When You Walked Back Into My Life by Hilary Boyd

Author:Hilary Boyd
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Romance, General, Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9781782060949
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-10-09T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

9 November

The terraced house stood just across the road from the River Ness. They had taken a taxi from the station in the pouring rain, and as Flora opened the door of the cab, the wind tore at it, snapping it back. She struggled out, dragging her backpack after her, stiff from being bent up in the short bunk on the sleeper. Fin had insisted on sharing with her and neither of them had got any sleep. She looked over at his late father’s house. From the outside, it was an attractive red-brick terrace, with a white gable window.

No one had lived in it since Angus McCrea had died the year before. Only Jimmy, the man next door, who was using Angus’s ancient Vauxhall, dropped in to check once in a while and remove the piles of junk mail from the mat to the hall table. As they opened the front door they were met by an overpowering smell of mustiness and damp. Flora shuddered.

‘Better get the heating going,’ Fin said, and went off to the kitchen to light the gas boiler while Flora peered cautiously into the sitting room. As she remembered it from the few occasions she’d visited with Fin, it had been a cosy room, tidy and warm, filled with the reassuring presence of Angus McCrea. She could recall the tea tray and the battered Scottish shortbread tin full of digestive biscuits; the knitted, striped tea cosy over the brown teapot; the pile of local papers, the scattering of yellowing Ordanance Survey maps – collecting them had been his hobby. Now, stripped of Angus’s personality, the room seemed sad – and a little creepy. She wandered in and sat gingerly on the brown sofa, trying to imagine living here with Fin. In her mind she stripped the faded wallpaper and painted the walls a light, clean colour – white, pale blue? – took up the swirly-patterned beige carpet, replaced the furniture with her own … But it wasn’t happening. He said we don’t have to live here, she thought, and prayed he had meant it.

That night, after a supper of fish and chips, cramped together in one of the single beds in the spare room, under the faded blue floral sheets – probably bought in the Seventies and smelling stale and dusty – neither of them could sleep.

‘What are you thinking?’ Fin asked. The river, swollen with the rain, sounded loud outside the window.

The house had warmed up slightly – physically at least – during the day. But the atmosphere was still cold and dead, as if the four walls were resisting them, reluctant to let go of the previous occupant and allow them to be at home there. Flora snuggled closer to Fin.

‘I’m thinking I don’t like being here,’ she said. All day she’d pretended it was fine, that it only needed a small amount of polishing up and clearing away to make it habitable. She didn’t want to hurt Fin’s feelings about his father’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.