Page 51 of Total Dreamboat

Felix

The property I find is an existing twenty-room inn in a nineteenth-century manor house in Devon.

The building needs a full update and the restaurant is currently just your average country pub—scotch eggs, fish and chips, well-done burgers.

But it’s spacious, with a beautiful garden and a view of the sea.

The second I see it online I know it’s what I’m looking for, and pretty much the moment Ned and I walk into the lobby, we’re ready to make an offer.

By Christmas, we own a hotel.

There are owner’s accommodations in a flat above the lobby, and I move myself and Priscilla into them.

It’s a mess.

Renovation is constant stress and faff, and the costs quickly exceed our projections, so we have to scramble to find an additional investor. I don’t have time for a rigorous routine. My entire life is chaos and variables.

I love it.

I feel exhilarated. Energized by living a life different from the one I’ve always had, in some form, in London. When I go back once a month, to meet with Ned and Sophie and my two pub managers, I can’t wait to leave.

It’s humbling and reassuring at once to see how well the business runs without my daily involvement. I’ve built something amazing. But it doesn’t need me to fret over it. I can let go and expand my remit.

It makes me want to expand myself in other ways too.

When I envision a life in this place, I envision a partner, eventually a family. And when I think of what that partner might be like—one woman always pops into my head.

Hope Lanover.

It’s impossible to walk the streets of this quaint seaside village without remembering her dreams of living in just such a place. I wonder if she’d be happy here. I wonder if she’d be happy with me.

I search online for clues of her, but she’s not on social media, and Lauren’s posts are scrupulously absent of any hint of her.

Which does not stop my sisters from pointedly asking about her every few weeks. It’s been so relentless that when Pear demanded her address, I dug it up and gave it to her.

“Would you like to send a little note with the package?” she asked.

“It didn’t end well,” I finally admitted. “I don’t think she’d want to hear from me.”

“I think she would,” Pear said airily. “A secret about girls is we always want to know when someone is pining for us.”

“I’m not pining,” I objected.

“Obsessing, then,” she said.

“Fuck off, please.”

But my sister is not wrong. Pining is an appropriate word.

I know Hope’s only a text or phone call away, but every time I resolve to get in touch with her, I lose my nerve at the critical moment.

I had my chance, and I squandered it.

I thought I had good reasons for ending things, but the way I did it was clumsy and hurtful.

I don’t know that I deserve a third chance, or how I would handle the long-distance hurdle if she gave me one. I don’t want to keep causing her pain.

My sisters come to visit the first week of April.

I take them to a quaint town a few villages away to shop for books and games for the library at the inn.

While they’re poring over the self-help offerings in a bookstore, I wander into the esoteric section, looking for a Ouija board.

Might be a nice touch in case guests want to fancy the big old house haunted.

I come upon a deck of vintage tarot cards. The same kind of deck Madame Olenska had on the cruise ship. Impulsively, while my sisters are distracted, I buy it.

I make the mistake of leaving it in a shopping bag among our other purchases on the dining table when we get home. Pear finds it immediately.

“Ha! What’s this?” she asks, brandishing the deck the same way she did when we were kids and she found my box of secret treasures. “Felix, have you gone woo-woo on us?”

“Just a little fun for the library,” I lie.

“You sneaky boy,” Prue says. “You never told us you’re a witch .”

“Come off it,” I say.

“This reveals untold depths,” Pear says to Prue. “Do you think he’s more of a Wiccan or an Aleister Crowley type?”

I snatch the deck out of her hands. “Calm down,” I say. “Or I’ll summon demons to silence you.”

“Let’s all draw cards,” Pear says. “I want to know my fortune.”

“Oh, yes, let’s,” Prue says. “Shuffle the cards, Felix.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” I say, handing her the deck.

I start to walk away but she grabs me by the arm. “No, sir. Your cards, your shuffle. Otherwise I’ll be cursed.”

I know they’re going to whinge and harass me unless I humor them, so I take the cards, shuffle them, and lay them out face down on the table, the way I saw Madame Olenska do.

“Take your pick,” I tell them.

“Wait,” Prue says. “We have to ask a question first, don’t we?”

“Make it tell me my future, Felix,” Pear says. She pulls out a card and holds it up. “King of Pentacles. What does it mean?”

“I have no idea, obviously,” I say.

“Let’s google it,” Prue says. She grabs her phone and looks up the card.

“You’re destined for material wealth, leadership, and ambition leading to long-term success,” she reports to Pear.

Pear smiles smugly. “I knew I was on to something with the Maquille acquisition. Now you do one.”

“I want to know the nature of my deepest soul,” Prue says, waving her hand over the deck. She selects the Knight of Cups.

“It says here,” Pear reads off her phone, “that the card signifies creativity, romance, charm, imagination, and beauty!”

“Eerie, how accurate it is,” Prue says. “These cards really are magical. Your turn, dear brother.”

“I’m good.”

“Nice try. You’re doing it. Ask a question.”

“Fine,” I grumble. “Tarot, please show me what is going to happen when my sisters finally leave me in peace on Monday.”

“Lame,” Pear says. “Tarot, please tell him his heart’s deepest desire.”

I pick up a card and turn it over.

It’s the Empress.

I’m not one to believe in hocus-pocus. But I get chills all the same.

“Hmm,” Pear says. “An odd one, that, since you’re so decidedly a man.”

“Read the meaning,” Prue says.

Pear scrolls through her phone. “ Oooh , fertility and love,” she says.

“I think the universe is telling you to go on Tinder,” Prue says.

But that’s not it at all.

If the universe is telling me anything, it’s: “You’re ready. You know what you want. You know who you want.”

I don’t say anything to my sisters, as they will delight in mocking me for the rest of my life. Probably deservedly, as it’s ridiculous to take such profound meaning from a random piece of paper.

But I also feel like I’d be a twit not to take the hint.

I make a decision: I’m going to call Hope.