Page 116 of Just One Little Bargain

Julian Ashford is prompt to the minute. I decide to take that as a good omen, because I’m currently taking everything as an omen and have been since six this morning.

I sent Milo into town with a grocery list twice as long as it needed to be. Half of it we don’t need until next week. I wrote ‘sourdough starter, ask Caroline’ at the bottom purely to buy an extra twenty minutes, because his excitement had reached a pitch I could no longer be in the same room as. He’d been vibrating with it since breakfast, telling me the feature was going to change everything, that Julian would take one look and love this place, that I deserved this. The words kept hitting the same raw spot until I wanted to climb out of my skin. I couldn’t hold my own nerves and his hope simultaneously. And if it all goes sideways in the next hour, I’d rather fall apart alone and pull myself together before he gets back.

So I’m alone on the porch when the tires crunch up the gravel.

It’s a black town car, waxed to a shine, and it rolls up my drive like it’s done me a favor by coming. A driver gets out and opens the rear door, and I spend a full three seconds wondering whether I’m meant to tip him.

Julian climbs out in a charcoal suit, wearing sunglasses, which is a bold move under an October sky that’s been threatening drizzle since dawn. It makes no sense, and I don’t think he cares. He wears the wrongness of it without noticing, and suddenly I’m aware of every wrinkle I failed to steam out of my lavender dress.

“Ms. Feywin.” Julian grins at me. “Thank you for having me.”

“Evie, please.” I step back to let him in. Everything hinges on the next four seconds, and I’d very much like to know how they’re going.

The entry hall does its quiet work. The floorboards are original heart pine, worn pale down the center where a hundred and twenty years of feet have walked the same line to the parlor. They were under three layers of ugly varnish when I bought the place, and I spent two weeks bringing them back because some things deserve more patience than money. The staircase creaks on the fourth step. It always has. I stopped meaning to fix it and started leaving it, because guests learn it within a day and then it becomes theirs—a thing the house says to them every night. That’s the part I’m proud of, more than the fresh paint or the booking numbers, or the stupidly expensive linen sheets. The guestbook slumps on the hall table, the leather cracked at the spine, so fat with other people’s gratitude that I’ve had to loop a ribbon around it to keep it shut.

His expression settles into quiet approval, and I let myself breathe.

And then I make the mistake of trying to see it through his eyes. The wallpaper is a botanical print I chose myself and love with my whole heart. There’s the lamp with a fringe I’ve never had the nerve to replace. For one lurching moment, I wonder if a man who steps out of a Bentley walks into this room and thinks cluttered and fussy, whether antique reads, to a person like him, as a nice word for someone else’s leftovers.

There’s a small stain on the runner near the base of the stairs. I take one casual step sideways, park my foot on top of it, and commit to standing there for the foreseeable future.

I walk him through the history the way I’ve walked a hundred guests through it, except this time every word matters, so I slow down. I tell him about the couple who ran it for forty years before me, and how they sold it to me instead of three developers because I’d scrubbed these floors as a teenager and they trusted me not to gut the soul out of the place. The sage green paint came from a scrap I peeled out from under a century of overpaint in the attic, which sounds charming now and felt significantly less charming while I was standing on a ladder with dust in my bra.

The foxgloves out front are the reason for the name, even though right now the beds are mostly brown stalks and seed heads. In June, they’re taller than me, pink and purple bells crowding the path like they own it. I leave the dead ones standing on purpose so the flowers can scatter themselves and come back wild, because half the trick with this place is knowing what to fix and what to leave alone.

“You’ve kept the bones,” he says, running one hand along the banister. “Most people renovate the character right out of a house.”

“The charm is the only reason guests forgive the plumbing.”

He laughs, and I risk believing this is going well.

The Bartletts are in the parlor when we pass, mid-crossword. They look up at Julian with the frank curiosity of two people who consider every guest in the house their personal business. Mr. Bartlett peers over his glasses. “New arrival?”

“Julian Ashford,” he says before I can. “I’m doing a piece on the inn.”

That’s all it takes.

Mrs. Bartlett puts down her tea. “I hope you’re planning to say every good thing there is, because there isn’t a bad one to find. We’ve stayed in grand hotels, you know. Marble everything. I didn’t sleep a wink in a single place. But upstairs, I sleep like the dead.”

Which is not the endorsement she thinks it is.

“That’s very kind,” I manage.

“It isn’t kindness, dear, it’s a review.” She turns to Julian. “Write that down.”

“There’s no need to—”

“There’s every need,” Mr. Bartlett says, still doing his crossword. “Six letters. Something you can’t get anymore.” He taps his pen. “Decent. That’s what she is.”

I’d like to lie down on the heart pine floor now.

Mrs. Bartlett nods. “And she bakes the entire breakfast herself. Every morning.”

“I feel I should state,” I say to Julian, “for the honor of the establishment, that I didn’t pay them to do this.”

His mouth curves. “That’s exactly what someone running an arrangement would say.”

“It’s also what someone not running one would say. That’s the tragedy of my situation.”