Here to Stay

FROM THE AUTHOR

"The storyline of Here to Stay came to me at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and I wrote most of it in 2020 and 2021. I landed a job in animal welfare in mid-2021—a dream job for an animal-lover like me—and Here to Stay was abandoned for a while as a result. It was thanks to the persistence of my ex-wife—at that time, my first and only reader, and a huge believer in my work—that I finally freed the manuscript from my laptop, did some more work on it, and submitted it to Bella Books. And the rest, as they say, is herstory."

—Debby Querido

PART ONE

Chapter One

A tiny fleck of ash floated onto Abby’s keyboard, landing right between the tilde and the Z. She pressed her finger onto it and rubbed, frowning at the small grey smear it left behind.

Hmm. Weird.

Abby was doing what she always did at 7:03 a.m.: sitting in bed, checking for new bookings on FortyLinks.com.

“Mmm…” she murmured as she scrolled through her emails, her eyes still blurry from sleep. “Who will I be sharing my house with next?”

Even after all these months, short-term house-sharing was a still strange concept to her. But it served its purpose, so she tried not to overthink it. Instead, she blew on her strong black coffee to cool it and squinted at the tiny avatars of her would-be guests.

Avatars covered in tiny grey specks.

Wait a second…Ash?

ASH?

Abby jumped to her feet, laptop tumbling into her pillows, and yanked open the curtains. The sky was an ominous grey and thick with smoke. The tiny slice of bay, usually visible from her bedroom, had disappeared into the smog. When she opened a window, the acrid smell of fire hit her nostrils. Abby quickly slammed it shut.

Lurching back over the bed, she retrieved her phone from the jumble of blankets.

“Dude, I was about to call you,” Evan said before Abby could utter a word. “Can you believe this fire? I mean, we always joked that The Dolphin Inn was an accident waiting to happen, but we never actually thought it would.”

She gasped. “The Dolphin Inn is on fire? What happened?”

“No idea,” Evan replied, slurping on something—probably a protein shake. “Saw the whole thing while I was out running—smoke, fire trucks, the works. Must’ve happened during the night.”

“Holy crap,” Abby murmured, staring back outside. “I can’t believe I slept through it. Although, we did have a pub quiz night last night.” She rubbed her eyes with her free hand. Her head felt thick. She took another sip of coffee.

Evan scoffed. “Oh, come on, it’s a virtual quiz. How many beers did you even have? Three, max?”

“Two,” Abby said sheepishly. “But I’m a lightweight, you know that. Anyway, it’s Monday, okay? Give me a break.”

“Nope, no breaks for you.” Evan took another noisy slurp. “You’re going to have to get on top of your game, Massey. With The Dolphin out of action, your spare room is going to be in huge demand.”

“Good point.” Abby glanced at her upturned laptop. It wasn’t like there was much choice in itsy-bitsy Bay View, which boasted exactly one of everything and zero excitement.

“I gotta get ready,” she said, pulling her laptop upright. “I’ll see you at school.”

The ping of an email notification: her FortyLinks booking for today had cancelled. So much for the fire creating a boom in business. The guest would have arrived this evening and stayed for a week. Nice bit of extra cash. Bummer.

With a shake of her head, Abby shut her laptop and headed for the bathroom—a good soak would clear the fogginess. What were they thinking, downing beers on a Sunday night?

Her email pinged again, but she didn’t hear it: she’d already sunk below the steaming water.

The fire was all anyone could talk about at school. Abby caught snatches of the kids’ conversations as she hurried across the front quad to the teachers’ entrance.

“And then the roof caved in!”

“My dad said it blew up!”

“Yeah! A piece of it landed in our yard! Still burning!”

The fire was the hot topic in the staff room too.

“I heard the bartender was an alcoholic. Yeah, that young guy who helps out on the weekends. He probably got drunk and passed out smoking or something.”

“Well, I heard it was that local gang of hooligans—you know, the ones who put graffiti all over the hardware store.”

“Arson? No way! That place was falling to pieces. Couldn’t flush a toilet without a couple bricks falling out of the wall. Was bound to happen.”

Abby listened to the theories half-heartedly. While many local folks had disparaged the place, she had genuinely loved The Dolphin, with its cracked leather booths and sticky bar counter.

“Hey, hey,” Evan said, sliding into the seat beside her at the long staff table. Freshly showered, his hair was still damp.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, handing her a steaming mug.

Abby mumbled her thanks as she took a sip. “Ugh. I’m sad about our Dolphin. And my FortyLinks booking for this week fell through. And…” She groaned, rolling her eyes. “I have back-to-back classes all week.”

“Sounds like a case of the Mondays,” Evan teased. Abby glared at him.

“Yeah, it’s a rough start to the week,” he conceded. “And this year’s schedule is super intense. I’m going to have to invent new historical facts just to fill all the extra classes I have. How soon do you think I can include ‘The Great Bay View Bar Fire of the Twenty-First Century’ in the curriculum?”

Abby laughed and hoisted her bag off the floor. “Maybe you can use it to teach the kids what ‘fake news’ is,” she said as she cocked her head in the direction of Moira Fresh, the elderly, musk-scented maths teacher who was banging on about the alleged alcoholic bartender. She’d cornered a group of teachers, most of whom were checking their watches and inching away as she spoke.

Abby and Evan said their goodbyes outside their neighbouring classrooms. As the kids filtered into her class, she sent a silent message of thanks to the gods of work husbands for sending her Evan—good-humoured, steadfast Evan. He’d been the one constant in her life since she’d moved to town eighteen months ago, and she so valued his easy friendship and thick skin. New teachers always assumed they were a couple.

The kids all inside, Abby clapped her hands together and pasted a bright smile on her face.

“Okay, class! Today we’re going to watch a movie.” The kids whooped, and Abby winked conspiratorially. “Just don’t tell the other teachers, okay?”

It was lunchtime before Abby checked her phone and saw the email notification from FortyLinks.

Hi, my booking at Dolphin Inn cancelled and urgently need accomm for a week. Flying in tmrw AM. Do you have available. Tx—Chris A.

Abby paused. There was no avatar. Chris A had no other bookings or reviews. That would usually send alarm bells ringing, but Chris A had booked at The Dolphin…

No, you’re being paranoid. And besides, you need the cash. Abby tapped Accept.

In the year she’d been renting out her spare bedroom on FortyLinks, she’d had close to fifty guests. Only two of them had turned out to be a little peculiar. One was a young woman who had stayed for a week and barely left her room. After she’d left, Abby found the room full of empty peanut butter jars, and peanut butter…everywhere. On the carpets. On the sheets. Even on the windows. She and Evan had called it the “Peanut Gallery,” and it had taken them an entire weekend to deep-clean the room. Abby swore she could still detect the odd whiff of peanut on warm days.

Then there was the middle-aged engineer who left towel animals all around the house. Every day for three weeks. A towel llama peeking around a door, a towel snake uncoiling from a cupboard. The weirdest was the litter of towel puppies that must have taken an entire afternoon to create—a real labour of love.

After that, Abby took to rationing her guests’ access to towels.

Her new FortyLinks booking had delayed her, and Evan had spread himself around the lunch table by the time Abby arrived. She handed him a sandwich and a bottle of water and plopped down on the chair next to him.

“You know who I was thinking about today?” she asked as she unwrapped her egg salad sandwich.

“Who?” Evan stopped midway through salting his food, looking concerned.

“Oh, no, not Dan,” Abby said quickly, smiling to show that there was no risk of sudden meltdown. It had been months since she’d sobbed uncontrollably over Dan, and Evan had been there almost every time.

“I was thinking about Peanut Gallery.”

“Oh, ha! That nutjob.” Evan bit into his sandwich, flicking his head to move a stray piece of blond hair from his face. He was annoyingly good-looking. Almost all the women and many men in Bay View were positively googly-eyed over him.

“Wait,” Evan said, a realisation dawning. “What are we cleaning up this time? I think the only thing more difficult to get rid of would be a body.”

“Well, actually…” Abby grimaced. “Maybe.”

Evan frowned, and Abby hurried on. “I accepted an accommodation request that came through this afternoon from some person called Chris with no picture or reviews. I was just so relieved to get a booking after this morning’s cancellation. So, now I’m worried he’s a murderer hunting down attractive young women.”

“Well, then, whatcha worrying about?”

Abby punched Evan on the shoulder.

“Ow! Okay, okay. You want me to come over?”

“Would you mind? He arrives in the morning so you could just swing by after your run…”

Evan ran every morning at seven a.m. He ate breakfast at eight and he was in bed by ten p.m. He was always Abby’s “first phone call”—the person she knew she could call in any emergency—peanut butter-related or otherwise.

Abby knew his schedule almost down to how often he took a leak. She supposed she could understand why his long-distance girlfriend seemed to feel threatened by their closeness. It didn’t help that she knew about their history. Early on, long before they were best friends, there’d been that one, confusing night… But that was in the past. Abby and Evan were firmly, and only, friends.

“Sure, dude, I’ll be there,” Evan said, pushing the last bite of sandwich into his mouth and stretching out his long legs. “But I’m warning you—I’m gonna start charging a protection fee.”