The Farmhouse Fix

Chapter 1: The Inheritance

The lawyer's office smelled like old paper and lemon furniture polish, scents that would forever after remind Margot of the moment her life split into before and after.

"Your grandmother left you the farmhouse and the surrounding forty acres," Mr. Pedersen said, sliding a manila folder across his desk. His voice carried the measured cadence of someone who delivered news—good and bad—for a living. "She updated her will six months before she passed. Very specific that it should go to you, not your mother."

Margot's fingers trembled as she opened the folder. Inside, a photograph showed a white clapboard house with a wraparound porch, dormers jutting from a green shingled roof, and fields stretching to the horizon behind it. She remembered that porch, remembered summer afternoons drinking lemonade while Grandma Ruth shelled peas into a metal bowl, the rhythmic ping of each one hitting the bottom.

"I haven't been there since I was twelve," she said.

"Twenty-three years is a long time." Mr. Pedersen removed his glasses and polished them with a cloth from his pocket. "The property needs work. Ruth did what she could, but the last few years were hard on her. Hard on the house too."

Margot nodded, though she barely heard him. She was thinking about Derek, about the way he'd looked at her that morning when she'd mentioned maybe visiting her mother in Winnipeg. The careful blankness of his expression, the slight tightening around his mouth that meant she'd have to spend the next three days apologizing for wanting something he hadn't approved.

"What would I need to do to take possession?"

Mr. Pedersen's eyebrows rose slightly. "You're considering keeping it? Your mother assumed you'd want to sell."

"My mother assumes a lot of things."

The words came out sharper than she'd intended, and she saw something shift in the old lawyer's face—recognition, maybe, or understanding. Ruth had been his client for forty years. He probably knew things about Margot's family that Margot herself had never been told.

"The paperwork is straightforward," he said. "Sign here, here, and here. The keys are in the envelope. Utilities are still connected—Ruth prepaid through the end of the year. She wanted to make it easy for you."

Margot signed her name three times, her handwriting looking foreign to her, like someone else was moving her hand. Margot Aldridge. In six months, she wouldn't have that name anymore. She'd go back to her maiden name, Margot Bryce, and Derek would become nothing but a cautionary tale she'd tell herself on dark nights.

But he didn't know that yet.

"One more thing." Mr. Pedersen reached into his desk drawer and withdrew a sealed envelope, cream-colored and thick. "Ruth asked me to give you this. She said you'd know when to open it."

Margot took the envelope. Her grandmother's handwriting on the front, spidery but still strong: For Margot, when she's ready.

"Thank you," she whispered.

She drove back to Vancouver in a daze, the folder and the envelope on the passenger seat beside her like passengers themselves, witnesses to the decision she was already making. Derek was at a conference in Toronto. She had four days.

Four days to pack twenty-three years of a life she'd never really wanted.

She started with the things that mattered: her grandmother's quilt, folded at the bottom of the cedar chest Derek had wanted to throw away. The cast iron skillet her father had given her before he died, the one Derek said was too heavy and took up too much space. Books—so many books, the ones she'd hidden in the back of closets because Derek thought reading was a waste of time when she could be doing something productive, by which he meant something that benefited him.

Her clothes fit in two suitcases. That surprised her, how little she'd accumulated in eight years of marriage. Derek bought her things sometimes, dresses he wanted to see her in, jewelry that marked her as his, but none of it felt like hers.

She left those things behind.

On the third day, she wrote him a letter. Not an explanation—he wouldn't accept one anyway—but a statement. I'm leaving. Don't contact me. The divorce papers will come from my lawyer.

She didn't tell him where she was going. She didn't tell anyone except her best friend Caroline, who cried on the phone and said "finally" and "I'll come visit" and "be safe, please be safe."

On the fourth day, Margot loaded her car and drove east.

The prairies unfolded before her like a promise, flat and endless and impossibly open. After the mountains and the rain and the constant gray of Vancouver, the Saskatchewan sky felt like a revelation—so much blue it hurt to look at, so much space that she could finally breathe.

She arrived in Millbrook at sunset, the town's single main street painted gold and amber by the dying light. A grocery store, a hardware store, a diner called Rosie's with a neon sign in the window. A church with a white steeple, a post office, a building that looked like it might be a community center. Population 847, according to the sign at the town limits.

The farmhouse was three miles outside of town, down a gravel road that wound through fields of stubble left from last year's harvest. Margot's heart hammered as she turned into the driveway, as the house came into view.

It looked smaller than she remembered, and sadder. The white paint was peeling, the porch sagging on one end. One of the dormer windows had been boarded up, and the garden that had once been her grandmother's pride was now a tangle of dead stalks and overgrown weeds.

But it was hers.

Margot sat in her car for a long moment, engine idling, staring at the house where her grandmother had lived for sixty-two years. Where her mother had grown up and fled as soon as she was old enough. Where Margot had spent two summers as a child, the happiest summers of her life, before her mother decided that Ruth was a bad influence and cut off contact entirely.

She'd never understood why. She still didn't.

The key stuck in the lock, and she had to jiggle it before the door finally swung open. The smell hit her first—dust and old wood and something floral, lavender maybe, the ghost of her grandmother's perfume still lingering after all these months.

Margot stepped inside and burst into tears.

She cried for Ruth, who she'd never gotten to say goodbye to. She cried for her father, gone fifteen years now. She cried for the girl she'd been at twenty-two, so desperate to be loved that she'd mistaken control for care, so afraid of being alone that she'd let herself disappear.

And then, when the tears were finally spent, she wiped her face and started to clean.