‘That’s all I ask,’ said Ned. He left then, evidently tired out by so much conversation. Elle heard him hum a few bars from a song, (no doubt a Beatles number) which indicated exactly how he was feeling, but she couldn’t pinpoint which one it was. While playing ‘guess the song’ used to be fun growing up, it had got old over the years and unlike her mother, Elle had long given up trying.

‘Well,’ Penny said, turning to her sister. ‘Looks like you and I have become hoteliers.’

‘Seems that way, yes.’ Elle got up and stood at the windows, looking out at the grey, roiling sea below. She sighed.

Keeping the hotel, or trying to whip it into shape wasn’t something she’d envisioned during her short leave of absence for the funeral. She would have to ring her boss, tell the architects firm that she would be off the grid for a little while longer, at least until she and Penny could get some kind of basic plan of action going for the hotel in the medium term. They would arrange some basic repairs, come up with some kind of marketing plan to try and bring in some more business, examine the staffing situation . . .

This was going to be a challenge. She couldn’t even begin to fathom how utterly unrealistic it was.

Her father was right, Elle might know what kind of standards a place like this should run to, but she didn’t have the foggiest about how to actually make those things happen.

Chapter 4

She and Penny decided to go into town to talk things over later that evening. Elle felt like they needed to get away from the hotel to discuss it clearly, without emotion or nostalgia getting in the way.

Ned didn’t seem to care what they did, as long as they didn’t sell or tear the place apart completely so he was happy to leave them to it.

In the meantime, Elle officially signed in to one of the empty guest rooms (only about a third of the hotel’s twelve rooms were booked).

For a start, she’d advised Penny to get someone else in to do the cleaning and general duties as she certainly wasn’t volunteering to take up that mantle. She imagined her mother laughing at this. It was a long-held joke in the family that Elle had a distaste for getting into the thick of things.

That’s what she loved about being an architect. She was able to attend to the most minute detail as well as the grandest, sweeping, most impossible plans, all without getting her hands dirty. She didn’t want to deal with the nagging realities, the hold-ups and the messiness. She guessed this was also what made her so bad at relationships. She never wanted to deal with the day-to-day humdrum and at the first sight of trouble, she fled like a startled cat.