CHERRY GARDEN Street

It was a place of magical childhood memories- but was it home?

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Alice chucked another log into the wood burner. Outside, the wind was throwing fitful handfuls of rain at the windows.

Alice frowned out into the storm... 'May, she thought, 'and I've had to light a fire.'

The weather was atrocious. She should take Hugo out, but she'd been putting it off all day. It was so much easier to sit cosily in front of the fire with a book, but she must do it now before it was completely dark.

She looked at her watch 8.30pm. Poor dog, he hadn't been out since the morning.

'Come on,' Alice said, picking up Hugo's lead. She shoved her feet into a pair of wellingtons and shrugged on her old corduroy jacket. It wasn't raining hard and it was rarely properly cold here in the West Country.

Hugo leapt up, brown eyes sparkling, a look of comical enthusiasm on his little white face. He was a bichon frise and had all the intelligence of his breed, and then some. Alice checked her pocket for the house keys, then threw herself out into the weather with Hugo in tow.

Alice and Hugo had been in the cottage on Cherry Garden Street for a week. She had inherited it from her  grandparents. The quaint little house in the fishing village of  Mousehole had been a part of Alice’s life ever since she was small. Raised in Plymouth by her single mother, Alice had spent her summer holidays there. It had been such a bittersweet surprise to learn the cottage was hers.

The timing, however, had been perfect. Living in London with her boyfriend Marcus and working from home for a marketing company, she’d become increasingly sure that Marcus was not the love of her life. And London wasn’t where she wanted to spend the rest of it. So she had taken her inheritance as a sign – and the sign solidified into an imperative.