‘Hah.’ He laughs but his face shows he has no idea if I’m being sarcastic or not. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve totally thrown me. I expected the person who’d won the auction to be a property developer intending to flatten the place and build something new, not someone turning up and intending to run it as a tree farm again. And you’re seriously telling me that you’re not in the industry and you haven’t got any experience? Do you have any idea how much of a state this place is in? What on earth were you thinking?’

‘I was a little bit drunk, okay?’ I snap, annoyance creeping in again. ‘What’s it got to do with you whether I have any experience or not? I’d just caught my boyfriend cheating with half the office and I wanted to change my life. All right, it needs a bit of work, but I wanted a challenge. What’s wrong with that?’

‘You were drunk?’ His voice goes high with indignation. ‘Didn’t you even come for a viewing?’

‘Look, with hindsight, I realise that not viewing it first was a bad decision, but it was on the spur of the moment; the auction was ending and I had to decide then and there whether to go for it or not. There was another bidder and I didn’t even realise how much I wanted it until I put the very last bid in with four seconds to go.’

‘Four seconds.’ He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘How do you even do that?’

‘I buy a lot of shoes on eBay?’ I offer, hoping it might make him laugh but no such luck.

‘You bought a Christmas tree farm like it was a pair of shoes?’

‘No, I used my experience of buying shoes to win an auction. Not that it has anything to do with you, obviously.’

His eyebrows rise and he has the decency to look a bit guilty. ‘No, of course it doesn’t. I was only trying to figure out how insane my new neighbour might be.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t accost a complete stranger on the road and start telling them what they’re allowed to do with their money and make judgements about how they intend to run their property.’

‘People around here are going to comment, you may as well get used to it.’ He lets out an annoyed huff. ‘You bought a Christmas tree farm, with no experience of the industry, because you were drunk? What did you expect? Did you think you could stand back and watch the trees fell themselves, net themselves, and toddle off to market on their own?’

‘Maybe. Well, apart from the toddling bit. If Christmas trees were going to move independently, it would be more of a leaping sprint, don’t you think?’