Her gaze landed on the pile of boxes she had stacked in the corner of the sitting room. She had been avoiding them since she arrived because she wasn’t ready to sort through the last of Hilda’s personal belongings. But it was a job that had to be donebefore the cottage was put on the market. So she might as well get it over with.
The first box yielded nothing but old sweaters and scarves that smelled as if they needed a good airing. Meryl folded them efficiently, placing them in the donate pile. The repetitive rhythm helped, though she still caught herself glancing toward the window more than once, half-expecting to hear Spencer’s truck returning.
“Stop it,” she told herself. “He’s not coming back today.”
The second box held random kitchen items: mismatched mugs, wooden spoons with handles worn smooth, recipe cards yellowed at the edges. She spent a few minutes going through the recipes and then set them aside, determined to cook some of them once the kitchen was properly fixed in honor of Hilda. Maybe she could invite Frank over for a meal as a way of saying thank you.
The third box was heavier, filled with books and papers. Old novels with cracked spines. A gardening encyclopedia. Seed catalogs from years past. She worked steadily, ignoring the way the house seemed to watch her now, the silence somehow heavier rather than empty.
At the bottom of the box, her fingers touched something different. A leather-bound book, worn soft at the corners.
She pulled it free and opened it carefully.
It was not exactly a journal. More a mixture of sketchbook, planner, and scrapbook, layered together in a way that felt intensely personal.
Hilda’s handwriting flowed across the pages in neat, decisive lines. But what caught Meryl first were the drawings. Page after page of Pine Cottage, sketched from different angles and in different seasons. The porch in summer, with climbing rosesspilling over the rail. The sitting room with the window seat intact, an open book lying across its cushion. The kitchen with bunches of herbs hanging from the beams.
Meryl turned the pages more slowly.
These were not casual doodles. They were plans. Intentions. Notes on what had been done and what still needed doing. Some pages were marked completed in Hilda’s firm hand. Others held measurements, paint colors, lists of materials, and reminders to herself.
A pressed rose petal slipped from between two pages, its color faded to dusty pink.
Beneath it, a note in Hilda’s hand:
Duchess of Wellington. Third summer. Finally thriving.
The rose by the gate.
Meryl kept turning pages. Here was the window seat, drawn in careful detail with measurements written in the margin. A date in the corner. Installed May 1978. And below it, in a different ink, added later:
Best decision I ever made. Perfect for winter afternoons.
Something tightened in Meryl’s throat.
There were sketches of the garden beds, notes about which plants had thrived and which had not, little fabric swatches taped beside possible paint colors, and shelving drawn precisely to fit into the alcove by the fireplace.
This was a place Hilda had chosen. Shaped. Loved on purpose.
Meryl traced one sketch of the porch railing with the pad of her finger, the same railing that had come away in her hand that first day. Beside it, Hilda had written:
Finally, fixed properly. Worth the extra cost for the joinery.
She turned another page and found more notes tucked between the sketches. Not letters. Just the sort of practical scraps someone left inside a working journal because they meant to come back to them.
Meryl’s fingers tightened on the edge of the paper.
Her mother’s voice came back to her at once, sharp and familiar as ever.
Don’t waste time making it yours. It’ll only make it harder to move on.
How many times had they moved? Twelve? Fifteen? She had stopped counting somewhere around high school. Flats, rented houses, borrowed rooms. Nothing on the walls. Nothing planted in the ground. Nothing that would hurt to leave behind.
Places are just places, her mother used to say. It’s the road that matters. Where you’ve come from and where you are going to.
Meryl looked down at Hilda’s journal again. At the measurements, the lists, the penciled revisions, the small, stubborn notes in the margins. The road had ended, in many ways, for Hilda when she moved to Pine Cottage and made it her own.
Meryl closed the journal and looked around the sitting room with fresh eyes. At the half-stripped walls. The cleaned hearth. The battered window seat, almost beyond repair. She thought of the color schemes she’d chosen for the living room as she stripped the wallpaper. The colors were close to those Hilda had noted in her journal.
