Page 1 of Once Upon a Fall

Rosie

Once upon a time, a girl built herself a fairy tale. She used what she had. Some of it was hot glue.

Everything is going to be fine.

T-minus four hours until my first guest arrives, and everything is going great. Super. Fantastic.

As long as you don’t count the fact that the room isn’t exactly ready, the front entry is covered in dust, and I haven’t showered in days. Somewhere downstairs, the sharp whine of a saw cuts through the house before a nail gun pops twice in quick succession as the custom check-in desk I absolutely did not need to splurge on is finally being installed. Oh, and I’m currently resorting to doing the finishing touches with a glue gun.

My shoulders have been creeping toward my ears since breakfast, but that’s probably unrelated.

“Please stay,” I whisper to the shower curtain bracket as I hold it in place, waiting for the glue to solidify, feeling a cramp in my arm as I keep the piece steady.

I need it to stay put because I tiled this tub myself. I’m quite proud of it. It took forever; I watched approximately forty YouTube videos, messed up twice, and had to start over, and I’m genuinely happy with the results, even if it’s still slightly uneven in one corner.

The brackets are supposed to be screwed directly into the tile, but drilling into tile that I laid myself, that I actually bled for (there’s a nice long cut across my forearm as proof), is too much to ask. One wrong move, and it will crack. I know this from experience, unfortunately.

Retiling isn’t an option, and so . . . glue.

“Would you just let me do it?” my brother, Dominic, asks, one hand on his hip, the other holding a hammer drill.

“No way,” I tell him. “If you do it and the tile cracks, I’ll never forgive you. And then we’ll both resent each other: me, because you wouldn’t listen, and you, because you’ll tell me it’s not that big a deal when it does, in fact, crack. And it’ll drive a wedge in the family that will be irreparable.”

“That seems like a stretch,” he says, frowning.

“So, I’m using glue to save our family,” I say to my younger brother. Younger by two minutes, but I like to hold it over his head.

He lets out a long-suffering breath. “Fine. Is there anything else you’d like me to do while I’m here, Rosaline?”

“Don’t call me that,” I tell him. He knows I don’t like being called by my full name, which is why he likes to overemphasize it when he does.

“Fine,” he says. “What else?”

“Can you hang that painting in the front room? The one above the fireplace.”

He rests the back of the drill on the shoulder of his stained white T-shirt, his baseball cap pushed back slightly, his green eyes—the only thing we have in common, feature-wise—watching me.

“Rosie, are you sure you’re ready for this?” He reaches up, pulling the hat back slightly, so he can rub his forehead with a calloused hand.

“I have to be,” I say, tugging lightly on the bracket to make sure it’s sturdy enough to hold the curtain and the rod, and I feel a little glee that it might actually have worked.

“Okay, I’ll leave you to it,” Dom says.

“Actually.” I stop him, and he sighs again. “Can you help me get this on here?”

I nod to the pile of pink frilliness on the floor, the shower curtain I painstakingly searched the internet for, the one I wanted for my Sleeping Beauty–themed room.

When I moved back to Autumn Ridge after losing my job and enduring a terrible breakup, I took a job at the only place to stay in town—a bed-and-breakfast owned by Tom and Jeanie Jacobsen. Two years later, when they decided to sell it and move to Fort Lauderdale, they offered me the place at a steal of a price. An offer I literally couldn’t refuse. Five months ago, I signed the mortgage, and now, on September first, I’ll have my first official guest.

Did I dream of owning an inn on Main Street one day, where guests could stay and visit our lovely town, before I’d even turned twenty-nine? Nope. That was never, ever on my radar. But I’m so glad I did.

Well, mostly.

Dom eyes the shower curtain with disapproval. “When does your guest arrive?”

“He said some time after five,” I say, reaching down to grab one end of the curtain rod.

“He?” Dom asks, his eyes widening.