Ash Cottage: Part 4

 Alice sat at her desk in the spare room, her typewriter waiting patiently before her. Her fingers hovered over the keys, poised for a word that refused to arrive.

The afternoon light filtered through the window, gentle and warm rather than harsh. Dust drifted lazily in its glow. Boxes stood stacked on either side of the desk like silent sentries, their contents still waiting to be unpacked. The door behind her remained open, the rest of the cottage breathing quietly beyond it.

She looked around the room. The walls were painted a soft orange that caught the sun beautifully. Beyond the glass, the ash trees swayed, their leaves whispering in the breeze. Birds sang somewhere unseen.

It was perfect.

And still, the words would not come.

It is not as though you need the money, a voice inside her murmured.

She did, though. Not desperately, not yet. But enough. She needed another book. Another mystery. Something to follow the success of the first two. Something to prove the first had not been luck. Something to keep the bills paid and the publisher interested.

She just could not find it.

It was not the genre. She loved writing mysteries. Loved building puzzles piece by piece, hiding clues in plain sight. There was something almost meditative about constructing a crime and then solving it. A little macabre perhaps, but it brought her peace.

Her first book, set in the Yorkshire Dales, had drawn unexpected success. It had taken her by surprise. A publisher had snapped it up quickly, and in a rush of momentum she had delivered a second, which sold even better.

But it had been too long since then. Too much life in between. Too much disruption.

She needed to begin.

But her imagination felt absent. On leave. She could not dream the way she once had. No conundrums formed in her mind. No tangled motives. No red herrings. Nothing to challenge a reader. Nothing to untangle.

Nothing.

She pressed her palms to her eyes and sobbed.

The trauma still seeped through her like water through cracked stone. Sorrow tangled with anger until she could no longer tell one from the other.

She had known loss before. Her mother and father had both been ill. It had been cruel, but inevitable. Her anger then had been aimed at the world itself, at the unfairness of being left alone so young.

This was different.

This grief had faces.

People who were still here. Mostly. People who had taken someone precious from her. People who had shattered her life so completely that she had run from it. Run here.

She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her thick cardigan. Her black hair clung damply to her cheeks, tangling against her glasses.

She had learned to live around the wound her parents had left behind. Learned that some pain did not vanish, it simply softened at the edges. There had been nothing she could have done for them.

But this.

This felt unfinished. Raw. Inescapable.

She could not heal around it. Could not think around it. Could not write through it.

She reached for her glass and found it empty. The pitcher beside it was dry as well.

Only then did she notice her thirst.

She stood, lifting the pitcher, and stepped into the hallway. She passed the small bathroom, the leaning towers of unpacked boxes, the quiet hush of a house still unfamiliar. In the kitchen she set the pitcher in the sink and turned on the tap.

Water rushed out, clear and steady. She watched it rise, letting her thoughts drift. Letting the ache wash through her instead of resisting it.

Then it came.

Smash.

The sound cracked through the cottage like a gunshot.

Alice froze.

The tap still ran. Water overflowed the pitcher and spilled into the sink, unnoticed.

Another second passed before her mind caught up.

The study.

She turned off the tap and left the pitcher where it stood, heart hammering now. She hurried down the hallway, slippers whispering over the wooden floorboards.

She almost stepped on the glass.

Shards glittered across the hall, scattered wildly as though thrown. She stopped just in time, staring down at the broken pieces, her pulse thudding in her ears.

Slowly, she lifted her gaze to the desk. Her glass had been there.

She stared at the debris, trying to reason it through. It had not been near the edge. There had been no draught. No open windows. No tremor beneath her feet.

How did the glass get there?

The cottage was silent again. Too silent.

Alice stood very still, her breath shallow.

And somewhere deep within her, beneath the grief and the fear and the exhaustion, something shifted.

A voice, quieter this time, almost curious.

Perhaps a mystery had found her after all.