Page 91 of The Clifftop Cottage

She wanted it all to be fixed. Wrapped up in a neat little bow. But life wasn’t like that. Some people left, and some stayed, and some just cleaned the same living room every day, hoping something would shift.

Dusty lifted his head at a passing car, then let it drop again.

It wasn’t just Leah waiting.

Waiting for someone else to arrive.

Leah leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Tomorrow would come. It always did.

Tonight, she would sit in the quiet and let it be hers.

Without realising, her hand reached for her phone again.

Then stopped.

She would take action tomorrow. Whatever that may be.

30

Gabriel had spent the morning with Chep, walking the long field edges and checking the fences, though he knew damn well they hadn’t moved. He couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t stop thinking.

That kiss.

It haunted him. Not because it had happened, but because it hadn’t gone anywhere. Just a silence that followed. The way Erica had pulled back. She hadn’t recoiled, exactly, but … she hadn’t leaned in either.

And now it worked at him.

It wasn’t just rejection. It was the fact he’d hoped, that he’d let himself believe that maybe this connection – this quiet thread between them – was mutual. That he wasn’t just fabricating meaning out of loneliness.

But maybe that’s all it was.

Loneliness.

A hollow ache. One that stretched back too far – past the long nights and the empty kitchen table, all the way to when he was a teenager and his parents’ deaths left the house echoing.

He was nearing the age they’d been when they died. Still some years off but close enough to feel the shadow of it. A line in the distance he couldn’t quite see beyond.

He scrubbed a hand over his face. He needed to clear his head.

A swim, maybe the fairy pool in the woods. Cold enough to shock his body out of its spiral.

But the thought stalled.

This time of year. Days after Halloween. A bad idea during Samhain.

Old stories stirred whether he liked it or not. The pool might be just water – but not now. Not at this turn in the year, when the veil was said to thin. When mischief wasn’t always harmless.

He knew it was daft, he was a grown man.

Still, superstition was stitched into him. He didn’t laugh it off the way others did. It lived under the skin.

So instead, he walked.

Down the cobbled street, cap pulled low, he nodded to a neighbour carrying shopping and didn’t stop. He passed the harbour edge and cut through the tight, twisting veins of Fisher Town – stone houses pressed close, chimneys sharp against the pale sky. Doors painted in worn blues and greens. Pots of lavender on ledges, washing lines strung overhead like tired bunting.

Chep padded beside him, alert.