Page 2 of Love from Pretty Beach

Driving at a snail's pace through the icy town, Darby shivered and let the last of the crying ebb away into the sparkling night and concentrated on the road. There was no way she needed the expense of a car accident in her life. She had not the energy, money, time or brain power to deal with her car getting crumpled. Every time she got into the car and it started without a hitch, she thanked the gods of mechanics looking down on her from above. She didn’t know what she would do if her car gave up the ghost. After giving a small, little salute-type wave to a man in a flashy BMW who had generously pulled to the side to let her pass, she inched her way carefully, waited at a set of traffic lights and managed to keep another round of wailing at bay.

Driving through Pretty Beach to the Old Town, where the street lights were less and less frequent, she turned onto the street that led to her road and squinted to watch for black ice.

With the world around her twinkling with frost, her nose feeling as if it might fall off from the cold, and trying to remain calm, she followed the bright beam of the headlights through the thick night air.

Hoping that she would get home without one, slipping on the ice, and two, having her overfull football head brain, in fact, explode, she clung to the steering wheel for dear life.

Inching along, she attempted to look on the bright side, but failed.

All she could think about was how almost everything in her life had changed.

She'd moved to a completely different area of the country, her financial circumstances were dire, and she had very few friends, make that one friend.

Her children were off doing their own thing, she had three serious and very failed relationships behind her and she was living in a small town, wondering what was next.

Most of all, Darby Lovell felt so very lost. Waiting for the heater to warm up, she mulled everything over as she kept her eyes glued to the road and the stretch of a New Year pulled out in front of her.

Yes, that was it. It was the New Year looming that had tipped her over the edge of a cliff she hadn’t even known she’d been balancing on.

As Molly had left and she’d realised, yet again, that she’d be spending New Year’s Eve on her Jack Jones, she’d been hit by a tsunami of snivelling, snotty, self-pity.

Quite pathetic, really, for a forty-one-year-old woman who had a mostly okay life.

However, the promise of another year rolling around was not shiny, happy, full of excitement or anticipation, as it was on the shows getting ready for the New Year parties on the TV.

Not at all. For Darby, it just flagged up questions and emphasised that her life had ground to a bit of a halt.

Up until that point, she hadn’t had any choice in which way she went.

Quite frankly, three children, one salary, three useless partners and one death had not given Darby Lovell time to be low or to be worrying about which way she might go.

She hadn’t actually realised when it had been there in her face every day that the gift of having no time had been an unknown, unseen, good one.

The ups and downs, lack of hours in the day and keeping her head above water had very much kept her on the straight and narrow.

Now, with her relationships gone, her children gone, her old home gone, her friendships gone, a bit of her felt as if it had gone too.

Where in the name of goodness was she going to end up?

Turning into a narrow cobbled street leading to her house, Darby smiled.

At least the road looked pretty. There could be worse places in life to be low.

Lovely windy cobbled pavements where little terraced pastel painted cottages butted right up to the road, a shop on the corner, a little café with the best coffee, a couple of detached Georgian villas squashed together, her next door neighbour’s three storey brick house and then wedged in beside a narrow public bridleway-cum-lane with a listed wall, just as the road turned to the right was her house.

As she parked in her small parking spot to the side and gathered up her things, she got out, gasped at the icy air, stopped for a second and looked up.

The moment she’d set eyes on her house, it had spoken to her and now here she was five years later calling it her own.

An odd shape with uneven bricks, beautiful old sash windows, a wind of wisteria, gorgeous old front door, funny little porthole window in the attic and sweet cobbled paths to the side.

Sighing, Darby swallowed: the house was supposed to have been a new start, a fresh, lovely place by the sea to bring her back to life.

And in a way, it had been. She’d made a few acquaintances in Pretty Beach for sure, she’d found a little job and loved her new garden, but, really, it hadn’t been a new start.

More what was looking like a dead end. At least that’s how it felt in her about to explode football head.