in small, cramped letters at the very bottom of the page, where it can be comfortably ignored in favour of anything that involves moving furniture.
Dylan drifts into the drawing room twenty minutes late, sunglasses still on despite the grey light and a guitar slung over his back like a prop he’s forgotten to put down. The small cluster around the coffee table, Sophie, Lucy, Miles, one of the junior events staff clutching a clipboard, breaks off mid-sentence.
“Sorry, sorry,” he announces, hands lifted in a gesture of helpless genius. “Massive breakthrough. I’m going to have to hole up by the lake and catch it before it runs off.”
“We just need to confirm your stage time,” Sophie says, pen poised over the schedule, the faintest tightness at the corners of her mouth. “So tech can. “Stick me wherever you like. Between the artisan cheese demonstration and the meditation gong, yeah?”
The polite laughter that follows lands like dropped cutlery. Lucy leans forward.
“Fine,” she says. “But we also need your sign‑off on the promo posts and whether you’re actually doing the Q&A with, ”
He presses a hand theatrically to his temple. “Can we not? I’ve got a migraine from all this rustic charm. It’s very atmospheric but my head thinks we’re in a church bell.”
Before anyone can object, he is already on his feet, backing towards the side door. “Email me. Or don’t. I’ll be by the lake if anyone needs existential suffering in G major.”
The door clicks shut behind him, leaving his empty chair and a neat, Dylan‑shaped gap in the timetable. Sophie draws a line through his provisional slot, the nib of her pen digging a little too hard into the paper, while Lucy mutters something unprintable under her breath and starts shuffling note cards as if the programme might obediently rearrange itself around his absence.
That afternoon, Jack colonises a corner table in the library, laptop open, flanked by neatly stacked printouts and a coffee that has travelled from hot to tepid to symbolic. The spreadsheet on his screen still displays the same projected cash‑flow tab he’s been “reviewing” for the better part of an hour; his cursor blinks accusingly in a single cell, unmoving, while voices drift in from the hallway about marquee deposits, licensing, fire regulations that apparently now apply to bunting.
When Sophie pops her head round the door to ask how the “scenario planning” is going, he straightens as if caught napping.
“Just stress‑testing a few assumptions,” he says, producing a small, tight smile. “I’ll have something concrete for you tomorrow. Promise.”
Her shoulders drop a fraction in relief, which lands in his chest like a stone. After she goes, he lets out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding, re‑saves the unchanged file with the self‑important click of a man who has done nothing, and opens a blank email to the estate’s solicitors. His fingers type three words (“We might need…”) before he backspaces them away and closes the window entirely, as though that might also erase the decision waiting behind it.
Miles spends the day shuttling between roles with practised ease: mid‑morning, he walks the grounds with Sophie, hands in his coat pockets, talking in calm, measured tones about “flexible options” and reassuring her that “nothing is locked in until the paperwork is signed.” She jokes about selling a kidney to cover marquee hire; he laughs, files away the remark as another data point, and listens while she vents about suppliers and sponsorships, offering sympathetic nods and small, practical suggestions that cost nothing now and commit no one later. That evening, shut in his guest room with patchy reception and the curtains drawn, he paces as he takes his client’s call, his voice flattening into professional cadence; he refers to Hawthorn Grange as “the asset,” outlines timelines for potential subdivision and staged disposal, and omits any mention of Sophie’s exhausted optimism, or the way her eyes had lit at talk of “next year’s programme”, as if the place were a case study rather than somewhere he can still smell cut grass from his open window.
At the far end of the walled garden, Thomas ignores the folded note someone has slid under his studio door about a “quick chat re: barn capacity” until the paper curls at the edges from damp. When a tentative knock follows an hour later (Jack’s voice asking if he has a minute to discuss overflow spaces) Thomas freezes mid‑brushstroke, holding his breath until the footsteps recede and the gravel stops crunching. He tells himself that if they’re determined to cram more bodies into the estate, they can manage without him; he’s already compromised by letting his studio be mentioned in festival brochures as a “resident artist’s workspace”, a phrase that makes his stomach tighten with the memory of gallery blurbs. As evening falls, he turns up the radio to drown out the distant sounds of marquee poles being hammered into the lawn, painting harder, as though thickening the layers on his canvas could insulate him from everything gathering outside, from names he no longer answers to and futures he refuses to plan for.
The barn argument doesn’t end when they leave the trestle table; it only sheds its witnesses.
Out on the gravel, where the night has cooled and the air smells of damp stone and trampled grass, Sophie’s boots skid slightly on loose chippings as she catches up with Jack. Security lights along the stable block flicker to life in a delayed, juddering sequence, humming faintly as if even the electrics are anxious.
“Brilliant,” she says, the laugh in her voice bright and brittle enough to cut. “Shall I assume you’ve already pencilled in the auction date, then? Since you’re suddenly so very worried about liability.”
Jack stops. For a moment his expression is just…blank, as if he hasn’t quite registered that she’s spoken. Then something behind his eyes closes, neat as a file being shut.
“That’s not fair,” he says, quieter than she expects, which only makes the words land heavier. “You know that’s not what I’m doing.”
“Oh? Because from where I was sitting, it sounded a lot like you and Miles agreeing the easiest way to keep us all safe is to have no one here at all.”
“I’m trying,” he says, jaw tightening, “not to get us sued. Or shut down. Or both. That’s literally my job at this point, Soph.”
She flinches at the nickname, because it sounds suddenly like a familiarity she hasn’t quite earned. “And my job is to make this worth saving,” she snaps. “Maybe you could try backing me up once in a while instead of practising your speech for the estate agents.”
The silence that follows has teeth.
Jack looks away, towards the dark bulk of the house. When he speaks again, his voice is clipped. “If you really think that’s what I want, then you don’t know me nearly as well as you think.”
Her laugh this time is shorter, harsher. “Maybe I don’t. Maybe I’ve been too busy selling kidneys to pay for fairy lights to read the small print on everyone.”
“Brilliant,” he echoes, matching her tone with a pale imitation. “Well. I’ll send you a disclaimer next time I open my mouth, shall I?”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
They separate with that single syllable between them like a signed agreement. Sophie turns back towards the house, shoulders squared, anger fizzing hot against the inside of her ribs. Jack heads the other way, towards the shadows by the converted stables, hands jammed in his pockets as if he’s holding something in place.
The crunch of their footsteps on divergent paths is louder than the distant clank of marquee poles, louder than the hum of the lights, louder than anything either of them might have said if they’d stayed at the trestle table five minutes longer.
The next morning, she is at the makeshift office before the laptop has finished whirring itself awake, two takeaway cups balanced in one hand, a folder tucked under her arm like armour. She sets one coffee down by Jack’s elbow with the same precision she uses on place settings.
“Good morning,” she says, bright and businesslike. “I’ve brought the revised projections for the Saturday capacity. I’d really appreciate your… considered perspective.”
Jack looks up, blinks once at the spreadsheet title, FESTIVAL RISK ASSESSMENT: DRAFT 3, then back at her face. “Thank you,” he replies, as if they’re on opposite sides of a boardroom table. “I’ll, ah, review your figures and revert.”
“Splendid.” Her smile has far too many teeth. “Your input is, of course, invaluable.”
On top of the filing cabinet, Lucy pauses mid‑snip, a loop of lanyard ribbon hanging from one hand. The pair of them continue in that excruciatingly courteous vein, “If you wouldn’t mind just highlighting any concerns”, “Naturally, I’ll flag potential issues”, while something soft and familiar lies conspicuously on the floor between them, untended.
Lucy’s jaw tightens. Another small crack, she thinks grimly, in a weekend already full of them.
Later that day, Lucy, on a mission for more cable ties she definitely labelled yesterday, pauses in the barn’s side passage. Through the half‑open door to the storage alcove she spots Sophie leaning against a precarious tower of folding chairs, shoulders slumped, ponytail askew. Miles stands opposite, shirtsleeves rolled, tie loosened to a degree that suggests either relaxation or surrender. He’s talking low, hands open in that lawyerly way that says, I am reasonable, please don’t notice the knife. When he touches Sophie’s elbow it’s almost absurdly careful, like she’s a client on the verge of suing. Sophie’s answering laugh is tired and unguarded, the sound of someone who’s forgotten to be brisk.
By the time they re‑emerge into the main space, Lucy has reassembled her expression into something tart and impenetrable. She’s at the trestle table with her sketchpad, flicking between layout doodles and colour notes, when Miles takes a seat within range.
“So,” he begins, in that smooth consultant tone that implies bullet points are imminent, “if we limit workshop capacity. “Wouldn’t want to overtax our mysterious visiting experts. They might evaporate the moment the spreadsheets come out.” She doesn’t look up, but she feels Sophie’s tiny flinch and Jack’s head tilt.
Miles’s smile appears on schedule, professionally calibrated. “I’m not that mysterious,” he says. “I’ve been in the same meeting room for three days. Hardly an enigma.”
“Funny,” Lucy murmurs, shading in a box marked CAR PARK, “I’ve known invoices with more concrete backstories. At least they tell you who sent them.”
There’s a faint tightening at the corner of his mouth, quickly smoothed. “Well, as long as the figures add up, does it matter who presses ‘send’?”
“Oh, it matters,” Lucy replies, as if commenting on the weather. “Especially when the boring money bits get tricky. That’s usually when certain consultants discover they’ve left the oven on in London.”
Sophie makes a small, abortive movement, halfway between a wince and a warning. “Lucy,” she says, too bright, “could you just show us the signage ideas?”
“In a sec,” Lucy says, flipping to a fresh page with unnecessary force. “I’m just factoring in contingency. For disappearing acts.”
Miles absorbs it all with that composed, courteous smile, shoulders relaxed, pen poised. Only his eyes betray him.
Dylan appears halfway through the same meeting, late enough that everyone’s shoulders are already up round their ears. He slouches against a beam, offering lazy provocations: asking Sophie if she’s planning to adopt all her guests, telling Lucy she’s “terrifyingly efficient for someone who lives in black jumpers,” tossing Jack a mock-sincere, “You still with us, spreadsheets?” Sophie only rolls her eyes, so he turns the wattage up, grin widening, voice softening in that practised, intimate way that treats the whole room as an audience. Lucy’s reply, something about “performers who only turn up for the encore and still expect applause”, cuts cleaner than usual. For a heartbeat his smile slips, naked and young. He straightens, announces he has “lyrics to wrestle”, and ghosts out, leaving the meeting sagging around the door he’s just closed.
That evening, as fairy lights blink uncertainly to life in the half‑converted barn, the earlier capacity debate resurfaces with sharper edges. Miles, posted by the fire exit with a clipboard like a benevolent health-and-safety warden, calmly cites building regs, insurance caps, hypothetical prosecutions. Sophie, flushed and frayed, insists that turning people away will strangle the word‑of‑mouth they’re banking on. When she glances to Jack for backup he hesitates just a fraction too long before agreeing that Miles is “probably right from a risk perspective.” The air cinches tight. Sophie presses her lips together on whatever she was about to say, nods once and turns back to measuring table layouts with a clipped, almost surgical efficiency that makes it obvious a line has been crossed, even if no one dares to name which one.
Jack escaped as far as one could escape without actually leaving: the narrow dog-leg of the back staircase, where the walls closed in and the carpet still smelled faintly of old polish and damp stone. He braced a shoulder against the panelling, phone loose in his hand, and replayed his own voice in his head.
Vote.
Brilliant. Of all the words to fling down a publicly accessible corridor, he’d chosen the one that sounded least like “harmless distant cousin” and most like “person you should interrogate immediately.”
Above him, somewhere in the service corridor, a door banged; from the barn side came the muffled thump of speakers being tested and Lucy swearing inventively about extension leads. Jack scrolled aimlessly through emails he wasn’t ready to answer and tried, unsuccessfully, not to imagine how that half-heard phone call might have sounded to anyone lurking on the stairs.
He didn’t have to imagine for long. Footsteps, unhurried, descended; a familiar creak on the fourth tread. Dylan came into view, hand gliding along the banister as if he’d rehearsed it.
“Didn’t realise you were that important around here, mate,” he drawled, every syllable easy, throwaway. The glance he slid sideways, though, was anything but casual: sharp, measuring, catching and holding.
Jack summoned a laugh that felt like rummaging for small change. “Family admin,” he said, with the airy vagueness of someone referencing bins rota rather than inheritance law. “Nothing glamorous. Just a lot of emails and people not replying.”
“Mm.” Dylan’s mouth tilted. “Sounds familiar.” He left it there on the surface, no follow-up question, just a neutral little nod before continuing down, whistling under his breath.
The whistling faded; the prickle between Jack’s shoulder blades did not. If Dylan had heard enough to be curious, he’d heard enough to mention it, intentionally or not, to exactly the wrong person. And once one person started wondering why Jack Sutton had a vote, it was only a matter of time before everyone else did too.
In the stables, the glow of Lucy’s laptop mixed with the cold, more officious blue from Miles’s screen, turning the trestle table between them into a low-budget light installation. Outside, rain fussed at the cobbles; inside, the only sounds were the tap‑tap of keys and the occasional, mutually ignored yawn.
When the email banner slid up in the corner of Miles’s screen (slick logo, confident sans serif, subject line about “Phase One Feasibility: Hawthorn Grange”) Lucy’s gaze flicked to it on instinct, the way it did to crooked picture frames and badly kerned menus. He snapped the lid down almost before the notification finished blooming.
“Client stuff, sorry,” he said lightly, as if she’d been about to demand a full audit rather than ask for the stapler. His tone was smooth; his hand on the laptop was just a shade too swift.
“Course,” she said, equally smooth, returning to her layout. But the firm’s name was already filed: the kind that bought up derelict warehouses, slapped a mural on the side and called it regeneration.
Later, rinsing ink from her fingers in the tiny bathroom, she watched the water run grey and thought about “consultant friend”, about billboards on the North Circular, about Sophie’s face when she talked about saving the place. Lucy met her own eyes in the mirror, dry amusement not quite disguising the flicker of unease, and carefully shelved the discrepancy for future use.
The next afternoon, Thomas pauses with a mug of tea halfway to his mouth as he hears bright, managerial voices drifting down the walled garden path: one of the junior staff, eager to please, and one of the festival organisers with a lanyard and a terrifying sense of initiative. They are enthusing about “tying in the resident artist” and “getting some shots in the studio for the socials. Then he sets the mug down, untouched, and stalks into the house, following the faint, insect whirr of the kitchen printer. The draft proposal he pulls from the tray (bold heading about “Heritage Programming,” a bullet point on a potential “Ellery retrospective”) makes the room tilt. His own surname, printed in a stranger’s font, sits there in unapologetic black, confirming that someone has crossed from idle speculation into dangerous specificity.
That evening, Sophie sat at her laptop in the half‑lit office, red pen uncapped, working through the “simplified” insurance documents Miles had rushed over with that apologetic, late‑train smile. Most of it was dense legalese, clauses marching across the page like infantry, but a cluster toward the back made her frown: sudden emphasis on “change of use”, “future subdivision”, “sale‑trigger events”. That didn’t sound like a cheerful weekend of yoga and folk bands; it sounded like contingency planning for things no one had actually said out loud. She circled a few phrases, meaning to corner Miles in the morning, then glanced at the time and thought of the unfinished seating plan, the unpaid invoices, the florist who wanted a decision yesterday. With a tired shake of her head, she underlined “comprehensive cover” on the summary page, told herself she was merely cross‑eyed with fatigue, and slid the papers to one side as if distance alone could make her unease evaporate.
By the time the fairy lights outside the barn blink out with a faint, apologetic buzz, each of them is carrying a private, jagged fragment: Jack with Dylan’s half‑caught look on the staircase replaying in his head, Lucy with the development email etched behind her eyes, Thomas with the proposal crushed into his paint‑spattered cardigan pocket, Sophie with her annotated insurance forms shoved under a stack of menus like contraband. None of them compares notes; no one quite trusts their own misgivings enough to say them aloud. The secrets stay siloed, hairline fractures under fresh plaster, quietly warping their instincts in ways that will make the next round of decisions harder, not easier.
Sophie took the call in the echoing prep kitchen, where every word bounced off stainless steel and tile as if the room itself were listening in. Her mobile was wedged between shoulder and ear, shoulder already aching from a morning of hauling trestle tables, while her free hand darted over the printed menu, crossing out “heritage tomato tart” with a biro that kept threatening to die.
“Yes, absolutely, we’re all set this end,” she said, pitching her voice into that bright, almost fizzy register that made people relax and sign contracts. “You’ll have a wonderful profile slot on the website: locally sourced, artisanal, all the buzzwords. We’re thrilled.”
On the other end, the supplier’s accounts manager did not sound thrilled. Her tone had the clipped, professional patience of someone who had heard every variation of “just a tiny delay” and had the unpaid invoices to prove it.
“As I’ve explained, Ms Carleton, we do need cleared funds by close of business today,” the woman said. “Given the scale of your order, we can’t risk your exposure without that assurance.”
Exposure. Sophie underlined “vegan option?” so hard the pen tore the paper.
“Of course, completely understand,” she said, with a laugh that came out sharp as fizz on an empty stomach. “It’s all in hand, I promise. Our banking app is just being temperamental, you know how rural Wi‑Fi is.”
She ended the call with one more apology and one more smile the woman couldn’t see, then set the phone flat on the flour‑dusty counter, staring at the screen as if it might come up with a better idea than she could.
The banking app did not offer suggestions. It simply displayed the figures: current account, reserves, the little ring‑fenced pot in a separate tab marked “Emergency – Staff”. She hesitated a fraction of a second, thumb hovering. It wasn’t as if the weekend staff would definitely need a safety cushion. Nothing was actually on fire. Yet.
She opened the emergency sub‑account anyway and authorised the transfer. The number slid from one column to another, obedient and bloodless. A second later, her email pinged with the supplier’s confirmation. ALL SET FOR FESTIVAL WEEKEND!: festooned with exclamation marks and a clip‑art champagne bottle.
She stared at the almost naked balance, then deliberately clicked away to the staff rota, as though changing screens might change reality. Wages, she told herself, could be staggered. Most of the weekend team were students; they were used to waiting. Repairs to the barn lights could be postponed if no one looked too closely at the health and safety guidelines. The extra insurance rider, well, Miles had called it “belt and braces,” hadn’t he? Perhaps she could manage with just the belt.
In her head, the numbers began their endless, exhausting shuffle: if she delayed the decorator, that freed up just enough to cover the extra linen order, which in turn… Her mind performed the usual sleight of hand, moving invisible coins under invisible cups, insisting there was a configuration in which everyone was paid, nothing broke, and the festival dazzled the investors into opening their wallets.
Somewhere beneath the crisp, managerial narrative a quieter voice pointed out that magic tricks worked best when the audience wanted to be fooled, and that this particular audience included HMRC, the bank, and a handful of very expensive barristers.
Sophie tightened her ponytail with floury fingers and pushed the thought aside. Panic, she decided, was a luxury item, like heritage tomatoes and ethically sourced trout. She couldn’t afford it.
Instead, she picked up her dead‑on‑its‑last‑legs pen, rewrote the menu to swap the heritage tart for something cheaper and more “rustic”, and added a cheerful little note at the top: FESTIVAL FEAST – CELEBRATING LOCAL ABUNDANCE.
“Abundance,” she muttered, as she shoved her phone back into her pocket and headed for the barn. “That’s us. Absolutely overflowing.”
Jack chose the smallest of the unused morning rooms precisely because it had no mobile signal and only one chair. A fireless grate, a watercolour of somebody else’s ancestors looking disapprovingly down, and a narrow table just big enough for a laptop and a sense of dread.
He arrived with a sheaf of envelopes and a mug of tea he’d already forgotten he’d made. When a passing housekeeper asked if he needed anything, he smiled and lifted the post. “Just catching up on admin,” he said, as if the word covered everything from bin‑rotas to the slow financial strangulation of a family estate.
The solicitor’s letter was, as always, impeccably civilised: headings in reassuring fonts, phrases like “we would strongly advise” and “to ensure you continue to benefit.” The annex was less polite. Columns of figures marched down the page, arrowing towards the line where certain allowances lapsed and the tax bill leapt like a spooked horse.
He laid the annex beside Sophie’s latest cash‑flow projection, aligning the corners with unnecessary care. Her spreadsheet glowed with colour‑coded optimism: “Projected festival income”, “Potential investor contributions”, tidy little notes about “conservative estimates”. The two documents did not so much fail to match as exist in parallel universes. In Sophie’s, the festival bought them time; in the solicitor’s, time had already been sold at a premium.
His stomach tightened in that familiar, quiet way. No drama, just the sense of gears grinding. He reached for a pen, uncapped it, hovered above the margin where he ought to jot down questions, scenarios, dreadful but necessary phrases like “liquidation of assets”.
The pen made no contact with the paper. After a moment he capped it again and slid it into his pocket.
“I’ll go through it properly after the festival,” he murmured, to the empty room, as if rehearsing an answer for some future inquisition. After the festival, when income figures were concrete instead of hopeful cells on a screen; after Sophie had something solid to wave at him besides charm and spreadsheets.
He stacked the annex on top of the letter, then on top of the other brown envelopes, until the problem became physically thicker, satisfyingly opaque. Technically, there were weeks before the allowances expired. Plenty of time, if one began now.
Jack closed the folder without adding a single note and placed it carefully at the edge of the table, just within reach and entirely out of sight. Then he picked up his laptop, opened the staff expenses file instead, and began approving tiny, harmless claims for mileage and printer ink. Numbers small enough that they didn’t rearrange anyone’s life.
The ancestors in the watercolour continued to stare down at him. He did not look up.
In the small bedroom that marketing materials called “characterful” and Miles mentally labelled “adequate”, he listened twice to his partner’s voicemail. The phrases were polished to an office sheen: Hawthorn Grange as a “straightforward restructuring”, gentle concern that his “emotional proximity to certain stakeholders” might be clouding his professional objectivity. Translation: stop dawdling in the provinces and send the paperwork.
He opened the draft letter of intent on his laptop. The familiar clauses unspooled: good faith negotiations, exclusivity periods, an obligation to explore partial development options. Language he could draft in his sleep, only now every “shall” and “irrevocable” felt like a small act of violence. Against whom, precisely, he declined to specify.
Normally, he would have forwarded it to Jack with a neutral cover note – “for your review, no rush” – then let the inevitable resistance play out on someone else’s conscience. Instead, his fingers hesitated over the trackpad. He saved the document into a newly created, innocuous-looking folder, “HG – Misc”, and did not share it with anyone.
His reply to chambers was brisk and anodyne: progress good, stakeholders engaged, “nearing agreement in principle.” It was, strictly speaking, untrue. For a man who lied for a living in the most impeccably legal ways, he was startled by how much this particular one lodged, like a stone, just beneath his ribs.
Dylan had holed up in the disused attic sitting room he’d unofficially claimed: low beams, lopsided sofa, one begrudging lamp and a window that framed nothing but sky and chimneys. The email subject line already made his teeth itch. The forwarded tabloid inquiry was worse: Hawthorn Grange recast as some “mysterious countryside project involving discreet financial manoeuvres”, with a cheery suggestion of an exclusive on his “healing, hands‑on involvement with the estate’s future.”
“Healing,” he muttered, blowing smoke at the cracked ceiling. “Adorable.”
Ash dropped into the chipped teacup he’d been using as an ashtray since day one. He tapped out a reply, Don’t really fancy being the poster boy for gentrified tax shelters, thanks, smirked at it for a beat, then watched his own joke evaporate as he held down backspace. The replacement line, Just want to keep the focus on the music right now, yeah? D x. Was bland enough to pass every PR filter.
He hit send, shoved the phone face‑down on the arm of the sofa, and stared at the sloping plaster wall until the words “discreet financial manoeuvres” started to itch. He hadn’t come here to care what anyone was manoeuvring, or why. Still, the question he hadn’t typed, what exactly are you lot up to down there, and who’s paying for the healing?, sat under his skin, stubborn as a splinter.
At the far end of the walled garden, where brambles did most of the security work, Thomas came back from a cigarette to find one of the junior admins orbiting his studio, arm aloft, phone angled for maximum ivy. She startled when he said, “Lost?” in a tone that suggested he hoped she was.
“Oh! Sorry, Tom, just getting some content for the festival page. It’s so atmospheric down here.” She beamed, already assessing another angle.
“Atmosphere’s overrated,” he said. “So is trespass.” He didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t need to. Years of sulking in studios had taught him that economy usually did the job. The girl mumbled something about having permission “from marketing” and retreated, thumbing at her screen as she went.
Later, cutting through the front hall to avoid a cluster of yoga mats and earnest conversation, he caught the glow of a monitor on the reception desk. The headline arranged itself before he’d quite meant to read it: SUMMER CREATIVE WEEKEND AT HAWTHORN GRANGE. Beneath, a carousel of photographs dutifully paraded lawns, fairy lights, Dylan with a guitar looking credibly spontaneous.
Then: his door. Closed, ordinary, the bit of flaking green paint he’d been meaning to ignore for another year. The caption underneath, in a jaunty font, read: “Exclusive access to our resident artist’s studio – creative process up close!”
His stomach made a small, hard knot. “False advertising,” he said, under his breath. “You’d need an actual resident artist for that.” The receptionist glanced up, half‑smiled, clearly assuming he was joking, because people generally did until proven otherwise.
He turned on his heel and left before he could be invited to “do a little Q&A” or “sit on a panel”. The idea of his name, or worse, his face, anywhere near a programme made his skin prickle.
That night, the walled garden was all damp earth and cooling stone. He stood a moment outside the studio, listening for footsteps that didn’t come, then let himself in and shut the door with unnecessary care. The lock clicked once. He checked it. Checked it again. After a pause, he dragged an old flat‑file cabinet across the threshold, its metal feet shrieking softly over the flagstones.
It was absurd, he knew; no one was breaking down doors for a glimpse of half‑finished canvases and a man who no longer existed on paper. Still, as he looked around at the one space that was wholly his – the tilted easel, the coffee mug rings on the workbench, the battered stool by the north light – he felt, with a cold clarity, how quickly even this could be requisitioned into someone else’s idea of an attraction.
Sophie stared at the unsent email long enough for the screen to decide she’d abandoned it. The glow dulled; her own faint reflection floated over the black text box, hair escaping its ponytail, jaw set too tight. She flexed her fingers, jiggled the trackpad until the words flared back into accusatory clarity.
“Dear all,” it began, with the strained cheerfulness of someone announcing a tombola, not a reckoning. She made herself go through every sentence again, line by line, excising anything that smacked of pleading. “If convenient” went first, deleted with a small, vicious satisfaction. Then “just”, that faithful little minimiser. She deleted three of those. “Hoping to gather initial thoughts” became “requiring your attendance”. “Informal catch‑up” hardened into “emergency post‑festival meeting”.
When she reached “ownership and future options”, she paused, cursor blinking like a dare. Beneath it, buried in the second paragraph, waited the phrase she’d already typed three times and deleted twice: “including possible sale or restructuring.”
Her throat tightened before she even finished reading it. Sale. Restructuring. Words Miles used as if they were items on a set menu, not the potential erasure of everything she’d been patching together with fairy lights and mood boards. The room seemed to contract around her. The back of her neck prickled with the sensation of doors closing somewhere out of sight.
She highlighted the offending clause, hovered over delete, then forced her hand away. No more soft landings. No more hoping the right canapé budget could solve structural deficits.
The laptop fan whirred hopefully into the silence. Sophie snapped the lid shut on the email and the reflection both, the click too sharp in the small office. For a second she sat absolutely still, palms pressed flat to the cool metal as if she could pin the whole problem in place by sheer will.
Then the faint sound of distant laughter and an urgent kettle whistle filtered up from downstairs. The festival wouldn’t staff itself, and coffee, unlike capital injections, was something she could actually provide.
She stood so quickly the chair skidded back and bumped the wall. “Right,” she said to no one, rolling her shoulders as if shaking off rain. “Urns first, existential dread later.”
In the kitchen the air was thick with steam and the clatter of crockery. She moved through it at double speed, topping up cafetières, checking filters, hauling the industrial urn onto its stand with more force than was strictly required. Each physical task was blessedly simple: fill, switch on, carry, smile. Not a single one contained the words “possible sale or restructuring.”
She carried the first brimming urn towards the barn, boots thudding a little too fast along the stone corridor, as if momentum alone might outrun a subject line that now sat, heavy and unignorable, like a stone at the base of her stomach.
In his room over the converted stables, Jack lay propped against the headboard, the low eaves pressing the air a little closer than usual. On his phone, the development consultant’s email sat open, the attachment icon a small, insistent paperclip. He’d read the proposal enough times to quote sections in his sleep, but he opened it again anyway, because numbers always felt safer than feelings.
He skimmed past the executive summary, straight to the projected cashflow. The blue “Accept” button hovered under his thumb at the bottom of the screen, patient, confident. At length he set the phone down on his knee and reached for his laptop instead.
The estate spreadsheet bloomed into view, familiar cells like a map of other people’s expectations. He added two new columns of projected outcomes: one if he agreed to the consultation, another if he stalled again. Both columns, obligingly, marched towards the same conclusion. The estate bled money either way; dithering simply cost more.
He closed the file without saving. Cowardice, or mercy? Hard to say.
Finally he opened his calendar and typed a new entry for the morning after the festival: “Call re: decision, no extensions.” He hesitated, then colour‑coded it in uncompromising red, a quiet, bureaucratic confession that his days of strategic hesitation were nearly over.
Through the thin wall he could hear distant laughter from the courtyard below, the clink of bottles being crated for the weekend. He stared at the red block in his diary until his eyes stung, then snapped the laptop shut, as if that could make the box (and what it meant) disappear.
Miles had chosen the far corner of the library precisely because it was dim and usually empty; even so, the quiet felt crowded. His phone lay face‑down beside a neat fan of estate files with his own notes clipped on top, paper evidence of a professionalism his stomach no longer believed in.
On the laptop screen the sentence sat, stubborn and bald: There’s something about my role here I haven’t been honest about.
He tried, again, to go on. Two paragraphs in, the trapdoor opened: the client’s name, the mandate to assess “strategic disposal options”, every conversation with Sophie vibrating, in retrospect, with concealed clauses.
He backspaced until only: Need to talk after the weekend: important remained. The cursor blinked, prim, judgemental. He sent it anyway, then turned his phone face‑up, as if bracing for impact that did not immediately come.
Outside the half‑converted barn, Dylan lounged against a stack of flight cases, cigarette smouldering between his fingers while his manager’s voice crackled through the speakerphone, briskly itemising conditions for the closing set: no questions about his family, no mention of rehab rumours, a neat little narrative of “healing in the countryside.” Dylan agreed on cue, voice light, tossing in a joke about fairy lights and redemption arcs that made his manager laugh and tick a mental box. When the call ended, the silence roared back. He ground the cigarette hard into the stone until it snapped, then stared at the dark smear it left and wondered, not for the first time, if blowing the whole thing up onstage, answering every forbidden question himself, would feel more honest than playing along in someone else’s redemption story.
The studio’s single lamp threw the house into a kind of twilight, the raw timber uprights cutting across the mellow façade like prison bars. Even the little smear of lake he’d fussed over now reflected hazard tape. He wiped his hands on an already–ruined rag and, absurdly, thought of covering the whole thing with a dust sheet. As if canvas, once honest, could be unread.
The sunshine and bunting outside feel like a cruel joke as word of the Wi‑Fi glitch and the assistant’s careless comments ripple through the courtyard, a low, nervous buzz threading through influencer laughter and clinking glasses.
From the French doors, Sophie watches the mood shift the way she’s watched weather roll in over these hills: that strange, breathless pause before the downpour. Ten minutes ago, strangers were photographing the piston‑straight lavender borders as if she’d personally convinced each stem to bloom. Now they’re photographing each other instead, phones held aloft in frustrated little salutes to the patchy signal, thumbs stabbing at unresponsive screens.
“It’s fine,” she tells one of the junior staff, who has appeared at her elbow with the stricken look of someone about to confess to manslaughter. “It’s only the guest network, the main line’s untouched. We’ll reboot the router, reset the access points, and everyone can go back to lovingly curating their authenticity. Deep breaths.”
The girl attempts a smile and scurries off towards the offices. Sophie presses her own hands flat against the cool stone of the doorframe. Deep breaths, yes. In through the nose, out through the, oh, for heaven’s sake, is that Dylan’s tour manager gesticulating at the house as if threatening to sue the masonry?
She steps out. The air is bright and deceptively clean; somewhere beyond the rose garden, someone has strung up speakers currently emitting a tasteful acoustic playlist that is doing nothing to drown out the rising fretfulness.
“Hi,” Sophie says, stepping neatly between the tour manager and the nearest member of the catering team, who looks about ready to bolt. “I gather the internet has personally wronged you?”
“It’s a nightmare,” the woman snaps, lowering her voice only slightly as she clocks the cluster of onlookers. “We’ve got embargoed content scheduled, sponsor posts lined up: his followers are expecting live from the countryside, not radio silence. And now your (” she bites off whatever she was going to call the estate, glancing around at the gilt stone and the hovering aristocrats “) your venue is being whispered about as some kind of… I don’t know, scandal farm.”
“Scandal farm,” Sophie repeats. “Charming. We’re mostly lamb and heritage apples, but I’ll see what can be done.”
A flicker of reluctant amusement crosses the woman’s face. “Look, one of my assistants overheard some of your people talking. Something about ‘cashflow disaster’ and ‘if this weekend doesn’t land, nothing will’. He’s been talking to a blogger. He thinks he’s being subtle. He isn’t.”
A vein of cold threads down Sophie’s spine. There it is: the tiny, casual sentence that can undo a year’s worth of spreadsheets and careful charm.
Her smile doesn’t falter. “Right. OK. Thank you for telling me. I’ll have a word with him and with your blogger, if I can identify which artfully distressed blazer he’s wearing.”
She moves away before the woman can say more, weaving through clusters of guests who are suddenly, acutely interested in the phrase “cashflow disaster”. The words prickle against her skin as she passes: “trouble behind the scenes”, “thought this place was being reinvented”, “typical country house, pretty façade, rotten foundations”.
She has worked very hard to ensure the roof doesn’t literally fall in on anyone; metaphorical collapse, apparently, is harder to plaster over.
“Soph?” Lucy’s voice crackles over the radio at her hip. “You might want to get inside. The internet isn’t the only thing misbehaving.”
“On my way,” Sophie murmurs, clicking the button, her gaze skimming the lawn, the champagne, the polite panic. “Hold the fort, would you? And for the love of God, no one mention the word ‘disaster’ to a journalist unless we’re talking about the canapés.”
She ducks back through the French doors as another gust of speculation lifts across the courtyard, the sunlight catching the fluttering bunting as if the estate itself were smiling innocently while everything underneath begins, unmistakably, to crack.
The back corridor between the kitchen and the old billiard room is barely wide enough for two people to pass even when one of them isn’t radiating intent like a heat source. It smells of beeswax, boiled vegetables and the particular old damp the dehumidifiers never quite conquer. Miles turns the corner with a file under his arm and almost walks straight into Lucy.
“Funny thing about brand fonts,” she says, before he can retreat. Her voice is soft, North London flattened to a blade. “They tend to match across pitch decks, legal proposals and the PDF someone left minimised on their laptop in the drawing room.”
He blinks. “I’m… not sure I follow.”
“No?” Her gaze flicks to the file, then back to his face. “Devon. Denham. Easy mistake. Same man, though. Same firm that specialises in ‘strategic rural redevelopment’.” She quotes the phrase exactly; he goes very still.
“Lucy, ”
“Here’s the deal.” She steps in, forcing him back against cool panelling. “You tell Sophie who you are, who you work for, and what your client actually wants with this place. Today. Or I start cc’ing people myself.”
For the first time since he arrived, his careful, polished smile doesn’t come.
At the far end of the walled garden, where the noise of the festival arrives only as a distant, fizzy hum, an unfamiliar voice cuts cleanly through the muffled quiet of Thomas’s studio.
“Oh. My God. This is an Ellery.”
The words land like a dropped pane of glass. Thomas’s hand stills on the rag he’s been using to worry at a palette. He does not turn, but he can see, in the buckled reflection of the window, the critic’s silhouette leaning closer to an old canvas he had meant to hide better.
“Thomas Ellery,” they say again, savouring it. “It has to be.”
The name is a match struck in dry tinder. He feels the air itself tense as the syllables slip out through the open door, caught and carried by a passing assistant, then another curious guest, rising from person to person like a startled flock taking flight, winging its way across lawns and gravel paths toward the main house, where rumours travel faster than any Wi‑Fi signal ever has.
They are herded into the green‑and‑gold drawing room, chairs dragged into an untidy oval, gilt mirrors reflecting tight mouths. An investor with an apologetic tie clears his throat and inquires, delicately, who actually owns what, and what “future-proofing” entails. Polite phrases fray; eyes slide to Miles. His careful, lawyerly circumlocutions land, in Sophie’s ears, as deliberate, exquisitely prepared betrayal.
Strings of fairy lights glare down like an interrogation rig rather than ambience as Dylan’s easy grin curdles. Pushed once too often for a “healing arc,” he laughs, short and sharp, into the microphone and, in a few carelessly precise sentences, tosses Jack’s quiet inheritance and Sophie’s precarious ledgers into the air, letting them hang there while the barn’s merriment dies by degrees.
In the ringing aftermath of Dylan’s outburst, Sophie feels the room’s attention pivot toward her like a spotlight, the casual laughter of minutes ago replaced by a hot, appraising silence that makes her suddenly, viscerally aware of every unpaid invoice and sleepless night stitched into the walls of the barn.
For one absurd moment, she is convinced everyone can see the numbers, actually see them, projected on the rough‑hewn beams overhead: overdue accounts in accusing red, supplier notes in polite, thinning patience, the grim little spreadsheet she updates at midnight with a glass of supermarket wine and her boots still on.
Her cheeks burn. Her spine, out of sheer habit, stays straight.
“Well,” she says, or thinks she does; her throat seems to have filled with dust. The microphone on its thin stand waits a few inches away, black and dumb. Dylan is still gripping it. His knuckles are white; his face is not the blithe mask from the posters.
Someone tuts, softly. Someone else, one of the investors, she thinks, leans back with the air of a man mentally revising figures down.
This is fine, she tells herself, with the same desperate briskness she uses on leaking marquees and last‑minute dietary requirements. Transparency, authenticity, all that. People love a plucky underdog. They’ll say the estate has “charm” and “potential” and then, perhaps, they’ll quietly wire money to someone else.
Her gaze snags, in the blur of faces, on Lucy’s tight, furious expression; on Miles’s careful stillness, the lawyer’s mask cinched so neatly in place she wants, suddenly and violently, to tear it off; on Jack, who looks as if he’d quite like the floorboards to open and swallow him whole.
Dylan shifts, half‑turning toward her, apology and defiance warring visibly.
“Don’t,” she hears herself say, aloud this time, the single syllable cutting through the murmurs with unnerving clarity.
The barn falls properly quiet.
She steps forward, into the light that was never meant to be for her, feeling the familiar rickety scaffolding of competence clatter into place around the raw panic.
“Since my ledgers appear to be this evening’s entertainment,” Sophie says, dryly enough that a few people blink, uncertain whether to laugh, “perhaps we should at least get the figures right.”
On the far side of the barn, Jack hears his own name fall out of Dylan’s mouth with that throwaway, amused emphasis he uses for song titles and scandal. The word “inheritance” follows a beat later, then “stakeholder,” passed from table to table like canapés, each repetition trimming another layer off the quiet life Jack has been so painstakingly curating.
Heat drains from his face so fast he feels oddly hollowed out, as if someone has reached in and scooped away the solid, sensible parts. He had arranged it all so carefully: the regional office, the two-bedroom flat with the view of a car park and a tree that did its best in spring, the occasional, dutiful train down here where he could sit at the edge of meetings and say, “I’ll need to look at the numbers,” without ever quite stepping forward.
Now, heads are angling in his direction, measuring him, attaching him to balance sheets and bloodlines. The phrase “silent partner” flits through his mind and breaks, quietly, on the word “silent.” He has been, very suddenly and without consent, drafted onto the stage.
At the back of the barn, where he had thought himself safely half‑invisible against the stone, Thomas hears his own name, his real name, spoken aloud with a little gasp of triumph, like a magician revealing the trick. “Thomas Ellery,” the critic says again, louder this time, and the syllables ripple outward, picked up and passed on by curious guests who, ten minutes ago, had not known he existed.
He goes very still. Years of careful erasure, of becoming Tom Ellis, of signing nothing, of refusing openings and interviews, disintegrate in the span of a heartbeat. Heads turn; a couple of phones tilt up, lenses catching on his paint‑spattered cuffs, his unshaven jaw. The studio at the end of the walled garden, his small, obstinate sanctuary, seems to recede from him, suddenly flimsy as a stage set.
Across the room, Sophie’s face rearranges itself with terrifying precision: shock, hurt, then something cool and businesslike icing over the warmth he has secretly, greedily watched for weeks. Lucy’s low, fierce summary of his lies; the investor’s pointed, practised questions; his own, careful confession (“I represent the firm”) land like signed documents. The air between them contracts into contract: terms void, trust rescinded.
As the meeting dissolves into fractured clusters Sophie feels the numbers in her head tilt out of alignment. The price of truth is no longer abstract: it is investors cooling, reputations hairline‑cracked, alliances listing, and the fragile, hopeful version of Hawthorn Grange she has been constructing splintering under the weight of revelation.
The investor is the first to move.
Half an hour ago he had been standing with her on the south terrace, elderflower cordial in hand, rhapsodising about “authentic charm” and “exactly the sort of place people are hungry for, Sophie, trust me.” Now, in the overheated air of the barn, with rumours crackling like static around the fairy‑lit beams, he appears at her elbow with the air of a man returning a borrowed coat.
“Sophie.” His smile is immaculate, softened with what passes, in his world, for concern. “I won’t keep you: clearly you’ve rather a lot on. I just wanted to say how impressed I am with what you’ve achieved here.”
The compliment lands with the weight of a preamble. She hears it as clearly as if he’d prefaced it with However.
“Thank you,” she says, because politeness is the last defence. Her mouth finds the professional curve almost by muscle memory.
He inclines his head, the cordial glass now nowhere to be seen. “Given the…ah…recent developments” (a microscopic glance toward Miles, toward Jack, toward the little knot of guests still murmuring Thomas Ellery like an incantation) “I’m afraid my colleagues and I will need to step back for the time being. There’s a degree of, well, instability that makes it difficult for us to proceed at this juncture.”
Instability. As if Hawthorn Grange were a slightly suspect financial instrument rather than her entire waking life.
“I understand,” she hears herself say. Her voice is perfectly level, admirably so. Only her hands, folded around her notebook, betray her, the knuckles white beneath ink smudges.
He reaches out, not quite touching her arm, the gesture of a man who has taken several courses on Empathetic Leadership. “I’m terribly sorry. This isn’t a reflection on you personally. The vision is marvellous. Truly. Perhaps, once things have…settled, we can revisit.”
A year of emails and carefully curated progress photos, of train journeys to London with pitch decks in her rucksack, of pretending not to notice when his assistant forwarded articles about “the peril of overextending heritage properties”: all of it condenses into a single, exquisitely courteous handshake.
His palm is cool and dry. Her own feels faintly damp, traitorously human.
“Of course,” she says. “Thank you for considering us.”
Us. As if there is still a coherent us to offer.
He withdraws into the drifting crowd with the soundless efficiency of a man accustomed to leaving before the music stops. In his wake, the fairy lights seem to dim a fraction. Sophie stares at the space he has vacated and silently crosses out a number in her head, replacing it with a smaller, meaner one. The castle of spreadsheets she has been quietly building all year lists on its foundations.
Someone laughs too loudly near the bar. A snatch of Dylan’s name, Thomas’s, Miles’s, catches on the air and disappears. Sophie squares her shoulders, pins her smile back into place, and turns to greet the next guest as if nothing at all has just been lost.
Word of Miles’s true role sends a cold ripple through the room. It is not the dramatic kind that prompts gasps and dropped glasses, but the quieter, more consequential shift that registers first in ledgers and later in livelihoods. Near the back, by the trestle table of canapés Sophie can no longer taste, two of the local suppliers (Ben from the dairy and Priya from the flower farm) exchange a look over her head.
They had both extended her generous credit this spring, when the cashflow graph dipped into the sort of red that makes one’s stomach fizz. She remembers their shrugging reassurances, “We know you’ll make it work, Soph; it’s an investment in our future bookings”, as keenly as if they’d just said them.
Now their faces have the shuttered politeness of people rapidly recalculating. Ben murmurs something about “popping outside for a quick word,” and Priya nods, already drawing her phone from her pocket. Terms can be tightened. Payment schedules “reviewed.” Friendly, flexible arrangements petrified back into formal ones.
Sophie doesn’t blame them. She still feels the flinch of every bridge quietly, sensibly beginning to retract.
She finds Thomas halfway down the service corridor, one hand braced on the panelling as if the house itself is the only thing keeping him upright. Up close he looks oddly smaller, drained of his usual irritable volume.
“Tom. “Don’t.” The word is quiet but slices cleanly through her. He doesn’t look at her. “It’s fine. It was always going to come out.”
“It doesn’t have to change anything about, ”
“It changes everything.” His mouth twists. “The studio will be cleared by the end of the month. You’ll have your precious space back for yoga retreats or pottery or whatever it is.”
For a heartbeat she can’t breathe. The loss isn’t just square footage or a line on a brochure. It is the thin column of lamplight at the far end of the garden on winter evenings, the muted clink of brushes in jars, the knowledge that someone else was here, working, keeping faith with the place when she stumbled.
“Thomas,” she says, deliberately using the name that has just detonated his quiet life. “Please.”
He flinches as if struck. “Don’t,” he repeats, softer this time, and walks away, leaving her with the echo of his footsteps and the sudden, yawning sense that a load‑bearing wall has been quietly removed.
Jack lasts precisely three evasions.
On the fourth, with Dylan’s careless “Ask Jack, he’s practically the landlord” still hanging in the air, he straightens, colour high, and stops pretending not to understand. In a voice that carries farther than he intends, he confirms that, yes, he has the legal right to authorise sales of land: sacrificing his useful obscurity, and any quiet plan to bow out unseen.
When she finally forces her voice through the dry ache in her throat, she does not reach for the glossy phrases she has practised for brochures and bank managers. Instead, she gives them the ledger as it is: the looming shortfalls, the over‑optimistic projections, her own misjudgements. She knows, even as she speaks, that such candour may peel away the last of the fair‑weather backers. But the alternative (another smiling, artful half‑truth) feels, for the first time, like a worse kind of failure.
As Sophie finishes, the room hangs in a brittle silence that has a texture to it, like thin ice over deep water. No one quite wants to be the first to move.
At the oval table, one of the quieter investors studies his cufflinks as if they might contain an exit clause. Another, the one with the aggressively cheerful socks and the louder PR entourage, leans back just enough to put a fractional distance between himself and the idea of ruin. A woman from a heritage‑preservation trust taps her pen once and then stills it, watching Sophie with an expression that is almost pity, and almost respect.
To Sophie, it feels as if the oxygen has gone grainy. She can hear the faint whirr of the ancient ceiling fan, the murmur of a kettle boiling somewhere far down the service corridor, the distant rise and fall of noise from the festival outside: laughter, a bassline, the clink of glasses. Her own heartbeat thrums behind it all, too fast.
On the other side of the room, a journalist’s fingers hover above their phone, thumbs poised between note‑taking and the siren glow of a live tweet. Their expression brightens by degrees, the dawning look of someone who has just stumbled across a much better story than the one they were sent for. Sophie meets their eye, briefly, and sees it. The calculation, the narrative already forming about a plucky estate on the brink. She holds the gaze anyway, because to look away would feel like an apology.
She realises, with unnerving clarity, that she has just stepped off the safe, familiar script she’s lived by since first taking on the estate: no more artful optimism, no more cheerful “all under control” to soothe donors and family and herself. The words she’s spoken hang between her and the room (stark, inelegant, unmarketable) and for once there is no glossy brochure language to tuck them behind.
It is Dylan who breaks the surface tension.
“Yeah,” he says, too loudly for it to be a joke, then clears his throat and drags a hand through his hair. “Look, since we’re all doing honesty. This ‘healing retreat’ thing?” He hooks two fingers in the air for quotation marks. “That’s PR. My PR. I’m here because my manager thought pictures of me with trees would sell another album cycle. Not because I’m some whimsical patron saint of struggling country houses.”
There is a ripple around the table: his assistant goes very still, the PR woman’s pen actually stops its furious note‑taking. Someone near the door gives a tiny, shocked laugh and then swallows it.
Dylan keeps going, eyes fixed, uncharacteristically, on the scratched tabletop instead of the watching room. “I’m burnt out. Properly. Couldn’t write, couldn’t sleep. So we sold it as ‘time to reconnect’ and ‘supporting heritage’ because that photographs better than ‘man has breakdown in Cotswolds’.”
He glances up, briefly, towards Sophie. “They’re not the only ones who’ve been spinning a story. I just have more practice.”
In the pause that follows, Jack clears his throat. The sound is so small it ought to be lost in the room, yet heads turn.
“I should probably…” He gives a faint, abortive smile. “Declare an interest.”
Several investors angle towards him; Sophie feels the movement like a tide shifting.
“I’m not just ‘helping out’ with the numbers,” he says. “I’m one of the people they belong to. The will that brought me here didn’t make me a consultant, it made me… an heir.” The word lands awkwardly, as if it doesn’t quite fit his mouth. “I’ve been calling it ‘temporary’, ‘advisory’, anything that meant I could pretend I wasn’t actually on the hook.”
He exhales, shoulders tight. “Truth is, I’ve been hiding behind that language because if I said the real thing out loud, it meant I might actually be responsible. For this place. For… people who live and work here. And I’ve spent a very long time arranging my life so nothing and no one could reasonably expect that of me.”
Opposite him, Miles’s composure splinters. In neat, barrister’s cadences he gives the name of his firm, his division, the mandate he was sent with; outlines, without euphemism, the carve‑up, the long lease, the boutique‑hotel nightmare he has been modelling in spreadsheets. Then his voice roughens as he admits that the polished charm, the careful reserve, were simply mechanisms for ensuring nowhere, and no one, could ever lay real claim to him.
When the murmurs tilt towards Thomas, he does not bother to deny the critic’s quiet verdict. Instead he uncurls from his habitual stoop, lays both paint‑scarred hands flat on the table, and, with a steadiness that sounds almost like defiance, says, “I am Thomas Ellery.” The name hangs there. He confesses that the walled‑garden hermitage was never only about scandal, lawsuits, or poisonous reviews. It was about refusing any claim on him refusing commissions, responsibilities, the possibility of forgiveness; about choosing a life so circumscribed that neither his work, nor the man who made it, need ever risk being wanted again.
The room holds its breath as the old narratives, eccentric resident artist, temporary consultant, carefree celebrity guest, no longer fit the people standing in them. They sag and tear like costumes left too long in a damp wardrobe, the seams giving way under the strain of actual human weight.
Sophie becomes acutely aware of the labels she has been handing out, and wearing, ever since she arrived. Tom the harmless recluse who needed shielding from the world; Jack the nice accountant who would go home again once the awkward paperwork was done; Miles the helpful family friend with mysteriously good suits; Dylan the charming chaos element she could package as “added value” on a brochure. None of those descriptions survives five consecutive seconds in this air.
What unsettles her most is not that they have all been lying but that each lie turns out, horribly, to be a sort of self‑protection. Hiding is not a parlour trick here; it is a survival skill. Even Dylan, lounging by the mantelpiece as if he might break into a joke at any moment, looks less like a guest and more like a man who has wandered onto a stage and discovered the play is about him.
The investors, sophisticated creatures of London boardrooms and discreet family offices, glance between faces as if recalculating risk in real time. This is not, Sophie realises, the tidy narrative they were sold: charming estate, innovative business plan, celebrity endorsement, modest capital injection, tasteful return. This is a tangle of obligations and evasions, of people who have spent years learning how not to belong, suddenly being asked whether they might like to.
In the strained quiet, she feels a peculiar vertigo, as though the entire room has shifted half an inch to the left. For once, she is not outside the story, arranging everyone into sensible, marketable shapes. Whatever happens next, it will not be something she can file under “just work”.
It is an almost physical sensation, as if some invisible prop she has been leaning on has been kicked away. The persona she has worn so assiduously feels suddenly threadbare. She can feel the room seeing through it, seeing the hours and overdrafts and favours she has poured, quietly, into Hawthorn Grange. The story she has told about herself, the tidy one where she is merely a professional passing through, begins to tilt; what shows underneath is nakedly, embarrassingly simple. She has staked everything on this place.
The investors’ eyes catch on figures Miles has just named, on phrases like “contingent on continued performance” and “personal guarantees”, and Sophie realises, too late, that her own name is stitched into more of those documents than she has ever admitted aloud. She hears “director’s liability” and “security against existing loans” and knows no one in this room can now pretend she is only the cheerful events manager. For the first time, her gamble looks less like entrepreneurial verve and more like desperation laid bare.
Dylan recognises, with a sick jolt, that the persona he’s been coasting on here has no cover left in the face of what he’s accidentally exposed. The off‑hand joke, the half‑shrugged refusal to be serious, used to be enough to slide him out of anything. Now every flippant aside about “not really doing commitment” lands in the air like evidence. He can feel the investors’ attention turn towards him not as fun decoration but as a liability with a microphone and a following. The PR fairy‑tale his team crafted, healing retreat, wholesome countryside reset, frays in his hands. For the first time in years, he is not performing a role; he is simply a man who has just made things worse.
Miles feels, with a clarity more brutal than any cross‑examination, that his useful fiction (discreet consultant, amiable plus‑one) has been stripped for parts. In the cool recitation of clauses and client names, his professional armour melts to something uncomfortably like guilt. He is no longer the man facilitating options; he is the instrument by which other people might lose their home.
He had thought, dimly, that if the truth ever came out it would be despite him, dragged from some archive or whispered by someone else. To speak it himself is a treachery of a different kind. In the stunned quiet that follows, he feels the years of obscurity peel back, exposing not a misunderstood exile but a man who chose flight over apology, talent over the people scorched by it.
For a suspended second after the words leave his mouth, the room doesn’t breathe. It is as if the panel, the rows of chairs, the slightly-too-bright borrowed uplighters, all collectively forget how to exist. Thomas hears the echo of his own name hanging there, his real name, not the careful, dull syllables of “Tom Ellis” that sit unobtrusively on sign‑in sheets, but the one that once appeared in bold on catalogues and in italics beneath angry op‑eds.
He feels every gaze converge on him like pinpricks, tiny hot points along his skin: the critic’s sudden, voracious interest; the investors’ narrowing calculation; the festival volunteers’ confused curiosity; one or two older guests blinking as a decade‑old recognition clicks belatedly into place. It is not Tom they are seeing, the oddball who skulks about the walled garden and refuses to come to drinks, but Thomas Ellery, the cautionary tale, the man in the headlines who vanished instead of explaining.
Somewhere at the back of the room, someone whispers, “I thought he was dead,” and the ridiculousness of that (that he has been wandering these corridors, alive and irritable, while strangers have discussed his hypothetical demise over dinner parties) does not even have time to be funny. It simply lands alongside the rest.
His heartbeat thuds too loud in his ears; the faint buzz of the rented sound system, the creak of a floorboard, the scrape of a chair leg all register as if magnified. He can feel his body wanting to fold in on itself, old instinct dragging his shoulders inwards, arms halfway to crossing, the hunch that used to shield him from cameras and questions. Only there are no cameras now, only phones poised with apologetic alacrity, and the questions will not wait behind velvet ropes this time.
Questions swarm almost before the air has finished vibrating with his name. First the soft‑voiced, ostensibly respectful sort, then bolder, edged with the pleased sharpness of people who sense they are in the vicinity of a story. The critic, suddenly ten years younger with excitement, begins reeling off exhibition titles and catalogue essays; an overeager journalist counters with dates, injunctions, the name of the gallery that dropped him, the paper that ran the most vicious profile. They are, between them, constructing a neat little timeline of his ruin.
Thomas’s throat goes dry. His fingers have curled, unnoticed, round the carved top rail of the chair in front of him until the grain bites his skin. They are discussing the legalities of his disappearance, the ethics of his silence, the “legacy” of those last, angry canvases. All in the same tone one might use over coffee to dissect an interesting but distant scandal.
It is as if he is not three feet away, lungs working, heart pounding, but a case file laid open on the table: precedent, cautionary tale, object lesson. Not a man who still knows, inconveniently, how to feel ashamed.
When someone asks (not unkindly, but with that avid tilt of the head journalists get) why he hid here, why he never stood up in front of microphones and lawyers and said anything in his own defence, he hears himself answer. The words arrive without rehearsal, hoarse and flattened of all the deflecting irony he has spent years cultivating. He says the paintings were the only part worth keeping, that everything else (interviews, statements, counter‑statements) had already congealed into performance and punishment long before he ran. He says he could not see a way to speak without turning even the apology into spectacle. The admission drops into the room’s hush like smashed crockery, startling in its clatter, impossible to pretend away.
He catches, in the unsettled blur of faces, the exact moment Dylan flinches, quick, involuntary, like a man recognising his own reflection in an unkind mirror. Sophie’s expression, meanwhile, shifts from horrified curiosity to something softer and far more dangerous: understanding. The double recognition hits him with a jolt. His carefully maintained invisibility has not insulated anyone from the collateral damage of his long, stubborn retreat.
As the meeting fractures into side arguments about contracts and development plans, Thomas stays where he is, oddly steady, accepting each searching look as if it were no more than weather. The old reflex to deny, to deflect, loosens and drops away, leaving him with nothing to hide behind, no myth to curate, only the graceless, necessary business of telling the truth.
On the first grey morning she tells herself she is only doing a quick circuit, a brisk, sensible inspection before coffee. It feels, as most of her brisk, sensible ideas do, remarkably like punishment.
The lawn is still scarred where the main marquee stood, a paler rectangle of crushed grass glistening with dew. Her boots soak through at the seams as she picks her way between abandoned trestle tables, one leg of a table sunk slightly into the earth as if the ground itself has given up trying. Paper napkins, once artfully folded, cling damply to chair legs; a string of fairy lights has slithered down to coil like a defeated snake in the wet.
Sophie moves automatically, righting chairs, closing the lids of half-full bins where wilting flowers slump in cloudy water. Peonies and roses that yesterday were “whimsical meadow chic” now resemble the contents of a respectable funeral. She lifts a centrepiece, feels the stems slip under her fingers, and sets it down again before it can disintegrate completely. Every object comes with a mental price tag: hire fee, breakage deposit, the exact line in the spreadsheet where it will appear. Every stray cable on the grass is a potential replacement cost; every shattered glass at the edge of the path a line on the bar invoice. It is a very expensive hangover with none of the fun.
The silence where music and laughter had been makes her chest go tight in a way she refuses to name. She takes out her phone, snapping photos of damage for the insurance claim. Close-ups of torn canvas, a cracked uplighter, muddy tyre tracks where a delivery van took a creative shortcut. When her camera catches her own reflection in a darkened window, a blurred woman in a bright jumper that looks offensively cheerful, she deletes the photo at once, then, irritated with herself, checks the bin and deletes it again.
Near the lake, the small stage is half-dismantled, speakers shrouded in plastic like patients after some failed operation. Someone has left a laminated VIP pass hanging from the back of a folding chair; it twists idly in the breeze, the logo for the “Hawthorn Sessions” already seeming like the title of a particularly cruel joke. Sophie pockets it without entirely knowing why. Proof, perhaps, that it all did happen and isn’t just a very elaborate anxiety dream.
By the time she trudges back up the slope towards the house, her toes are numb and the hem of her jeans is dark with damp. The manor looks larger than usual, more looming institution than kindly old pile. The front steps are already littered with padded envelopes, couriers having discovered that “ring and run” is the most efficient method of dealing with country houses and their harried occupants. Padded mailers, stiff brown envelopes, a plastic-wrapped bundle of trade magazines with Dylan’s face smirking from the cover of one, Sophie stoops to gather them into her arms.
A red “Final Notice” stamp glares at her from the top envelope. Another bears the logo of a supplier whose cheery “Don’t you worry, love, we’ll sort you out” from three weeks ago now feels like something she hallucinated. Bills are materialising faster than she can open them, each one an accusation in printed Arial that she didn’t see this coming, didn’t plan enough, didn’t perform the required miracles.
She stands on the threshold a moment, arms full of other people’s demands, watching a single muddy footprint on the hall tiles slowly dry to a dull mark. Then she squares her shoulders, because that is what she does, because there is no alternative, and steps inside to start paying for the party that never quite managed to happen.
She claims the end of the long dining-room table as a command centre, pushing candlesticks and leftover place cards to one side until the polished wood is reduced to a strip just wide enough for her laptop and a mug she keeps forgetting to drink from. The rest is paper: curling invoices, supplier contracts, risk assessments, and Lucy’s half-finished signage designs, “Hawthorn Sessions” in three different hand-lettered styles, each now belonging to an event that might as well be a cancelled wedding.
Her laptop hums faintly, fan labouring as if it too disapproves of the number of tabs open. Sophie colour‑codes a spreadsheet with rigid focus, turning panic into cells and formulas. Red for overdue, amber for “might still be persuaded to wait,” green for the very few things already, miraculously, paid. She drafts one version of an apologetic email to guests, another to investors, a third to local vendors; swaps adjectives, trims adverbs. Each time she rereads, the phrases “unexpected complications” and “temporary setback” feel more dishonest, but “catastrophic mismanagement” is a truth she refuses, absolutely refuses, to write.
Each new ping from her inbox lands like a small, well‑aimed blow: the marquee company querying “overdue settlement,” the PR woman delicately requesting “comment on recent developments,” a chirpy wellness coach sending heart emojis and regret that her autumn retreat “won’t be aligned with the current energy of the brand.” Sophie answers them all in the same cool, unflustered tone, fingers tight on the keys as she offers revised timelines, partial refunds, future‑credit vouchers. Promises she has not the faintest idea how to honour. When Lucy appears in the doorway and offers coffee, Sophie accepts without looking up, voice brisk as she delegates social‑media triage and asks her to start quietly stripping out anything that still sells Hawthorn Grange as “serene and stable,” as if it ever really had been.
At night, exhaustion refuses to translate into sleep. Sophie lies awake in the little room off the back corridor she chose because it’s cheap to heat, replaying the email where she typed Miles’s name, the cheery pitch deck that promised Dylan as salvation. The lifeline had turned out, in retrospect, to be a lit match waved over dry timber.
At three she gives up, pulls on a jumper and her oldest socks, and slips into the corridor, the boards giving their familiar, gossiping creak. The house feels altered, as if it too has read the headlines and is withholding judgement. She walks each floor with a clipboard she doesn’t strictly need. Checking fire exits, testing window latches, straightening a crooked portrait of some unsmiling ancestor who now looks merely disapproving rather than grand. In the library she nudges a stack of brochures so their edges align; in the unused blue bedroom she tightens a curtain tie-back. Small, fussy rituals of order, performed against the vast, uncooperative sprawl of invoices and reputation outside her control.
In the kitchen, she updates a handwritten list on the fridge titled “Non‑Negotiables”: staff wages, essential repairs, utility payments, the cleaner’s overtime she refuses to pretend did not happen. Everything else migrates to a second column labelled “Maybe,” which lengthens by the hour: fresh flowers, glossy brochures, weekend yoga. When dawn seeps in, Sophie stands at the back door, watching mist lift off the fields, and repeats under her breath the line she has drafted for the public statement (“We remain committed to the long‑term future of Hawthorn Grange”) worrying the syllables like a loose tooth, trying to believe them herself before she sends them to the world and, soon after, sits down with Jack to confront what that commitment actually costs.
The morning room feels smaller than Sophie remembers, as if the panelling itself has leaned in to listen. Someone (probably her, probably three crises ago) chose chintz curtains meant to suggest “cosy country charm”; this morning they only succeed in trapping the grey light and the faint, relentless sound of rain against the windows.
The low table between the armchairs has disappeared beneath highlighted spreadsheets and the dog‑eared will, a small paper continent bordered by two chipped mugs. Jack keeps straightening the same stack of papers, then misaligning them again, his fingers worrying the edges until they curl. His cheeks are unusually pale against the collar of his jumper, the set of his mouth too tight to be absent‑minded concentration.
“I’m not the spare pair of hands anymore, Soph.” He says it to the accounts rather than to her, as if the numbers might soften the admission. Then he makes himself look up. “I’m… one of the people who can actually sign this place away.”
The words land between them with the solid, ugly finality of a box dropped on a fragile table. For a second, the only sound is the tick of the old mantel clock and the distant, muffled bark of a dog in the yard. The house seems to hold its breath.
Sophie’s mind, ever eager to dart to solutions, doesn’t. Instead something slower and more treacherous rises first: hurt, sharp and oddly intimate. Not at the inheritance itself, she’s known about that in outline, but at the size of what he has been carrying in silence. At the memory of shared midnight wine and jokes about “your mad little empire,” all the while his signature sat there in the small print, a guillotine waiting for its rope to be pulled.
“How long,” she hears herself ask, voice coming out thinner than she intended, “have you been… ‘one of the people’?”
Jack flinches, very slightly. He pushes his glasses up his nose, an old schoolboy gesture that doesn’t fit the man with voting rights over her future. “Since probate cleared. A few weeks.” He clears his throat. “I thought. You had the festival, the investors. “Meanwhile you were sitting there with… with the off switch in your back pocket?”
His shoulders hunch, the movement almost imperceptible. “I wasn’t hiding it to be cruel,” he says, and the quiet seriousness in his tone makes her angrier, not less. “I was hiding it because if I said it out loud, it became real. And I thought you had enough reality for one month.”
She stares down at the will, the black ink of his name beside percentages and clauses. The letters blur slightly; she blinks them back into focus. It is ludicrous, she thinks, to feel jilted by a cousin and a legal document. Yet there it is: the sense that some private contract between them (she works, he helps, the universe more or less looks away) has been unilaterally amended.
“You should have told me,” she says, not loudly, but with the flat certainty she reserves for health and safety breaches and overdue wages. The hurt folds itself neatly behind the words, out of sight but not, she suspects, out of his hearing.
Once the first sharpness of betrayal ebbs, their conversation does not so much soften as acquire edges in new places. The politeness they usually wrap around disagreement frays. Sophie, fingers ink‑smudged from late‑night lists, taps at the “Non‑Negotiables” column she has rewritten on a legal pad. Staff wages circled twice. Roof repairs underlined. “If we start trimming people,” she says, “we’re not a retreat, we’re a cautionary tale with sacked housekeepers.”
Jack slides a spreadsheet towards her, the cells lit up in anxious amber. “If we don’t trim something,” he replies, “we’re insolvent by Christmas. That’s not a tale, it’s a fact.” He speaks without heat, which somehow stings more. “A controlled partial sell‑off of the north fields buys time. Time means we don’t have to pretend we can magic cashflow out of yoga and fairy lights.”
They argue not as dreamer and killjoy, but as two people fluent in the same grim arithmetic who weight debts differently: to the staff whose rent depends on this month’s payroll, to a future they may already have mortgaged past repair, to themselves and the quieter lives they once assumed they would be living somewhere else.
The side room is one of those spaces the house appears faintly ashamed of: paneled, airless, smelling of old polish and tepid coffee, with a faint undertone of decades of committee biscuits. Thomas sits opposite two trustees and a solicitor whose tie matches his ring binder, a printed dossier between them like evidence at a trial. His own face stares back at him in grainy photographs: gallery openings, a catalogue cover, that cursed profile shot from the broadsheets.
The questions come in courteous, practised tones. Would he consider a carefully managed interview? A limited exhibition on-site? Might he be willing to let his “journey” form part of a heritage bid or fundraising push? For the first time since he arrived as “Tom Ellis”, they speak of him as leverage, not lodger; an amenity, not a neighbour.
When one trustee, cheeks flushing with the effort of sounding modern, uses the phrase “cultural asset”, he feels an almost adolescent spike of panic and something sourer beneath it, like humiliation reheated. Assets are catalogued and insured; they are also listed under “disposals” when the numbers demand it. A man who came here to vanish has become a bullet point in someone else’s PowerPoint, a line item on a balance sheet. And line items, as he knows all too well, can always be reclassified or removed.
He moves more slowly than usual, the familiar turns of the back passage feeling suddenly foreign, hostile. His long invisibility, he sees now, was a courtesy extended by a failing institution, not some moral victory of his own. If he digs in (no interviews, no “narrative arc”) they can invoke clauses he skimmed in bad light and quietly remove him. If he yields, the walled garden ceases to be sanctuary and becomes a pilgrimage site for strangers who want a piece of his ruin. At the studio door, hand on the scarred frame, he understands with a cold, almost statistical clarity: it is no longer a question of hiding versus painting, but of whether he will let the estate cash in the wreckage of Thomas Ellery to keep Hawthorn afloat, or stand aside and watch it drown with his silence intact.
Out by the stables, Lucy finds Dylan leaning against a stone wall, halfway through a cigarette he doesn’t seem to want, smoke curling away in thin, uncertain threads. When he tries a joke about giving them “one hell of a headline,” she doesn’t roll her eyes and play along; she cuts in, voice flat, that setting fires and walking away isn’t artistry, it’s cowardice with better lighting and a soundtrack. The flinch that crosses his face surprises them both. Their usual barbed banter falters as she adds, quieter but no softer, that Sophie needed stability, not another beautiful disaster story. And that his talent for blowing things up is of no use to anyone who has to stay and clear the rubble from their own front steps.
Back at the house, Sophie works her way methodically down the length of the barn, as if efficiency might yet qualify as a superpower. Lanterns first: unhook, check for cracks, coil the flex round her wrist, stack neatly in their plastic crates. Folding chairs next, legs snapping shut with small, accusatory clicks. A stray paper cup here, a dropped wristband there: each bit of detritus a relic from the weekend’s great experiment in reinvention.
She keeps moving partly because once she stops she isn’t entirely sure what will happen. So she doesn’t stop. She just counts. Twelve trestle tables. Four crates of unsold branded tote bags that had seemed, three weeks ago, like a charmingly low-key merch strategy and now look like a bulk order of hubris. She re-tapes a cardboard box with more force than necessary, the tape gun’s rasp echoing in the rafters.
Halfway along, beneath the strand of fairy lights that still loop from beam to beam, unlit, sulking slightly in the dimness, her hand stills. The silence presses in, carcass-of-a-party silence, and something in her posture gives. Her shoulders, which have been welded into a cheerfully resolute line since the first journalist phoned about “comment,” finally sag forward.
The big chalkboard leans where she left it by the bar. Yesterday it had been part of the aesthetic: relaxed, artisanal, proof that everything was curated but nothing tried too hard. Today, the white script looks faintly delusional. Sunrise Yoga. Foraged Brunch. Fireside Session with Dylan Hawkes. She reads the words twice, as if they belong to somebody else’s weekend, somebody else’s optimism.
Her fingertip follows the curl of a Y, the loop of an S, a muscle-memory of planning meetings and Pinterest boards. Then, with a small, impatient breath that is not quite a sob, she drags her hand straight through the list in one hard, horizontal sweep. Chalk squeals; letters disintegrate into cloudy streaks. The future she had been selling, to investors, to the trustees, to herself, blurs into smudged grey dust.
She wipes her hand on her jeans, leaving pale fingerprints at her thigh, and blinks fiercely against the hot, treacherous prickling at the backs of her eyes. There is no time, she informs the empty barn, for melodrama. There is a fresh budget to draft, a PR disaster to triage, suppliers to reassure. She will find another angle, another package, another way to make Hawthorn Grange look like a safe bet.
But for these few stolen seconds, under fairy lights that never quite got their perfect Instagram moment, she lets herself feel the hollow drop of it. The quiet, stunned grief for a version of the estate that had existed so solidly in her spreadsheets and moodboards that it had almost counted as real. Almost.
On the far edge of the fields, Jack follows the uneven line of the old stone wall, boots scuffing through the long grass, mentally ticking off repair estimates and overdue invoices like an unwanted litany. Roof tiles. Drive repairs. Insurance renewal. The figures march beside him, columns of numbers overlaying the landscape in a way childhood never prepared him for.
He pauses at a familiar gap where the wall has slumped, stones tumbled aside to make a boy-sized doorway. Once, he used to clamber through here to race his cousins to the river, trousers muddied, lungs burning, the house behind them a storybook backdrop with infinite adults in charge of everything important. He braces a hand on the cool stone now, feeling lichen rough against his palm, and realises with a small, disorienting jolt that the grown-up decision he’s been avoiding isn’t a line item but a verdict: whether he can keep pretending this place is someone else’s problem when it is, quite literally, under his feet.
He stands astride the boundary, one boot in the estate field, one in the tenant’s pasture beyond, and understands, with the accountant’s precision he usually trusts, that not choosing has been its own choice all along.
In the walled garden, Thomas lifts one of his older canvases and eases it halfway into a crate, then freezes, his hands shaking just enough to betray him. The echo of gallery openings and courtroom whispers crowds in tempting him toward the old reflex of disappearance. His fingers tighten on the frame. If he walks now, he knows every article will write the same story again: Ellery bolts, unable to face himself.
He glances round at the mismatched furniture, the paint-splattered floor, the kettle that wheezes rather than boils, the small window onto the overgrown borders. Somehow this anonymous corner, with its draughts and spiders and stubborn quiet, has become more of a home than any loft he fled in London.
Down by the lake, the boathouse smells of damp wood and stale beer, the water slapping half-heartedly at the warped boards, as Dylan stares at the guitar beside him, fingers hovering but not quite touching the strings. Fractured images of the festival’s last hours (Sophie’s stricken face, Lucy’s flat accusation, the murmur of journalists on the lawn) loop in his head, and for once he can’t twist them into some rakish, defiant anecdote for a future interview. There is only the slow, spreading ache of recognition, the dull, insistent truth that walking away this time won’t erase the bruise he’s left behind, or the unwelcome suspicion that, for all his clever exits, he may finally have run out of places to vanish to.
As the sky darkens, the estate settles into a heavy, expectant quiet: a single light burns in Sophie’s office, Jack’s silhouette crosses an upstairs window with a stack of files, and a faint glow seeps under Thomas’s studio door where the crates remain open and unpacked. In the boathouse, Dylan finally reaches for the guitar and lets out a few halting chords that don’t fix anything, can’t charm or spin this into content, but at least acknowledge the wreckage. A thin, uncertain thread of sound tying him, however reluctantly, to the place he’d only meant to pass through and now can’t quite shrug off.
Sophie stares at the red‑inked spreadsheet until the columns bleed into one another and the whole thing resembles a particularly vindictive abstract painting. Her eyes burn; her neck gives a small, traitorous twinge. In the corner of the screen, the cursor blinks in the draft window of an email she could write in her sleep: Hi lovely people! So sorry for the delay, wild weekend here, but GREAT news coming soon!!
She reads the sentence back, disgust curling in her stomach. The festival has been many things, chaotic, humiliating, oddly revealing, but it has not been great. Her finger pauses over the delete key. For a moment she considers simply shutting the laptop and hiding behind the fiction for one more night.
Instead, jaw tightening, she drags the cursor across the chirpy paragraph and watches it disappear. The empty white box is oddly terrifying. It means she has to decide who she is, now that the glossy optimism has cracked.
She sets her fingertips on the keys, consciously unclenches her shoulders, and begins again.
Dear all,
I’m writing with a more serious update than usual.
No exclamation marks. No “hope you’re well!” to soften what follows. Slowly, haltingly at first, then with a grim sort of momentum, she sets it out: the shortfall in ticket sales after the early departures, the investors who have “paused conversations”, the unexpected extra costs from last‑minute changes. She names numbers she has only ever muttered to herself. She types the precise figure she can pay this month, and the amounts she can commit to in the months following, with dates that make her stomach hollow but are (if nothing else) true.
She explains, briefly but without spin, that her priority is to honour every invoice, even if it takes longer than planned, and that she understands completely if anyone prefers not to extend further credit. When her fingers try to add a line about “exciting opportunities on the horizon”, she stops, deletes it, and sits back.
The email now looks stark. Exposed. Like wandering into a drawing room full of people without a carefully pressed dress on. She reads it twice, searching for some small, reassuring lie to tuck in at the end, a bow on a very ugly parcel. None of the usual tricks feel tolerable.
Her heartbeat is loud in the quiet office. Somewhere upstairs, a door closes; down the corridor, the ancient boiler gives a grudging cough. No cavalry is arriving between now and the end of the month.
“All right,” she murmurs to the screen, as if the estate itself is listening. “We’ll try it your way.”
She signs with just her name (no “Warmest” or “Best”) checks the list of recipients one last time, and presses send. The whoosh of the email leaving sounds absurdly final, like a judge’s gavel. For a second, every muscle in her body wants to reach after it, to drag it back and stuff in a smiley face or two.
Too late. The truth is out, pared down and inelegant, with nothing but her reputation and a very old house standing behind it.
She braces for bounced‑back fury. Formal phrases about breach of contract, or at the very least a few withering “disappointed to hear this” missives. What lands first, ten minutes later, is a three‑line reply from the marquee company.
Thanks for being straight with us, Sophie. Not ideal, obviously, but let’s see what we can work out.
No legalese. No veiled threat. Just a cautious, almost embarrassed pragmatism. She blinks at it, rereads twice, then watches as another email pings in from the sound engineer, then a third from the florist. One offers an extra thirty days before late fees. Another suggests stripping back next month’s booking to basics (no uplighters, no add‑on package) if it helps her stay afloat. The florist, a woman with fierce eyebrows who terrified Sophie at their first meeting, writes simply: Been there. Pay what you can this month; we’ll stagger the rest.
The relief that follows is not the cinematic, head‑back exhale she’d once imagined. It settles lower, quieter, like a weight redistributed rather than removed. The figures are still ugly. No miracle has descended. But a narrow ledge of time has appeared where there was only freefall, and with it a disconcerting lightness in her chest at the realisation that, for the first time in months, she is not lying to anyone about how bad it is. Including herself.
When Jack turns up two evenings later with an overnight bag and takeaway coffees, it isn’t for a crisis summit but to sit opposite Sophie at the scarred office table, sleeves rolled, laptop open, tie stuffed in his pocket like a surrender flag. He goes line by line with her through the accounts, methodical where she has become slightly frantic, circling modest subscriptions to cancel, suggesting cheaper energy tariffs, quietly flagging duplicated insurance policies no one has noticed in years. Every so often he glances up, checking she’s still with him, not just nodding bravely.
He gently questions whether certain “essential” flourishes really are. They argue over a few (fresh flowers in every guest room, the expensive coffee beans, the live pianist at Saturday dinners) her clinging to atmosphere, him to arithmetic. Eventually, with more sighing than drama, they compromise, trimming costs without stripping away what makes the place feel alive. When he finally shuts the laptop, the numbers remain stubborn, but they look, if not kind, at least marginally less murderous.
Upstairs, Lucy drags a folding table into a spare twin room, tangles herself in charging cables, and pins a rough sitemap of the estate’s online presence to the wall like a crime board. With headphones on and cold tea by her elbow, she edits late into the night, stripping out “luxury escape” fluff for candid mentions of creaky floors, patchy Wi‑Fi, and “work‑in‑progress” gardens that may contain actual nettles. On the estate’s feeds she starts posting quieter, less polished images (mist on the lake, muddy boots by the back door, staff laughing in a cluttered kitchen) trying to seed a version of Hawthorn Grange that’s flawed but recognisably, stubbornly real.
Down the garden path, Thomas stands in his studio amid opened crates and half‑unpacked canvases, the familiar panic of exposure scraping at his nerves as he re‑reads the gallery owner’s message, polite, interested, full of words like “important” and “long‑awaited.” He hovers over his phone long enough to compose and delete three refusals, then instead types a careful reply: the visit can go ahead, but strictly private, no photos, no announcements, no press releases, no talk of “comebacks.” When the day comes he almost bolts, then unlocks the door and walks the woman through his cramped space in near silence, letting the work speak while he studies her reactions, testing, in a controlled way, whether stepping toward the world again must mean surrendering the fragile refuge he’s carved at Hawthorn Grange.
In the weeks after the festival, the first changes are so small they’re almost invisible, the sort of alterations only noticed by people who know where things usually sit. The stack of ominous brown envelopes on the corner of Sophie’s desk stops breeding, for one. She and Jack work through them on Tuesday mornings, and instead of being shuffled into a hopeful “later” pile, invoices are actually paid on the due date, entered into a spreadsheet that now has colour‑coding and, to Sophie’s faint horror, tabs.
Lucy, who has always mistrusted any business whose homepage features the word “bespoke” more than once, quietly rearranges Hawthorn Grange’s online reflection. Out go the breathless promises of “grand seasonal festivals” and “exclusive society weekends”; in come photographs of mismatched chairs catching late afternoon light, handwritten chalkboard menus, and a note that some of the rooms “retain their original character, which may include creaks.” She experiments with new headings, “small gatherings,” “working retreats,” “escape from your own inbox”, and watches, half‑pleased, half‑wary, as enquiries shift from influencers wanting complimentary stays to tired‑sounding people asking if there’s decent coffee and a door that shuts.
Thomas, observing all this in his own oblique way, leaves his studio door propped open on certain afternoons when the weather is good and his nerves are, if not steady, at least resigned. He tells himself it’s for ventilation, but he does not move the chair that now sits just inside the threshold. The sounds of the house, distant hoovering, a burst of laughter from the kitchen, the rattle of a trolley over uneven flagstones, pool in the doorway and seep around his easel. Occasionally a member of staff pauses, hovering, offered a muttered “come in, if you must” that somehow becomes, over days, “come in, if you like.”
None of this is grand enough to count as a turning point. There are no speeches, no ribbon‑cuttings, no triumphant announcements on social media. They are, instead, a series of small, almost embarrassed corrections: an overdue bill settled, an overblown sentence edited down, a closed man allowing the corridor’s life to graze his solitude. Yet together they begin to change the atmosphere, inching it away from emergency measures and wishful thinking toward something quieter, more deliberate, and, though few of them will admit it aloud, more honest.
The tone of the meetings in the old library shifts almost by stealth. What began as frantic, midnight huddles conducted in whispers and bad lighting becomes a standing Tuesday afternoon appointment at the big table, where papers fan out beside half‑drunk mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits Lucy has ostentatiously labelled “For Surviving Reality.” The curtains stay open now; daylight picks out every crack in the high ceiling and every water stain on the peeling wallpaper.
They talk numbers without flinching: which parts of the estate can realistically earn their keep, which beloved corners must be shut up and left to dust, which long‑nursed projects are, on examination, pure vanity. Jack reads out line items; Sophie forces herself not to joke them away. When someone suggests a Christmas ball with live reindeer, she actually writes “NO” on the pad in front of her.
“We can’t sell a fantasy we can’t afford to live in,” she says once, surprising herself with the bluntness. The words hang in the air like a ruling; this time, nobody even tries to argue.
By the second or third Tuesday, even the headings on their shared folders have changed. Instead of “Summer Spectacular – Vision” there is “Contingency Scenarios v3,” “Phased Recovery Options – Draft,” and, at Lucy’s suggestion, “Absolutely Not (Ideas to Avoid).” Jack builds sober spreadsheets in which columns labelled best, middling, and worst are weighted with interest rates and rainfall assumptions; Sophie, after bristling at all the grey, begins to slide her bright notions into his grids, discovering that colour‑coding can be oddly satisfying. When she suggests a modest programme of residencies instead of another all‑or‑nothing festival, it is Jack who quietly improves the cash‑flow projections and adds a cautious buffer. Their old friction cools into a wary, oddly respectful partnership, possibility and limits forced to share the same page.
Around them, other habits slowly admit new truths. Thomas, who once stalked the grounds with sketchbook in hand to avoid people, now perches in a corner of the barn during staff breaks, apparently absorbed in his tea. His pencil, however, is ruthless: the curve of a gardener’s wrist around a chipped mug, the droop of Sophie’s shoulders over a ledger, the way Lucy’s sarcasm slackens at the edges when she thinks no one’s looking. Occasionally someone realises they’ve been caught and stiffens; occasionally they ask to see. He almost never shows them, but his notebooks fill with these quick, unsentimental studies of the humans who have tethered themselves to Hawthorn Grange, as if conceding that the estate is no longer just stone and sky but also the flawed, stubborn lives running through it.
Even far from the Cotswolds, the estate refuses to stay a mere incident in Dylan’s past. In his London flat, soundproofed and impersonal, he keeps reaching for the battered notebook he carried to the boathouse, scribbling lines about ivy over stone and voices echoing in high, cold rooms. Melodies arrive that won’t sit with his old swaggering choruses, insist instead on suspensions and unfinished cadences. The new songs are less about scandal than about quiet compromises: people choosing to stay when leaving would be easier, choosing to tell the truth when performance would cost less. He doesn’t call it inspiration, not yet, but when his manager asks what the tracks are “about,” he hesitates, hears himself say, “A house in the middle of nowhere,” and realises the place has begun to matter to him in ways he can’t quite laugh off or market away.
Outside the estate’s tight knot of reckonings, the rest of the county barely pauses long enough to enjoy the scandal. In Hawthorn-on-Lea, the pub’s regulars hold the story like a shiny coin, turning it over at the bar for a week or two, “that disastrous festival up at the big house”, before it joins the quiet hoard of village lore. On damp evenings, when the fire draws a crowd, there are a few sharp, satisfying retellings: the rainwater that allegedly got into the electrics (“health and safety nightmare, that”), the famous faces who were seen arriving and just as swiftly vanishing again, and the rumours, improving with every pint, of raised voices by the lake and “some rock star or other” storming off towards the boathouse.
The details shift obligingly with each narrator. One version has organisers weeping in the shrubbery; another insists the whole thing was cursed from the start because they put the stage facing the church. A man who once did odd jobs at the estate claims intimate knowledge of the “proper to‑do with the money,” though this seems to rest mainly on the fact that someone from London asked him for directions to the station. A barmaid, whose cousin’s girlfriend provided cupcakes for the opening night, contributes that the canapés were “too fancy by half” and that no one who serves beetroot foam can expect good luck.
By the time the month turns, the tale has settled into its allotted place: a useful anecdote for impressing visiting relatives, something to mention as the landlord wipes down a table, “You remember when they tried to turn the old place into Glastonbury?”, before the talk drifts back, as it always does, to Sunday fixtures, council roadworks, planning applications, and whose nephew is moving to Birmingham “for a proper job, apparently.” The big house on the hill resumes its role as background scenery, an object for pointing at from car windows, while its inhabitants carry on rearranging their futures quite unnoticed.
On the lane up to Hawthorn Grange, white vans still grind their way to the service entrance, but now it’s tradespeople rather than caterers: an electrician to finally look at the wiring in the east wing, a plumber grumbling about Victorian pipework, a tree surgeon assessing storm-damaged branches along the drive. They nod at whoever opens the door, vaguely aware there was “some big do that went a bit wrong,” and are far more interested in getting paid on thirty-day terms.
Sophie meets them with a clipboard instead of a smile tray, ticking off purchase orders that make her stomach dip, negotiating, where she can, for a discount in exchange for “future work, once we’re properly up and running.” The glamour of “festival” has flattened into “necessary maintenance,” and no one from town arrives now to take selfies by the gate. Jack appears at intervals with revised budgets and careful caveats, translating each invoice into months of runway. When a delivery driver asks if they’re “planning another of those events,” Sophie hears Lucy, somewhere behind her, mutter “God forbid,” and answers, briskly polite, “Not like that. Not again.”
The physical traces of the festival are stripped away in unceremonious stages, like evidence tidied after a minor, embarrassing crime. Scaffolding lorries haul off the last of the staging before breakfast, leaving pale rectangles in the grass where platforms blocked the light. A skip squats by the barn, steadily filled with broken pallets, warped plywood bars, and mouldering banners whose sponsors no longer return Sophie’s emails. Fairy lights, once carefully strung for maximum Instagram appeal, are coiled into plastic crates and shoved into a cold store for “possible future use,” a phrase Jack repeats with an accountant’s wince. Out on the browned edges of the lawn, tyre marks blur under new growth; the trampled square where the VIP tent once stood is briskly reseeded, another quiet debit on an already strained maintenance budget, the soil accepting the failure without comment.
Beyond the village, the story thins even further. A regional paper runs a short follow‑up on “Noise Complaints Over Country Festival,” illustrated with a stock photo of an entirely different field, then drops it for fresher outrage. Online, a handful of old photos circulate without context, fairy lights, a blurred guitar, someone’s sequinned jacket in mid‑turn, before sinking under newer scandals and sponsored content. Weeks later, when a glossy travel magazine publishes a spread on “Five Perfect Cotswolds Escapes,” its airbrushed images of honeyed stone and champagne picnics are taken at some other manor entirely, the copy assuring readers that “discretion is guaranteed,” as if Hawthorn Grange had never briefly tried, and publicly failed, to sell precisely that illusion.
At Moreton-in-Marsh station, commuters and weekenders step off trains under grey skies, check their phones for taxis, and are swept into routines that have nothing to do with a half‑mended house on a hill. The branch‑line service glides past the unnoticed turn‑off for Hawthorn‑on‑Lea, and the estate sinks back into being a blur of trees and stone beyond the hedgerows, a name on an old OS map nobody consults. Inside its drafty rooms, however, the quiet that follows is not quite the same: Sophie counts lightbulbs and linen sets, Jack recalibrates columns, Lucy redesigns flyers no one has ordered. They move differently through corridors that feel barer and more honest, already, in small, stubbornly practical decisions, beginning to make a future the outside world will only ever see in passing.
The estate’s online presence becomes a testing ground for this new honesty, a kind of publicly viewable confession drafted in alt text and subheadings. Sophie spends late evenings at the scrubbed pine kitchen table with Lucy, the old Aga ticking as it cools, their mugs leaving expanding circles on print-outs. Between them, the laptop screen glows with the last remnants of “timeless elegance” and “unforgettable luxury experience,” phrases Sophie now regards with the suspicion usually reserved for dodgy boilers and estate agents.
“‘Nestled in the heart of the Cotswolds,’” Lucy reads aloud, nose wrinkling. “What are we, a fugitive? We’re not nestled. We’re… lodged.”
“‘Stubbornly clinging to a picturesque hill,’” Sophie suggests, fingers already tapping. “Too much?”
“Accurate,” Lucy says. “But maybe don’t lead with the structural anxiety.”
They strip out velvet-voiced promises and replace them with candid photographs: peeling paint beside blooming roses; half-cleared attics with trunks open and their contents mid-sort; artists hunched over work in borrowed rooms where the skirting boards don’t quite meet the floor. Lucy adjusts colours and layouts, muting some of the brighter hues, leaning into soft, overcast light that makes decay look oddly tender. She rearranges the home page so that “in progress” reads as a design choice rather than a failure of completion.
“Lose the shot where you’ve cleverly hidden the scaffolding,” she says, clicking through. “Put in the one where it photobombs the lake.”
“That’s the ugly one,” Sophie protests.
“That’s the truthful one. Besides, anyone who objects to scaffolding probably objects to reality.”
Sophie argues, stubbornly, for keeping in the awkward bits: the mismatched chairs borrowed from three different dining rooms, the patch of lawn still more mud than grass, the handwritten “sorry, out of order” sign on the grand staircase loo. Because that is what people will actually find when they arrive. The copy shifts, too: “Not yet perfect, but trying” replaces “flawless service”; “rooms with quirks and good duvets” stands in for “sumptuous suites.”
By midnight the new site looks less like a brochure and more like an invitation to join a work already underway. It unnerves Sophie, exposing all the seams: but to her surprise, it also feels like taking a long, necessary breath.
As the website shifts, so do the enquiries it attracts. The gushiest requests for “exclusive country luxury” dry up, replaced by emails that sound as if they have been written late at night and revised twice. Burnt‑out teachers ask for somewhere quiet to think and, if possible, a desk that isn’t in the same room as a television. A mid‑list novelist wants a long weekend away from London “with tolerable coffee and intolerable silence.” A recently divorced couple write to ask, not altogether jokingly, whether the estate can survive two people who no longer know how to talk, and whether there is anywhere on site for emergency escape.
Sophie reads each message slowly, elbows on the scarred kitchen table, answering with precise descriptions of what they can and cannot offer: yes, there is Wi‑Fi in most rooms; no, the east wing is still off‑limits unless you enjoy structural risk; yes, you may bring work that isn’t finished yet, and no one will demand to see it. She resists the urge to embroider. For the first time, “not yet” feels like a selling point rather than an apology.
The practical rhythms of the house narrow but deepen. Fewer guests means fewer frantic turnarounds, but each arrival feels more deliberate, like a considered experiment rather than a mad dash. Mornings begin with Sophie spreading invoices, booking notes, and seed catalogues over the scarred dining table, annexing territory with paperclips and highlighters, while Jack boots up his laptop and pulls up cash‑flow projections that look, unhelpfully, like ECG readouts of a patient in mild distress. They work mostly in silence, pencils tapping in counterpoint to the old radiator’s clank and the kettle’s periodic sigh. Breaks are brief and functional: to scribble lists for the gardener, rejig the rota, or adjust the schedule for the next residency. The atmosphere is equal parts war room and shared homework desk, no one pretending that a miracle is going to swoop in and fix the numbers, but neither of them quite willing to surrender the exercise books.
Conversation at that table grows more direct, too. Where Sophie once deflected with jokes and Jack stayed politely non‑committal, they now argue about which rooms to shut this winter, which events to risk, and how far to push “in transition” guests before the place starts to feel like a managed process rather than a home. On damp Tuesdays they rehearse worst‑case scenarios and then, methodically, decide what level of discomfort is survivable. They circle back to the same questions: how honest can they be without scaring people off, and is it better to have three guests who understand the mess than a dozen who will complain about the drafts and never return?
Outside their improvised office, the half‑restored walled garden becomes an unofficial barometer of their intentions. Between budget meetings, Sophie walks the beds with a mug of reheated coffee, counting which perennials have survived neglect; Jack trails behind with a notebook, jotting down costs for gravel paths and second‑hand benches, occasionally adding, in tiny handwriting, “optional” beside anything that looks too hopeful. They start small: one border cleared properly, a single corner nudged into order and labelled on Jack’s spreadsheet as “artist nook,” a place for visiting residents to sketch, sulk, or drink tea out of chipped mugs. Promising themselves that each modest improvement will be paid for, justified, and visible on both the balance sheet and the ground. The garden, like the website and the bookings ledger, is no longer an inheritance to be taken for granted but a project they either choose, line by line and plant by plant, to build together or let quietly fail.
Once the numbers are up on the wall, they stop being spectres and become, inconveniently, facts. The language in those meetings shifts from “challenging months” and “tight spots” to “we will run out of money by February if we don’t fill those mid‑week slots.” Sophie prints out cash‑flow forecasts and pins them to a corkboard already crowded with cleaning rotas and event flyers; red pen circles the danger months, green ticks mark the rare lines that have actually behaved, and no one is allowed to pretend they haven’t seen them. Lucy, roped in under the pretext of “designing something friendlier,” sharpens a black fineliner and adds plain‑English translations in the margins, “this is bad,” “this is worse,” “do not spend money here unless it is on fire”, until the board looks less like a corporate memo and more like a particularly dark piece of conceptual art.
The next time a rainstorm exposes a new leak over the back staircase, it does not vanish into the amorphous category of “maintenance.” Sophie photographs the spreading stain, swears at the bucket that refuses to stay upright, and then marches straight back to the morning room to add “Back stair ceiling – probable roof tile – £???” to a shared “triage” list. The list already features the barn’s dodgy electrics and the crumbling lakeside steps, each item with a rough cost, a risk rating, and a column marked “defer?” that they argue over in full view of the junior staff.
“What happens if we put ‘yes’ in every box?” one of the weekend cleaners asks, halfway amused, halfway alarmed.
“Then we get very good at umbrellas and plausible deniability,” Sophie replies, uncapping her pen. “And we lose the wedding trade.”
They laugh, but the “defer?” column does not stay hypothetical. Items are moved up and down with grudging clarity; when Jack writes “not optional” beside the electrics and underlines it twice, no one argues that fairy lights are more romantic than functioning wiring.
Sophie notices, with a mixture of relief and guilt, how the staff respond to this bluntness. The housekeeper, who once guarded her linen cupboard like a duchy and met any suggestion of change with frosty politeness, volunteers, almost gruffly, to trial cheaper laundry suppliers and to see whether “hotel‑folded” is really worth the extra seventeen pounds a week. The groundsman quietly offers an old contact who might patch the roof for mates’ rates if paid in instalments, muttering something about “owed me since ’98” and looking faintly appalled when Sophie writes it down under “in‑kind support” and thanks him.
There are still mutters in the kitchen about “turning the place into a business,” as if the last century had been sustained entirely on good breeding and Victoria sponge. But the eye‑rolling softens when Sophie posts the month’s bookings on the noticeboard, wins and losses both, and circles the lines where staff choices have helped. She thanks people by name when a saved receipt, an off‑peak oil delivery, or a tightened rota makes a visible dent in the deficit, and the next suggestion comes a little less grudgingly.
Jack’s presence in these conversations becomes impossible to frame as a favour. He starts fielding calls from suppliers on the landline, his voice calm as he renegotiates payment terms in a way that makes even the most belligerent oil company sound almost penitent, and drafts emails to potential corporate clients that Sophie edits for tone rather than substance. He mutters about “brand positioning” and “tiered offers” without irony, scratching figures on the back of a recycled menu. One afternoon, Lucy wanders past the morning room, pauses, and snorts at the sight of him in shirtsleeves, tie loosened, spreadsheets open on his laptop and a cold mug of tea by his elbow; by the following week, the estate Wi‑Fi password has been stuck, half‑joking, above his usual chair with a Post‑it labelled “Sutton HQ,” which no one removes.
The boundary between his “real life” and Hawthorn Grange blurs in petty, revealing ways. His overnight bag becomes a semi‑permanent fixture under the desk; a spare toothbrush appears in the staff bathroom with no comment, followed by a donated mug on the draining board. When a colleague from the accounting firm rings to ask if he can take on another client, Jack steps out into the corridor, looks automatically toward the morning room as if checking whether Sophie can spare him, and hears himself say, “Things are complicated at the moment,” instead of the brisk refusal he’d rehearsed. Later, missing yet another last train, he scrolls rental listings on his phone, hovering over “Cotswolds (within 10 miles)”, then, uneasy, flicks the screen dark before anyone can glance over his shoulder or, worse, ask if he’s found anything suitable.
Still, he protects a sliver of distance. On certain Sundays he vanishes to his town flat, runs shirts through the washing machine and sits at the narrow kitchen table with his old laptop open, inbox dutifully refreshed, supermarket loyalty emails unread. The hum of distant traffic and neighbours’ televisions is oddly reassuring. Driving back up the estate lane with the suitcase in his boot, he frames it as commuting between two worlds rather than defecting to one, even as his calendar, his conversations, and the quiet expectations in other people’s eyes tilt inexorably toward the honey‑stone house and the walled garden where his name has begun to appear, discreetly, on more than internal papers.
The first box arrives on a drizzly Tuesday, the cardboard slightly buckled from the damp. Lucy shoulders the boot-room door open with it, tracking in a smear of mud and rain, and announces, “Your fan mail’s here,” before dropping it on the bench with a thud that makes the pegs rattle.
Sophie happens upon it half an hour later. By the time Thomas comes in from the garden, shaking rain from his sleeves, she is waiting for him in the corridor outside the kitchen, one of the brochures already open in her hands.
“Tom.” She steps into his path, the glossy paper held like a cautiously proffered verdict. “They’re here. I thought you ought to… approve your own existence.”
He makes a noncommittal sound and reaches for it because there is nothing else to do. The cover is familiar enough, Lucy’s photograph of the house caught in late-afternoon light, the lake doing its best impression of an oil painting, but the inside spread stops him.
There it is. Black on cream, in the same unfussy serif as everything else, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary: Resident painter, studio visits by arrangement.
His name, his real name, sits beneath in smaller type. Thomas Ellery. No biography. No “controversial.” No carefully euphemistic “formerly of London.” Just the bare fact of him, tucked between “seasonal supper clubs” and “eco-retreat weekends.”
“Well?” Sophie prompts, half-teasing, half-solemn now that the thing is real. “You’re official. Practically a bullet point.”
He stares a moment longer. The words have the unreal flatness of something printed about a stranger. “Looks… fine,” he manages, the old London varnish of indifference sliding automatically over each syllable.
“Lucy fought me on the comma,” Sophie says, as if this is the important part. “She said it should be an en dash. I told her no one cares. She told me you would. So. En dash.”
He blinks down at the faint horizontal line, absurdly precise. “I don’t,” he says, and hears the lie even as he hands the brochure back. “It’s your brochure.”
“No,” she corrects, though her voice is light. “It’s ours.” Then, without waiting for an answer, she folds the leaflet shut and tucks it under his arm, as if it were a file he has agreed to carry. “You should keep one. For posterity. Or kindling.”
He nods, noncommittal, and escapes with it to the cooler quiet of the back corridor. In his room, later, he sits on the edge of the narrow bed and opens it again. The cream paper is smoother than it looks, a little too glossy for his taste; the inked letters are perfectly sharp.
Resident painter, studio visits by arrangement.
The phrase looks like a label on a museum wall. It is both smaller than what he was and impossibly large: this neat, domestic title for the ruin and retreat of the last decade. He thinks of all the things it does not say: the headlines, the interviews, the accusations, the gallery doors politely closed. Reinvented as six words between a wine-tasting weekend and a yoga retreat.
With a frown at his own absurdity, he runs his thumb once, twice, across the line of text, feeling the faint, almost imperceptible ridge where ink sits on paper. Again. The movement finds a rhythm, back and forth, until the crease whitens and the fibres roughen under the pressure. By the time he stops, the paper has softened, buckled slightly, the printed certainty blurred at the fold.
He closes the brochure, the spine now imperfect, and leaves it on the bedside table. Tomorrow, Sophie will stack its uncreased siblings by the front door for guests to take. This one, maimed into something less definite, will remain here, its existence admitted but not, quite, surrendered.
The initial visitors are handpicked: a local arts fund trustee with sensible shoes and an alert, evaluating gaze; a schoolteacher with two shy sixth-formers who clutch sketchbooks like shields; a quiet couple from Bristol who already own one of his early prints without realising. They tread lightly on the flagstones of the walled garden as Tom, shoulders tense, unlocks the studio door and stands back as if disclaiming responsibility for whatever they might find inside.
The air smells of turpentine and old stone. Canvases lean against the walls in unshowy ranks; the newest work still turned half-away, as if undecided. He talks about light and hedgerows and how the Cotswold beech woods hold blue at the edges of evening, not about exhibitions and scandals and the London years. He demonstrates how he mixes a grey that isn’t dead, how to look for the colour hiding in shadow.
When one of the teenagers, voice cracking with nerves, asks for advice, he hears his own reply, measured, patient, precise, as if it belongs to some other, more functional man who knows how to do this, and remembers being believed.
News of “the Hawthorn Grange painter” starts to seep out sideways, as damp finds brick: an Instagram snap from a charity open day, all bunting and Victoria sponge, with the studio door blurred in the background and tagged, almost as an afterthought; a lifestyle blog burbling about “an unexpected highlight tucked behind weathered walls”; a slender column in a regional arts paper that prints his full surname without quotation marks or whispered caveats.
The first emails follow. Subject lines bloom like unwelcome seedlings: Studio visit?; New work at Hawthorn?; Re: Ellery. So glad you’re back. His chest tightens at each ping. He replies to a few in blunt, courteous sentences, deleting any that mention his London disappearance with an old, practised flick of the finger, as if swatting midges.
At a modest group show in Cheltenham, a trio of new landscapes hangs under his real name for the first time in years. The card is small, the font infuriatingly neutral: Thomas Ellery, Hawthorn Grange series. He arrives late to the opening, collar up, ready to leave if anyone looks twice, if any expression slides from curiosity into recognition.
A couple of former gallery assistants hover at the edges of the room, squinting at the caption, their brows knitting as some old staff-room anecdote half-returns. One middle-aged collector mouths, “Is that, ?” without quite finishing, as though to say the rest aloud would conjure lawyers or headlines. No one approaches. They only stand a little closer to the canvases than usual, as if testing some private theory against the grain of paint, while he plants himself near the emergency exit and counts his own breaths until it is over, thumb worrying the edge of the plastic name sticker he refused to wear.
Back at the estate, he folds into a routine that makes the exposure just barely tolerable. Mornings and afternoons he paints with the studio door propped open, sleeves rolled, the murmur of distant visitors coming and going through the garden gate on days Sophie has scheduled appointments, their footsteps and muffled admiration drifting in like weather. After dusk, when the paths empty and the house lights wink on one by one across the lawns, he walks the perimeter of the bricks in slow, habitual loops. Each circuit is a bargain struck in his head: a little more of his name out there, in exchange for this continuing shelter; a little more risk, in exchange for work that finally, grudgingly, belongs to him again and not to the vanished life that first taught him how to paint and how to disappear.
Miles’s absence lingers most sharply in the small, administrative corners of the house, where nothing dramatic ever happens and therefore everything important does. The spare room where he stayed has been briskly reclaimed for paying guests, neutral duvet reinstated, tasteful throw plumped, wardrobe cleared of the two shirts he’d inexplicably ironed himself, but the indentation his suitcase left on the old rug has yet to spring back. Sophie notices it every time she passes with a fresh set of towels: a rectangular shadow in the pile, like the ghost of a sensible man.
She tells herself it is purely practical, this habit of looking. There is no point, after all, in wishing the rug would forget more quickly than she has.
In the office, his absence is even less romantic and far more irritating. For weeks she had grown used to the quiet, competent presence at the corner of the big oak desk: the low murmur of his voice as he phoned some elusive contact; the way his hand, moving over spreadsheets, made the estate’s finances look temporarily less like a Greek tragedy and more like a solvable puzzle. Now the second chair is pushed back under the table, its wheels no longer scuffing faint tracks into the faded carpet.
Sophie keeps catching herself reaching for “Miles’s folder” on the shelf that no longer exists, hand going unerringly to the gap where it used to sit between Insurance – Misc. and Utilities. Her fingers brush nothing but dust and unhelpfully pure air. Each time, there is a half-second of absurd annoyance at the empty space, as if the man might at least have had the courtesy to leave his paperwork as a sort of consolation prize.
Lucy, when she catches her at it, raises an eyebrow and says, “Phantom limb,” by way of diagnosis, before producing a new, unlabeled lever-arch she bought in town. It stands there, squat and accusingly blank. Sophie writes ESTATE – CURRENT on the spine in firm, block capitals, and files the loose documents inside, but the habit of reaching for the old name takes longer to correct.
The accompanying email, sent separately and time‑stamped some ungodly hour, is shorter and even more formal, as if terrified of straying into anything that could be mistaken for feeling. The envelope, however, contains feeling in abundance: smoothed to within an inch of its life and translated into clauses.
Sophie reads aloud at first, stumbling slightly over the denser sections. “‘Option three would require… substantial alteration to existing governance structures,’” she recites, then pauses. “Translation: everyone has to agree to be sensible at the same time. So that’s out.”
“File that under fantasy,” Lucy says. “After unicorns, before ‘heritage-sensitive spa complex.’”
They fall into a rhythm: Sophie decoding, Lucy annotating in muttered asides. The legalese is all there, without prejudice, subject to, contingent upon, but the odd, unguarded sentence glints through like pebbles in a very carefully laid path. “I am sorry for the distress my conduct caused,” sits alone in its own paragraph, as though even on headed paper it requires space to breathe. Sophie’s eyes snag on it; she hears his voice saying it, imagines the precise, measured tone, as if apology, too, were a professional obligation to be correctly formatted.
The anger goes in waves rather than one gratifying blaze. It spikes hot when Lucy snorts at a particularly delicate phrase, “distress,” as if he’d double‑booked a hen party, not constructed an entire man out of omissions, then ebbs as Sophie hears herself leaping, automatically, to mitigate. “He did say. By the time the teapot is empty and the biscuits are downgraded from “for guests” to “fair game,” the fury has thinned into something far less tidy. Reluctant gratitude, because of course the work is immaculate; a tired, hollow ache for the version of the future he’d briefly sketched in, all competence and companionship without danger.
When they finally close the file, Sophie writes LEGAL OPTIONS on the tab: nothing about him at all. “That’s all he gets,” Lucy decrees, but she doesn’t suggest shoving it to the back of the cupboard, and Sophie, after a moment’s hesitation, leaves it squarely in the front row.
Dylan’s spectral return comes first through the radio in the back corridor, where one of the housekeepers keeps it tuned to a mid‑morning show. A new song slides in between advert jingles. A low, steady guitar line, then a voice they all recognise without needing the DJ’s introduction. The lyrics are oblique, nothing so crass as naming names, but there is a verse about “a house that won’t stop listening” that makes the housekeeper stop polishing the banister and stand very still. When the chorus returns, she reaches out and nudges the volume a notch lower, as if the walls might otherwise lean in. Later, she mentions it to Sophie in passing while they stack glassware, and they both pretend not to wonder whether the “house” is theirs, or how much of them has been quietly recorded in someone else’s key.
A few days later, a plain envelope, hand‑addressed, lands in Jack’s in‑tray with the rest of the post. Inside is a terse, looping note on hotel stationery, “For the roof. No press, please. D.”. And a cheque for a sum generous enough to matter but not quite ostentatious. Jack shows it to Sophie and Lucy without comment; Sophie exhales, half‑laugh, half‑sob, while Lucy mutters something unprintable about guilty consciences and PR instincts dying hard. In the ledger, Jack enters it under “Anonymous Donation (Restricted: Repairs),” adds no further detail, then closes the book with a small, precise tap. A quiet acknowledgment that some connections will remain half‑finished, their traces absorbed into slates and guttering rather than spoken of.
Word spreads slowly, not through glossy brochures but through late‑night searches made on dim laptop screens and conversations conducted in lowered voices over kitchen tables. A blogger who came once for a cousin’s wedding mentions, almost as an afterthought, that the house in the Cotswolds is “good for starting over, or at least admitting you’ve stalled.” Someone else, less poetic, posts on a forum for burnt‑out junior doctors that it is “weirdly tolerable, no forced mindfulness, plenty of toast.” Between those two reviews, and a handful of untagged photos in which the house’s name is carefully omitted, Hawthorn Grange acquires a rumour of usefulness.
Sophie and Lucy, who have neither the budget nor the temperament for sleek wellness branding, lean into that crooked promise. Their brainstorming sessions become a kind of game: how far can you push specificity before you frighten everyone away? They test offerings that sound like private jokes or cries for help: weekends for people who can’t cry at funerals; a two‑night “What Now?” package for the recently promoted and secretly appalled; midweek stays for professionals on “sabbatical” that everyone knows is burnout leave by another name.
The bookings spreadsheet looks chaotic rather than full. Instead of neat blocks labelled CONFERENCE or WEDDING PARTY, there are scattered entries tagged with Lucy’s provisional titles: Untidy Endings / Ghost Jobs / Probably A Divorce. Sophie colours them in with cautious satisfaction, watching isolated islands of certainty expand into something almost resembling a coastline. The gaps between bookings begin, if not to vanish, then at least to narrow into breathable pauses rather than gulfs.
On days when another normal wedding enquiry fails to materialise, she still feels a flicker of panic. Yet when she walks the gravel drive at dusk and sees lights in odd corners of the house (an attic room, the old nursery, the half‑converted barn) she finds herself counting not heads or revenue, but the quiet, stubborn fact that people have chosen to be here precisely because nothing is tidy.
The first grief‑writing retreat is awkward and under‑attended, six people huddled in a draughty drawing room whose grandeur does nothing to disguise the fact that the chairs have been stolen from three different centuries and at least four forgotten conference rooms. Someone has put out too many plates of biscuits, as if sugar could be deployed as emotional ballast. Sophie worries about the numbers; Lucy worries about the font choice on the schedule handouts, glaring at the serifs as though they personally trivialise bereavement.
The sessions themselves proceed in fits and starts: long silences, unexpected laughter, one participant who spends most of the time meticulously aligning pens. Sophie hovers at the edge, refilling teapots and resisting the urge to cheerlead.
On the final afternoon, when the others trail upstairs to pack, one guest lingers in the doorway, coat half on, and asks if they can stay an extra night “because it feels… honest here, somehow.” The pause before that adjective seems to land in the middle of Sophie’s chest. She processes the extra payment with unceremonious efficiency, while Lucy, back in her room with a mug of over‑strong coffee, quietly rewrites the retreat’s online description to make space for that word and everything it implies.
Between these fragile new ventures, the estate still fields enquiries for hen parties and marquee weddings, voices on the phone asking for “Instagrammable backdrops” and weather‑proof contingency plans, preferably involving doves and/or fireworks. Sophie, handset wedged against her shoulder, has learnt to say, “We’re a little more… reflective, these days,” in a tone that weeds out the worst of the inflatable‑tiara brigade. Jack sits with her at the kitchen table, spreadsheets open, pencilling in which weekends they can afford to say no to and which they can’t, playing fiscal chicken with the overdraft. They learn to thread the needle: a burnout retreat one week, a low‑key civil ceremony the next, and in between, short residencies for illustrators, playwrights, and musicians in need of somewhere cheap, anonymous, and faintly forgiving to recalibrate.
As the calendar knots into this uneven pattern, the house’s reputation shifts from whispered scandal to something stranger: a place where people arrive calling themselves consultants, designers, or “between projects,” and leave having shed none of those half‑truths but no longer pretending they’re whole. Thomas agrees, after much sour negotiation, to lead a single, tightly controlled studio visit each month, speaking about process and pigment and the weather while pointedly ignoring questions about his past; the rumour that he is someone becomes, ironically, part of the draw. Miles’s absence, meanwhile, settles into the fabric of the place as one more story they don’t quite explain to guests who ask about “that lawyer who used to be around,” an omission Sophie steps around with practised, economical kindness.
By late evening, after workshops, weddings, or solitary hours in the studio, whoever is in residence drifts, almost by instinct, to the same few spots: the scuffed kitchen table, the lake path, the low wall by the walled garden. Conversations meander, stall, change subject mid‑sentence. No one insists on revelations. Hawthorn Grange becomes less sanctuary than holding pattern: a place where people keep their aliases and unfinished business, provided they will at least admit they are heavy, and let that weight be seen, and briefly, imperfectly, shared.
The wind lifts off the lake, cold enough to ruffle Sophie’s ponytail and snatch at the corners of the laminated welcome packs in her hand. She curls her fingers more tightly around them, the plastic edges biting into her palm, and shifts the folders under one arm, gaze flicking from the new guests to the patched gravel, silently counting how many of the worst potholes they’ll notice before they reach the front steps. Three, if they’re looking down. Two, if they’re distracted by the ivy and the notion of “rustic charm.” She decides she can live with two.
Beside her, Jack thumbs his phone off after checking a spreadsheet one last time, the gesture as much a relinquishing as a habit. The faint glow dies on the cracked screen; whatever the numbers say, they have, for the next forty‑eight hours, officially committed to calling this an “immersive mixed‑discipline retreat” and not “a desperate attempt to plug a gap in the overdraft.” His shoulders drop a fraction, as if accepting that, for once, there is no more finessing to be done before the people actually arrive.
Thomas, hands shoved deep into his paint‑streaked coat, watches the arrivals with the wary interest of someone observing a new subject for a sketch rather than future patrons. His gaze lingers not on their faces but on the way they move: the slight stiffness of the woman in the yoga hoodie, the performative casualness of the camera‑bag man, the way the younger couple unconsciously lean towards each other when they laugh. Sophie knows that look now. It’s the one he wore the first time he agreed to let a group into the studio: like a man opening the door to a room he’s not entirely sure is safe to share.
She shifts her weight, boots scuffing the damp grass at the lake’s edge, and blows out a slow breath that ghosts white in the air. “Right,” she says, mostly to herself, the word hanging between them like the drawing‑room bell before a difficult guest. “Let’s see who they’re pretending to be.” Jack huffs a quiet, resigned laugh. Thomas makes a noncommittal sound, somewhere between a scoff and assent. Together, they start up the slope towards the drive, the laminated packs pressed to Sophie’s side like a shield.
Up by the forecourt, a young couple in bright waterproofs laugh as one of their suitcase wheels jolts to a halt on a loose stone, the bag juddering to a stop so abruptly the girl almost overbalances. The boy rights it with exaggerated gallantry, shooting the house a conspiratorial grin as if the manor itself is playing tricks on them. Sophie files him, without effort, under “enthusiastic, will forgive temperamental plumbing.”
A few paces behind, an older woman in a soft‑faded yoga retreat hoodie pauses mid‑stride, phone already lifted. She angles herself sideways, stepping until one of the larger lime trees neatly eclipses the missing guttering and the worst of the peeling paint. On her screen, Hawthorn Grange becomes a mood‑board of honeyed stone and ivy, the kind of place strangers in cities will save to wish‑lists. Sophie feels a brief, unreasonable flare of gratitude.
Between them, a tall man with a camera bag and a notebook tucked into its side turns in a slow, assessing circle. His gaze ticks off roofline, signage, sight‑lines, staff. Sophie clocks him automatically, possible blogger, low risk, might whinge about Wi‑Fi, and shelves the thought without breaking stride.
Behind the small cluster, Lucy straightens from her work on the sign, flexing her cramped fingers until the brush clatters back into the old jam jar at her feet. A crescent of drying Payne’s grey smudges the heel of her hand as she steps away to appraise the board. The arrow towards “Studios & Retreat Barn” wobbles just enough to look human, the brushstrokes thick, off‑centre and entirely unapologetic, a deliberate affront to the neat, serifed estate crest still bolted to the wall behind her. She tilts the board a fraction, wedges a flat stone against its base so it won’t topple in the next gust, and glances up, catching Sophie’s eye across the grass. For a second, Lucy lifts her chin in a half‑dare, half‑blessing: the branding may be makeshift, but it’s theirs, and it’s honest, and, for now, that will have to be enough.
In the flat, forgiving light, the house offers up its compromises without flinching: sash windows in unequal partnership, one frame crisply white, the other moulting; ivy hacked back in hurried‑looking swathes to expose both mellow stone and a discreet “Private Wing – No Access” sign; fairy lights already strung in hopeful zigzags above the barn doors though it’s barely teatime. Inside, a vacuum cleaner drones, then coughs to silence; a door thuds somewhere along the service corridor; from an open kitchen window drift the clatter of pans and the faint, reassuring smell of onions easing into butter. It feels less like a stately home and more like some large, stubborn creature mid‑moult, untidy, vulnerable, and determinedly still alive.
The thin call of the distant train horn threads through the air, followed a heartbeat later by the insistent ring of the main house phone, that particular double‑chime of the outside line reserved now mostly for bookings and, very occasionally, trouble. Sophie lets out a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding, squares her shoulders so the welcome packs don’t slip, and turns uphill. Gravel crunches under her boots as Jack falls into step on her left, tucking his phone away with the care of a man reshelving a problem for later, and Thomas on her right, muttering something caustic about “new exhibits” that almost, but not quite, hides the grudging note of responsibility. Lucy’s sign creaks faintly behind them; ahead, the house waits, unapologetically imperfect. They start up the slope together towards the manor and the ringing call, no script in place beyond the bare, stubborn agreement that whatever comes next, they will face it as a shared endeavour rather than a set of separate, private performances.