Page 84 of The Key to the Last House Before the Sea

‘How I feel won’t change.’

‘We’ll see,’ said his father, patting his arm as though he was a difficult toddler. ‘We’ll see when you’ve had time to consider all that you’ve got to lose. I’ll expect to see you back at work in a week’s time.’

With that, he swept out of the cottage, banging the door behind him, and a couple of minutes later his car screeched off into the distance.

Gabriel walked to the sea and sat on the grass. This place was so peaceful but it would soon echo to the growl of diggers tearing up the land.

He closed his eyes and went over the conversation with his father. Was his father right, that being here had skewed his thinking, and life would get back to normal once he spent more time in London?

He rubbed his temples, trying to ward off a brewing headache. His father was a difficult man, but Gabriel didn’t want to cause a family schism. And yet he felt a pull to this place and to Nessa, though she believed he’d betrayed her to his father. That hurt more than anything.

Gabriel didn’t feel like the same man who’d pitched up at Driftwood House five weeks ago. Getting to know Nessa had changed him. He’d come to care about her deeply and had planned to talk to her today about their kiss. To see if it truly had meant nothing to her or if, like him, she’d been lying. He believed – he hoped – that she had been. But she’d want nothing to do with him now. His father had seen to that.

He opened his eyes and stared at the cottage that he’d helped Nessa to start renovating.

‘Sorry,’ he said out loud as a salt-laced breeze ruffled his hair.

He was sorry that this cottage and this Ghost Village and all of its history would be erased. And so very sorry that any possible future with Nessa had disappeared. Without her, he didn’t have the courage to upend his whole life.

‘All I have left are my work and my family,’ he murmured, his words lost in the gentle whoosh of the waves. And leaving it all behind to sell art, to be with Nessa, was nothing but a dream.

So he’d take a week off to lick his wounds and then he’d go back to work and his real life. He’d throw himself into being the man his family wanted him to be. And his time in Heaven’s Cove, and Nessa, would gradually lose their defined edges in his memory and become just one more dream that would fade away.

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