Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
I let myself feel his gaze on the back of my hand on the fabric before I take in a deep breath and pull the curtain the rest of the way.
Chapter
Five
I’ve decided I deserve a bath after all the commotion. I get the water nice and hot, the pipes moaning and shaking as I do, as if I’m sharing this cottage with a horny couple, then shake in some of the thyme salt. I know it’s meant for the windowsills, but having it in the water can’t hurt. If anything, maybe it will ease my aching muscles. I have a bunch of bath stuff coming in a box that Maddie said she shipped for me, stuff I couldn’t fit on the plane, but who knows when that will show up at my door.
Once it’s ready, I step inside, nearly eating shit as my foot slips. No wonder Effie had to add the shower, I think. I can’t imagine doing this old and arthritic.
I manage to steady myself then carefully lower myself into the water.
It feels heavenly. I make a note of things that might make the space feel more like mine—whether I last a year or not, I have to start thinking of this place as mine for now or it will never feel like home—such as getting a couple of house plants, maybe installing wood shelving along the wall for fancy salt jars and dried flowers and candles to give it that fashionably-rustic look, when suddenly the skin at the back of my neck begins to prickle.
The bathwater turns ice cold.
Someone is watching me.
Right now.
I can feel it. Feel them.
Feel eyes at the window behind me.
I suck in my breath, pins and needles igniting my nerves and cascading down my back in shivers.
Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look, I tell myself.
But I have to.
I quickly whirl around in the bathtub, water splashing, expecting to see someone standing at the window. But I don’t. There are only patches of rich blue sky coming in through the clouds, that dusky color it gets as it heads toward evening.
I make a mental note to close the curtains next time. Sure, one wouldn’t expect to need privacy out here in the middle of nowhere, but then again, I’ve had more than a few visitors already.
Once I catch my breath, I decide bath time is over. The water isn’t as cold as I thought, but it’s tepid at the very least, and no longer enjoyable. I get out carefully so I don’t end up in a naked heap on the floor, quickly close the curtains, and then hop in the shower to wash my hair and scrub off the bathwater.
By the time I’ve slipped into my comfy clothes—a bralette, a burgundy sweater and sweatpants—and dried my hair, I feel a lot better, and the creepiness of bathtime seems like a distant memory.
Now would be a good time to figure out how to relax.
Effie didn’t have a television set in the house—though the solicitor told me the hookup for cable was there, or I could do what everyone else does and just use the internet to stream things—but my mind is too scattered to attempt to read that airport paperback. I sit down in the armchair in the sitting room for a moment and flip through a stack of aging magazines, mainly Town & Country from the ‘90s, before picking up my phone and going online. I scroll idly through my social media accounts, all neglected since the divorce. I married Ryan young, but we started dating in high school, so a lot of my friends came through that relationship. When our marriage ended and Ryan was proven to be a cheating rat bastard, it turned out those friends were fair-weather and sided with the rat bastard. Call me petty but I blocked them all, one by one.
Of course, I’ve never been quick to make friends in general—something about being both neurodivergent and having a chronic illness makes people put you in either the “no-fun” or “too much” zones—so I haven’t really filled my well in the time since. Even as I scroll through my feeds, there’s a lot of accounts, but few people I actually know well. There’s Maddie, of course, and my brother, I guess. There’s Trisha, whose couch I stayed on for a month before her boyfriend started hitting on me and I left. I probably should have told Trisha, but she knew I wasn’t a fan of his to begin with—and with good reason! And Kayleigh from college who would have let me stay in her basement suite with her and her wonderful wife Callie (yes, their names get confusing) except the landlord wouldn’t let that happen, and he was looking for any excuse to evict them.
I keep scrolling until I see my mother on Rosemary Beach with my stepfather Frank, smiling at the camera like nothing is ever amiss, as if her daughter hasn’t been in Scotland for a week now with nary a call or a text or email to check in on her.