Chapter 1 The Things We Put Off

She stopped typing.

A low, mechanical whirr rose from somewhere beneath the keyboard, followed by a sharp little click. The screen flickered once, recovered, and continued displaying the paragraph she'd been working on for the last ten minutes.

Clarissa stared at it.

"Don't."

The laptop hummed.

"I'm serious. Not today."

She gave the machine a cautious tap beside the trackpad, as though it were a particularly temperamental animal that might respond to gentle handling. The fan settled into its usual uneven drone.

She exhaled.

"Good boy."

It was a ridiculous thing to say to a computer, but then she'd been working alone for nearly eight hours and was beginning to suspect that her laptop was the only thing in her life that needed her as much as she needed it.

She glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen.

4:17 p.m.

Three hours and forty-three minutes until the deadline.

Plenty of time.

Assuming, of course, that the laptop didn't decide to spontaneously combust.

Clarissa dragged a hand through her hair, dislodging several strands from the loose knot she'd twisted it into that morning. Her coffee had gone cold beside her keyboard. Again. She'd made it with the intention of drinking it while it was still hot, but the article had taken longer than expected, and now there was a thin skin forming across the surface.

She considered making another.

Then remembered she'd already used the last of the milk.

The coffee would have to do.

She lifted the mug, took a cautious sip, and immediately regretted it.

"Lovely."

Outside, rain crept down the window in thin, crooked lines. The afternoon had settled into that particular shade of grey that made it difficult to tell whether it was getting darker or whether the sun had simply given up.

Her flat wasn't much to look at, but it was hers. Well, hers in the sense that she paid a landlord a frankly unreasonable amount of money every month for the privilege of occupying it.

One bedroom, one bathroom, a narrow kitchen and a living room that doubled as her office. The furniture was an assortment of things she'd acquired over the years, some bought second-hand, others rescued from friends who'd been moving house. Her desk was an old dining table with a slight wobble in one leg, corrected by folding a piece of cardboard beneath it.

The sofa had seen better days.

So had Clarissa, if she was being honest.

Still, she liked the place. It was small, but comfortable, and she had managed to make it feel like somewhere a person might actually want to come home to. There were books on the shelves, a few framed prints on the walls and a collection of houseplants, three of which were thriving despite her questionable approach to watering.

She had always been good at making things last.

It was a useful skill when money was scarce.

Her phone vibrated beside the mug.

Clarissa glanced at it.

An email notification.

Another one.

She picked it up, expecting the usual collection of promotional rubbish and newsletters she'd never remember subscribing to.

Instead, there was a message from Martin at Hensley Digital.

Hi Clarissa,

Just checking we're still on track for the revised article. Client is keen to get this live tomorrow morning, so would really appreciate having it tonight if possible.

She stared at the message.

The article was due tonight. That was the arrangement. It had been the arrangement since he'd first commissioned it.

She typed a reply.

Hi Martin,

Yes, absolutely. You'll have it before the agreed deadline.

She paused, then added a smiley face.

It looked unnecessarily cheerful.

She deleted it.

She sent the message.

There. Professional. Reliable. Entirely unbothered.

She returned to her laptop and looked at the half-finished article.

Five Affordable Ways to Transform Your Home Office.

She almost laughed.

The irony wasn't lost on her.

Her home office consisted of a second-hand desk, a dining chair that had begun to creak ominously whenever she leaned back, and a laptop that sounded like it was trying to digest itself.

Perhaps she should include that as a sixth suggestion.

Invest in a computer that doesn't threaten to die every time you open a new browser tab.

She smiled to herself and began typing.

The letterbox clattered.

Clarissa glanced towards the front door.

A moment later came the familiar scraping sound of envelopes landing on the hallway floor.

She sighed.

Mail.

Wonderful.

There was something deeply unpleasant about the sound of post arriving when you were already worried about money. It was never anything exciting. Nobody sent cheques anymore, and nobody wrote letters unless they were trying to sell you something or inform you that you owed them money.

She could deal with it later.

Whatever it was, it wasn't going anywhere.

Clarissa looked back at the screen.

"Deadline first. Stress later."

She said it aloud, nodding once as though she'd just delivered a particularly profound piece of wisdom.

Then she carried on working.

By seven minutes past eight, the article was finished.

Clarissa read through it twice, corrected a handful of spelling mistakes, rearranged a paragraph and spent an unreasonable amount of time deciding whether the word cosy looked better than comfortable.

It didn't.

She changed it back.

Finally satisfied, she attached the document to an email and sent it to Martin.

A small sense of triumph settled over her.

One deadline met.

One client kept happy.

One more invoice to add to the collection of money she was hoping would eventually find its way into her bank account.

She leaned back, stretching her arms above her head until her shoulders cracked.

"Right. That's enough of that."

Her stomach gave an unceremonious growl.

She looked towards the kitchen.

There was half a packet of pasta in the cupboard, some tinned tomatoes and a questionable amount of cheese. It wasn't particularly inspiring, but it was food.

She could manage.

Before that, though, there was the matter of the post.

Clarissa wandered into the hallway and looked down at the envelopes.

Three.

A supermarket leaflet, a brown envelope from her electricity provider and a larger white one bearing the name of a solicitors' firm.

She frowned.

The supermarket leaflet went straight into the recycling.

The electricity bill she picked up with two fingers, turning it over as though the back might contain better news than the front.

It didn't.

She placed it on the little table beside the door.

"Tomorrow," she muttered.

Then she picked up the white envelope.

Thick paper. Her full name printed neatly across the front. No handwritten address, no advertising nonsense.

Just:

Miss Clarissa Mayfield

She turned it over.

The sender's name was unfamiliar.

A firm of solicitors in a city she hadn't visited in years.

For a moment she simply stood there, staring at the return address.

Then something in her stomach tightened.

She knew that city.

She hadn't thought about it properly in a long time, but she knew it.

And she knew the name of the man who had once lived there.

Her grandfather.

Clarissa carried the envelope into the living room, sitting down on the sofa before opening it.

The letter inside was printed on heavy cream paper. There were several paragraphs of formal language, the sort that seemed deliberately designed to make ordinary people feel stupid.

She read the first few lines.

Then read them again.

We are writing to inform you of the recent passing of your grandfather, Mr Arthur Mayfield.

Her eyes stopped.

For several seconds, the words seemed to lose their meaning.

Arthur.

Grandad Arthur.

She lowered the paper slightly.

"Oh."

It was a small sound. Barely more than a breath.

She read on.

The letter explained that Arthur had passed away approximately one month earlier. His funeral had already taken place. There had been attempts to contact her, apparently, although the explanation for the delay was buried somewhere in the formalities.

Clarissa swallowed.

She hadn't known.

Not a phone call. Not a message. Nothing.

She hadn't even known he was ill.

She looked down at the letter again.

Arthur Mayfield.

She hadn't seen him in years.

Not since she'd been eighteen, perhaps nineteen. She'd meant to visit. There had always been something preventing it. University applications, work, moving away, life generally getting in the way.

Then the calls had become less frequent.

Then the visits had stopped.

And somehow, without either of them quite deciding it, the years had passed.

She put the letter down and rubbed her thumb across her forehead.

"Oh, Grandad."

The words came out differently this time.

She remembered him.

Not as the elderly man he'd eventually become, but as the man who'd sat her on his knee when she was six and taught her how to turn pages without tearing them. The man who'd read her stories in ridiculous voices and encouraged her to make up endings when she didn't like the ones in the books.

He'd had a little library.

Not a grand one. Nothing particularly impressive. Just a narrow, cluttered building tucked between two shops in the older part of the city. It had once been a bookshop, apparently, before Arthur had bought it and turned it into somewhere people could read, borrow books and sit with a cup of tea.

Clarissa had spent countless afternoons there as a child.

She remembered the smell most vividly.

Old paper, dust, polished wood and the faint sweetness of the biscuits he kept in a tin behind the counter.

She remembered the little wooden stool he'd kept beneath the front window so she could reach the higher shelves.

And she remembered the way he'd looked at her when she'd announced, at the age of ten, that she intended to become a writer.

He hadn't laughed.

He'd simply smiled and said that the world could always use another person who knew how to tell a story.

Clarissa blinked, realising her eyes had begun to sting.

She looked away.

There was more to the letter.

Much more.

She picked it up again.

The solicitors explained that Arthur had left specific instructions in his will. His remaining estate was relatively modest, but he had made provisions for the little library.

And he had left it to her.

Clarissa read the sentence twice.

Then a third time.

"The library?"

She looked at the paper as though it might correct itself.

The little building.

His little building.

She hadn't even known it was still there.

The letter continued, explaining that the property and its contents had been bequeathed to her outright, subject to the usual legal formalities. The solicitors would arrange a meeting to discuss the transfer and provide further information regarding the estate.

There was an address.

Clarissa read it.

And felt the familiar heaviness settle in her chest.

Of course.

That city.

She hadn't been back since leaving. Not properly. She'd passed through once on a train, staring resolutely at her phone rather than looking out of the window.

It was a miserable place, as far as she remembered. Grey streets, tired buildings, endless rain and a sense of everything being just a little more difficult than it needed to be.

She'd spent her teenage years desperate to escape it.

And she'd succeeded.

Mostly.

She put the letter on her lap and stared at the ceiling.

Her grandfather was dead.

That was the part she couldn't quite get past.

Somewhere in the city she'd sworn never to return to, the man who'd taught her to love books had died, and she hadn't even known.

She felt a sudden, sharp pang of guilt.

She should have visited.

She should have called more often.

She should have—

Clarissa stopped herself.

There was no point.

The dead couldn't answer for the living, and the living couldn't go back and repair things that had already happened.

She folded the letter carefully and placed it on the coffee table.

Then she noticed the second sheet tucked beneath it.

A brief summary of the property.

Her grandfather's library was a small commercial building, situated on an older shopping street. The property included the ground-floor premises and a small storage area at the rear.

It was vacant.

The contents remained largely as Arthur had left them.

Clarissa frowned.

Vacant?

She imagined the building as she'd last seen it. The faded blue sign above the door. The narrow windows. The books stacked everywhere, some in proper shelves, others in uneven piles that had threatened to topple over whenever someone brushed past.

She wondered how bad it looked now.

Probably dreadful.

The thought brought a reluctant smile to her lips.

Grandad had never been particularly good at keeping things tidy.

She could almost hear him insisting that there was a perfectly logical reason for having three copies of the same book and a collection of old newspapers dating back twenty years.

Then another thought occurred to her.

The building belonged to her.

She sat up slightly.

She read the property details again, this time with a little more attention.

It wasn't a fortune. She knew that much. The area wasn't exactly fashionable, and a small, neglected shop in a city nobody was particularly rushing to move to wasn't likely to be worth millions.

But it was property.

Actual property.

Something she owned.

Clarissa looked across the room at her laptop.

The screen had gone dark.

She nudged the trackpad. It flickered back to life, accompanied by a faint clicking sound from somewhere inside the casing.

She stared at it.

The machine had been giving her trouble for months. The battery barely lasted twenty minutes, the charging port was temperamental and the screen occasionally developed a thin horizontal line that disappeared if she pressed the corner.

She'd spent hours researching replacements.

She'd even found one she liked.

A refurbished model with enough memory to handle her work, a decent processor and a screen large enough that she wouldn't have to squint at it until she was forty.

Four hundred and eighty pounds.

She had forty-seven pounds in her bank account.

Forty-seven pounds and a laptop that was beginning to sound like it wanted to die.

Clarissa looked back at the letter.

The library.

She could go and see it.

Find out what it was worth. Perhaps clean the place up a little, take some photographs and speak to an estate agent. If the building was in reasonable condition, she might be able to sell it.

Quickly.

She didn't need to keep it.

Not when she had a perfectly good life here, such as it was.

A little money would make an enormous difference. Enough to replace the laptop, catch up on a few things and perhaps put something aside for once.

She could even clear a little breathing room between herself and the next rent payment.

The thought was almost intoxicating.

For the first time in months, she could see a possible way out of the endless cycle of invoices, deadlines and carefully rationed groceries.

It wasn't a dream.

It was a building.

A dingy little building in a city she disliked, full of books she had no particular use for.

But it was hers.

Clarissa picked up her phone and searched for the address.

A map appeared.

She recognised the street immediately.

Her expression fell.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me."

The little blue marker sat in the middle of the old shopping district, surrounded by streets she remembered all too well.

She zoomed in.

The street looked smaller than she remembered. A few businesses remained, although several appeared to have closed. There was a photograph of the road, taken on a grey afternoon, and Clarissa studied the tired shopfronts with a faint sense of dread.

Nothing had changed.

If anything, it looked worse.

She dropped the phone onto the sofa.

Then she looked at the letter again.

Her grandfather had left her his library.

It was an odd thing to inherit. An old building full of books in a place she'd spent years trying to forget.

She wasn't sure what she felt about it.

Sadness, certainly.

Guilt.

A little curiosity.

And, if she was being completely honest, a considerable amount of relief at the prospect of having some money for a change.

She glanced at the laptop.

The fan whirred.

Clarissa gave it a suspicious look.

"Don't start."

She gathered the papers together, placing them carefully on the coffee table.

Tomorrow, she'd call the solicitors.

Tomorrow, she'd find out what needed doing.

Tomorrow, she'd begin making arrangements to visit the library, take a look around and see whether there was anything worth salvaging.

She could be there and back in a day.

A quick trip.

A few photographs.

A conversation with an estate agent.

Then she could sell the place, buy herself a decent laptop and get on with her life.

Simple.

She stood, picked up her empty mug and carried it towards the kitchen.

Behind her, the solicitor's letter lay open on the coffee table.

Beneath the formal wording, Arthur's full name was printed in neat black type.

Clarissa didn't see the small handwritten note attached to the final page.

It had been folded beneath the solicitor's covering letter, easy to miss amongst the paperwork.

In Arthur's familiar, slightly crooked handwriting were just seven words.

I hope you find what I left you.

But Clarissa had already gone to make dinner.

And tomorrow, she had every intention of going back to the city she'd sworn she'd left behind.