It should provide me.

I doom-scrolled through several searches, pinning the odd thing here and there to a board but ultimately coming up short every single time. I looked at hundreds of pictures, all of which should have given me an idea, but I was completely and utterly stumped.

I huffed and slumped forwards. I was going to fail if I couldn’t do this. Maybe if I spent less time trying to fix everyone else’s love life and didn’t walk about the gardens daydreaming, I might get somewhere.

This was a major unit in this course, and I had to nail it.

Had to.

This, this, was what I wanted to do with my life. And there was no way I’d get accepted into the actual garden design course if I couldn’t design a quarter-acre patch of flat ground.

My phone pinged obnoxiously from somewhere on my desk, and I shuddered. When had I taken that off silent? I reached for it, moving open files and books about until I found it under a Walkers crisps packet, half-buried in a Kit-Kat wrapper with chocolate smeared on the back of the case. I licked it off and then checked the notification. It was a text from one of my best friends, Adelaide, and I pressed my thumb against the screen to unlock my phone so I could see what she wanted.

ADELAIDE: I’m bored. What are you doing?

I should have known.

ME: Trying to work on this assignment. You?

ADELAIDE: Texting you. Fancy meeting me and Eva for lunch?

Eva was short for Evangeline, her twin sister. For as long as I could remember the three of us had been largely inseparable with only time and adult responsibilities putting some kind of distance between us. Neither Adelaide nor Evangeline held titles, but since their grandparents and parents did, we moved in the same circles.

Their grandfather was the Duke of Leicester, and after their mum, Lady Victoria Montgomery, moved to Bath for university, she decided to stay, fell in love, and that was that.

As it happened, Lady Vic—as she insisted everyone call her after a couple of brandies—had been best friends with my mum. Their heritage gave them the key to the snobbish upper-class society of the aristocracy, despite the fact she’d married a—gasp—commoner.

If you asked me, their dad was the best guy in the country.

After my own, of course.

ME: Sure. I’m not getting anywhere here. When and where?

ADELAIDE: Booked a table for three at Barty’s in half an hour.

Ugh, my favourite place.

ME: I’ll see you there.

***

Lord Bartholomew’s, known fondly as Barty’s to the locals, was the premier restaurant in our sleepy countryside village. It was supposedly named for some bard in the seventeenth century who roamed the southwest, met Elizabeth I, and made her fall in love with him.

Naturally, he was in none of the history books, but if there was anything Southwest England loved, it was a bit of local lore, whether it was true or not.