The Farmhouse of Second Chances

by Helen Rolfe

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

'A heartwarming story about family, forgiveness and the importance of kindness' FIONA HARPER on The Kindness Club on Mapleberry Lane

'Comforting and uplifting, this book is a joy to read' MY WEEKLY

'A heartwarming tale' WOMAN'S OWN

Home is where the heart is...

Joy has made a family for herself. She's turned her beautiful old farmhouse into a safe haven for anyone who is looking for a new beginning. She's always ready with a kind word, a nugget of advice and believes that anyone can change their life for the better, if they really want to.

Libby has exchanged her high-flying job in New York for a break in the quiet Somerset countryside. She's soon drawn into Joy's world and into her family of waifs and strays - including Drew, whom Joy once helped get back on his feet.

So when a secret from Joy's past threatens everything, can the unlikely group come together to give Joy a second chance of her own?

Curl up with this uplifting new story of second chances and finding where you belong, from the author of The Little Village Library, perfect for fans of Cathy Bramley and Ali McNamara!

***

Readers adore Helen's heartwarming storytelling

'Enchanting... Employing all the warmth and charm of Maeve Binchy, and a special brand of kindness that she has made her own, Rolfe weaves together elements of mystery, romance, family relationships and the warmth of community in a story guaranteed to bring laughter, tears and miles of smiles' Lancashire Post

'A warm, comforting tale of family and community which brims with kindness and love' Annie Lyons

'A heartwarming story about family, forgiveness and the importance of kindness... If you're looking for a feelgood novel in these difficult times, this is definitely it!' Fiona Harper

'A lovely community, full of friendship and love'

'I enjoyed every minute of this book and found it very hard to put down'

'Lovely, feel-good...filled with lots of love'

'Gave you all the emotions: suspense, happiness and excitement'

'Helen Rolfe's writing brought a smile to my face'

'Loved loved loved this fabulous book'

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 352

Sample

It was late June and the magnolia flowers on the bush by the main gates to The Old Dairy were showing off their creamy pink petals at long last. It would only be a matter of weeks before those petals fell and withered and the cycle started all over again.

Such was life. And Joy had grown to love the seasons, all of them. She welcomed the sun, the rain, the chill of an icy winter in Bramleywood, she watched the colours and the appearance of the village, her front garden and surrounding land change with them, but everything else remain constant. It had taken a long time to realise no matter the cyclical nature of the weather, the trees and the flowers, her place in the world remained the same. And she was content at long last, the shadows of her past fading gradually.

She sat by the open window at the front of the farmhouse that had been her home for twenty-five years and tore open the envelope that had landed on the mat almost half an hour ago. Whenever she got a letter from her niece Libby, she did this; she relished it, wanting to savour every second of a rare moment of contact with a member of her biological family, which often meant waiting for the madhouse to quieten down before she could enjoy it in this exact same spot on the armchair next to the open window, a mug of tea beside her. Not that she minded the madhouse, it was the home she’d built and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

She didn’t get to read the letter as planned, at least not yet, because she saw Drew’s jeep bounce in through the open metal gates at the front of the farm, crunch over the gravel and disappear down the side of the house where he’d be parking out back near the old cowshed. And despite spoiling her immediate plans, Joy never turned anyone away, she always had time for anyone who ever needed her, especially Drew who had no idea what it meant to her having him in her life. Drew, for reasons he didn’t yet know, was the person she’d most wanted to see make something of his life; he was the person she’d most wanted to help, to give him something back, in some way. It could never make up for what he no longer had, but she hoped that somebody somewhere was looking down on her telling her she’d done good at long last.

Joy put down the letter, picked up her mug of tea and made her way from the front of the farmhouse, along the hallway where she straightened the painting of sunflowers opposite the stairs that promptly dropped at the corner again the second she took her hand away, cut through the kitchen and headed on out to the adjoining utility room at the end. She threw her head back laughing the moment she stepped outside where a makeshift pen kept six lively Labrador puppies from running out into the fifty acres of land she owned, and saw Drew doing his best to fuss each of them. All six, three golden, two black and one chocolate, wanted to be first in line and they’d somehow managed to get Drew to the ground and were tugging at his shorts, his T-shirt and one was licking at his face with him laughing his head off but telling them to stop.

‘I think you’re protesting too much,’ Joy grinned, sipping her tea as though she were watching an elaborate performance. ‘And finding it funny as well as talking in a higher pitch is never going to make them behave. It seems to me you’re enjoying every second of the attention.’

Drew didn’t deny it. And it was moments like these, the mayhem, that had filled Joy’s house with the love she’d had to search for for so long. It had given her another sort of family, the sort you built around you and had nothing to do with genetic building blocks. She’d had the same sense of grounding and belonging with Ted and Marjory, the farm’s previous owners, when they took her in all those years ago and now she’d found it again she didn’t ever want it to change. Some folks around here assumed it would, thought that she’d get too old to be taking in waifs and strays, but Joy and what she did running a halfway house of sorts were as much a part of The Old Dairy now as the solid oak tree that stood next to the old cowshed and had grown wide enough to provide plenty of shade that reached part of the puppies’ pen.

As Drew continued to protest but love every moment with the six little rascals, Joy looked up at the cobalt blue sky until the sun peeped out from behind a cloud making it impossible to keep looking in that direction. She never took this open space for granted, she never grew tired of the freedom she felt out here. Smiling and content she moved to the shade herself to enjoy the light breeze from the mighty oak’s branches stretching up into the sky. She’d planted this very tree from a single acorn she found walking past the village pub one day. She’d brought it back here, planted it in a flowerpot filled with compost, nurtured it before transferring it outside, and slowly it had been turned from something someone might step on or kick across the street, into an impressive tree that now looked as though it had always been a part of the landscape with its deeply ridged bark and abundant burst of leaves. She knew without being able to see, that its roots would stretch way down through the earth, reaching as far as they could to claim this part of the village as their own, a place to belong, settle, and a place to grow old.

Drew finally got up and the puppies did their best to grab anything at ankle level, one of them catching the end of the lace on his trainers and pulling it the best he could until Drew escaped out of the pen, across the pavers and onto the flagstone floor once again. When Joy went over to join him he bent his head to kiss her on the cheek. ‘How are you today?’

‘Better thanks to this sunshine.’ She’d been feeling sorry for herself yesterday, her knees sore and her hip a little uncomfortable, and it was too hot to soak in the bath, so she’d had to go and lie on the sofa rather than helping get the chickens in to their coop at the end of the day. And now it seemed someone had got Drew all worried. ‘Might I assume you only heard about my knees because Lauren told you.’

‘Not Lauren.’

‘Cameron?’

Glossy eyes as brown as mocha caught the sunlight before Drew followed her inside for some respite. Despite only being June, it had been unusually dry and hot across the whole of the West Country and they were desperate for some rain. ‘I don’t think Cameron speaks to many of us yet does he? At least not unless it’s after he’s run off again and we try to find out why. I think we’ve got a way to go before he’s talking about anyone’s ailments.’

‘Then it would have to be Freddie,’ she guessed.

‘Got it in one.’

She supposed it was good that he cared. Freddie had urged her more than once to consider taking it a bit easier than she usually did.

Ted and Marjory had been like parents to Joy. She’d even taken their last name, feeling safe and secure after so long of being adrift, a moment she knew they’d been as touched by as she was. Taking Ted and Marjory’s surname of Browne had given her a sense of belonging, but more than that, it had given her a fresh start as someone else. It had marked a real new beginning. She’d never thought about the farm and what would happen to it when Ted and then Marjory passed away. She’d learned not to look that far into the future in case she didn’t like what she saw, but The Old Dairy had become hers to do with as she pleased.

When Joy learned she had been left the farm, she had no intention of doing anything major with the home or the land. The Old Dairy hadn’t operated as an actual dairy farm for quite some time and so Joy was content to live there and do what she could with the chickens, and she began to think about maybe growing produce, perhaps becoming self-sufficient if she could manage it. She didn’t have a whole lot going on in her personal life after all, so a project was perhaps what she needed to get her through the days, past her grief at losing Ted and Marjory. Her personal life consisted of day-to-day hellos to locals, but not much more and other than that it was the letters from her niece Libby that kept her going.

Libby was the one member of family Joy had left who was willing to be a part of her life. And it was the farm and Libby that had given her focus from one day to the next until she’d taken Drew in and helped him get his life back on track, setting him off in a direction that could only mean good things for him. She’d opened her house and her heart to him, and once he seemed to turn a corner and go from a troubled man angry at everything and everyone around him, it kickstarted something in Joy. She wanted to do it again. It was her way of giving something to people who were as desperate as she’d once been, a way to pay it forwards.

For more than a decade now, Joy had been running The Old Dairy as a halfway house, helping young adults mostly, who’d fallen on hard times and didn’t know which way to turn. Over the years she’d taken in countless people. Some lasted, others didn’t, and went back to their old ways, as though bad habits were so entrenched there was no alternative. Some people who came to her moved on but stayed in touch, others naturally drifted away, some sent the odd Christmas card but had put this part of their lives behind them, and that was fair enough. Drew, Lauren, and Freddie, at various points, had all lived at The Old Dairy, in need of a roof over their head, desperate to find a way to reinvent themselves or get their lives back on an even keel. Each of them had yearned for family comfort and found it right here and Joy couldn’t be happier that their ties remained strong. Despite moving into their own homes, Drew and Lauren were still a part of her life, and Freddie still lived here, something she was more than happy about.

‘Cameron’s a quiet soul,’ Joy confirmed as she made Drew a mug of tea in the farmhouse kitchen. Cameron was the latest stray to cross paths with Joy. She’d caught him attempting to break into her car one day and had seen something in his eyes, something that begged for another chance. And so the eighteen-year-old, who looked a good few years younger than that with his vulnerability, was now living under her roof in exchange for helping out around the place. Not that he’d managed much of that yet. But Joy had recognised when to push and when to ease off, because she’d learned it from Ted and Marjory who’d been strangers to her when she first arrived in Bramleywood. Her own flesh and blood hadn’t wanted to know, they hadn’t been interested in giving her a second chance, but somehow Ted and Marjory, although knowing the bad in her – she’d never been anything other than honest with the people who’d given her a home – had also managed to see the good. And Joy was under no illusions that at times they’d had to dig pretty deep to get any sort of a hint of it, especially when she was having a bad day, wallowing in self-pity that would change nothing.

‘Let’s hope he comes out of his shell soon,’ said Drew, knowing full well he’d been the same when he first arrived.

They watched the puppies from the window. Bisto, the only chocolate lab of the litter was chasing his own tail; Buttercup, one of the golden Labs, had taken to tearing apart an old shoe Joy had lobbed in there; a couple of the others were play-fighting in the corner of the pen, and their mum, black Labrador Luna, finally got up from her sunny sleeping spot to have a drink from her bowl of water and give a cursory glance to her babies. They chatted about the puppies and their personalities, how much they’d changed since the day they were born in early May, and it got Joy thinking about how much she’d changed herself since she turned up here in Bramleywood.

‘You having an easy day today?’ Joy, a good few inches shorter than six-foot-three Drew, reached up and brushed a small twig from his dark hair that had curled behind his ears. When he’d first come to The Old Dairy those curls had been wild, but over the years his hair and Drew himself had been tamed into a better version of the man who’d always been hiding underneath. She’d never doubted he could do it. And it gave her a slight sense of peace.

‘I’ve had a pretty busy morning and thought I’d head out here for lunch.’ He cradled his mug of tea in his hands as he leaned against the kitchen bench.

‘I knew it, your heart is in your stomach.’

‘Guilty,’ he admitted. ‘But I will offer to be the chef if it helps.’

‘Go for it, you know where everything is.’

He tilted his head in the direction of the wire egg storage basket in the shape of a chicken. ‘French toast, omelette or scrambled eggs? And how many am I catering for?’

‘Let’s have scrambled eggs and it’s just me and you. Cameron has only just made a toasted sandwich.’

He spied the sandwich maker still in need of a bit of attention. ‘Want me to go ask him to clean up.’

‘No need, he’ll come out of his room soon enough.’

‘He’s still not helping out around here?’ Drew raised his hands when she shot him a look. ‘I know, it takes some longer than others.’

It was what she told Drew, Lauren and Freddie when they got too protective. They looked out for her and, never imagining anyone would ever again, it was a feeling she valued.

Last year they’d had Gill, nicknamed Rapunzel because of her hair that was so long she sat on it, until she got so angry one night she hacked it all off. She’d been someone Joy had never quite been able to help, and nobody had any idea where she’d gone off to. All Joy or the others knew was that one minute Joy was trying to coax her into helping with the chickens and the next, she’d taken money from Joy along with her credit card and they hadn’t heard a word since. Joy had cancelled the credit card and there hadn’t been too much financial damage, but it was losing out on helping her that had hit Joy the hardest. She hated failing Gill. She hated failing anyone. She’d done that too much for her liking and it was a part of her personality she wanted to beat with a stick whenever it came calling.

Drew wasn’t bad in the kitchen, and over soft and creamy scrambled eggs served with generous doorsteps of buttered toast, he told her all about his morning. It was what she loved, hearing voices fill the walls of the farmhouse, knowing the minutiae of the lives that had at one time had way too much drama. Hearing about the normal day-to-day stuff was like music to her ears.

‘I taught a group of school kids basic kayaking techniques,’ Drew shared, ‘and all of them took to it straight away. I’m already looking forward to the next session. I’ll lead a bit of a tour, they’ll love it.’ He tucked heartily into his food, always good to see from someone Joy looked out for. Cooking brought everyone together in this place she called home.

‘I’ll bet you’re a good teacher, you have patience, not something everyone is good at.’

‘Maybe I learned it from you,’ he grinned. ‘And I’ve needed patience, especially at the start when the business first launched. It’s hard to believe I’ve gone from leaflet drops to drum up business and operating from my jeep at random places, to buying my own premises by the River Brue.’

‘I always knew you could do it.’

‘Not without your help I couldn’t.’ He winked, this man, this proud owner of a kayaking enterprise that took people out on guided tours along the river soaking in the Somerset countryside or provided kayaks for people to take out privately. A man who’d been totally lost when Joy first welcomed him in to The Old Dairy, he’d found his footing not on dry land, but on the water.

Joy liked to believe every person she brought to The Old Dairy deserved another chance in life, just like Drew. And just like her. On her first visit all those years ago she’d been dishonest with the honesty box at the bottom of the driveway and caught by one of the owners. Rather than reporting her, Marjory and Ted had given Joy a roof over her head and the best chance to make something of herself after everything she’d been through. She’d gone from a skinny, mousy-haired young woman with an office job in her twenties to an almost-seventy-year-old grey-haired surrogate mother to more than a dozen young adults over the years, lover of cows, keeper of chickens and land owner. Her life had turned out well, all things considered, but the less said about that the better. As far as everyone here knew, she’d simply run away from home, stumbled upon this place and the respected Ted and Marjory and everything else had worked out. Nobody ever need know what else had gone before, because the shame would swallow her up whole if she let it.

Cameron schlepped into the kitchen as they were clearing up the lunch dishes.

‘The water’s still warm, mate.’ Drew indicated the sandwich toaster and the dirty iron plates that would need a good scrub.

‘So?’ Cameron, small round glasses with a smudge on them that didn’t seem to bother him, obediently in place just below a fringe that he’d cut himself yesterday, and not well, immediately leaped on the defensive.

‘So, you could use it to clear up your things,’ Drew suggested firmly but not horribly.

‘You’re not the boss of me.’

‘Just trying to help.’ Drew backed away from the sink and Joy assumed Cameron would ignore the request, but as Drew and Joy got back to discussing the paddleboards Drew was adding to the shed to introduce another water activity, out of the corner of her eye she saw Cameron slide the iron plates out of the sandwich maker and put them in the water.

It wasn’t long before he was complaining that the debris wouldn’t come off. Drew opened his mouth and Joy knew he was going to say something along the lines of it being far easier if you cleaned them straight away, so she put a finger to her lips to shush him.

‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ She was too soft some of the time, she knew, but most of what these young adults or even adults had in common when they first came here was a lack of love, an absence of empathy and understanding, and she knew that if she could give them some of that, as Ted and Marjory had given her, then she was paving the way to change. It hadn’t worked on Gill, but Joy had had more successes than failures, and that was what fuelled her determination.

Joy and Cameron and a plastic scrubbing brush between them got those iron plates free from muck and back to black, the way they should be, before Cameron headed back upstairs leaving a trail of crumbs from an oat biscuit Joy handed him. She’d leave him a while before she tackled requesting his help for anything else. She knew he loved the puppies, she’d seen him glance their way plenty of times, his body almost taking him over there to play with them before his head told him not to show emotions, no weakness, no feeling. And tonight Joy would be ready to go into battle again, encouraging him little by little, and she’d ask him to give the puppies their dinner. All he’d have to do was fill two big bowls with food, take it out to their pen, set them down and watch the pups go nuts in a feeding frenzy. These puppies had arrived just in time. They could be the magic ingredient to get Cameron to come out of his shell a bit and start to move forwards, she just knew it.

With Drew traipsing across the fields to find Freddie who’d be tending to one of his many veggie patches or in his greenhouse, Joy took herself back to the sitting room and her letter from Libby.

It was time to lose herself in correspondence from someone who hadn’t turned their back. Joy liked to think of it that way when in reality, Libby probably kept in touch because she’d never been told the truth.

And that was fine by Joy. She hoped it would stay that way.

She settled down in her favourite spot in the armchair next to the open window at the front of the farmhouse again and opened up the letter, but rather than relax and lose herself in her niece’s exciting new life on the other side of the world, her mouth went dry and a feeling of dread coursed through her body.

Libby was coming back to England, but not only that, she was coming here to see Joy. And rather than be excited, Joy couldn’t summon anything other than a fear she was about to lose the life she’d so carefully rebuilt.

What if Libby wanted to dig into the past? After all, she knew the family had disowned Joy, she’d been writing to her auntie without anybody else knowing, and now she was older, perhaps at long last Libby would question the reasons why Joy hadn’t been welcome in her life.

Joy’s hands shook as she dropped the letter onto her lap and stared out of the window, out past the gate, across the road to the fields beyond, the landscape she’d become so used to.

The landscape that might be about to alter all over again.

Was she about to lose everything?

‘Taxi!’

The yellow cab came to a halt and Libby ran from the sidewalk, yanked open the door and leaped inside before reciting her address. She was soaking wet, the New York summer a mix between stifling heat and heavy rains, or at least that’s the way it had been over the last week. She’d set out this morning to the city bathed in sunshine and hadn’t brought a coat, or an umbrella, and right now her chestnut hair with its natural highlights was stuck fast to the sides of her face as she shivered in the back of the cab.

Home at her apartment on the Lower East Side Libby jumped straight into the shower to wash the day away and warm up. It had been a crappy day too. She’d once loved her job as an actuary for a reputable insurance firm, she loved being suited up and chairing meetings, using her specialised maths knowledge and skills to analyse the financial consequences of risk. Her expertise had seen her head-hunted by several major firms and years ago when she first arrived in the Big Apple she’d have eaten every opportunity up. She’d operated on fast forward for the last five years, but as the zingy shampoo she used on her hair in the shower awakened her senses she realised that she was still just as lost as she’d been when she first arrived on American soil.

Her body wrapped in a towel and another towel twisted turban-style around her hair, Libby sat on the edge of her bed and picked up the photograph of her and her parents. It had been taken the year before her mum died and they were all laughing their heads off outside a perfumery in London’s Soho after her dad was accosted by an over-enthusiastic sales assistant who’d liberally sprayed him in something way too floral for a manager at a bank. He had meetings lined up all afternoon and both Libby and her mum had been in hysterics thinking of how he would have the entire room sneezing with the amount of fragrance on his shirt.

Libby ran a hand across the photograph in its frame before she put it back on the bedside table. It had been a happy day for the three of them, one of those simple days that didn’t involve anything more than beaming sunshine, a regular lunch and time well-spent together. But if Libby had known she’d only have twelve more months with her mother she would’ve taken a ton of shots that day and every one since, she’d have photographed her mum sitting in St James’s Park concentrating on the book on her lap, she’d have captured a picture of her with her eyes squeezed shut she was laughing so hard at the comedy show they’d been to in Brighton together the following month. Libby would’ve caught moments when her mum least expected her to be lurking with a camera, when she was baking for Christmas, flour in her hair and on the side of her face as she made the family favourite boozy Christmas sponge with a hidden mousse inside that Libby and her dad adored every year and wished she’d make more often.

All of those moments had disappeared in an instant, and the photographs she still had would freeze her mum, age sixty-five, forever.

Libby checked her watch. She had thirty minutes until she was supposed to meet friends on the corner of Canal Street. Looking out of the window, she noticed that at least the rain had stopped now. She’d planned to go out straight from work in her dark grey fitted and flared tailored dress, but instead she pulled on a more relaxed printed floral dress that finished just above her knee along with her favourite sequinned ballet flats and she transferred her purse and accessories to a more relaxed leather tote.

She couldn’t wait to meet friends and have a sympathetic ear or two after the day she’d had.

‘It’s just the two of us?’ she asked as she and Brandon, her boyfriend of eight months, headed to a restaurant she knew you needed reservations for.

‘I’m sorry, I should’ve told you.’ He pulled her to him and kissed her firmly on the lips. ‘I wanted you all to myself tonight.’

‘I suppose I can’t argue with that.’ She let him take her hand and lead her into the restaurant which was one of those lowly lit places, all hushed voices and candles in the centre of tables with wax dripping down the glass bottles they’d been pushed into.

Usually it was a group of six friends who met up and went out for dinner, and while she and Brandon had started off as friends, they’d become a couple somewhere along the way, moving faster than she would’ve liked. But he was a good guy, he was handsome and well-dressed, had a good job and seemed to put her first. Her friends thought she was crazy to have any doubts, so she stopped being frustrated that he’d changed tonight’s casual meet-up with a crowd of them for a romantic dinner for two, and confided in him about her dreadful day at the office.

‘It feels so good to get it all off my chest,’ she said after she’d told him everything, her frustrations rising to the surface.

‘Hey, any time, I’m here to listen.’ He took her hands across the table, which worked to calm her down. ‘What do you think of this place?’

‘It’s amazing, thank you for bringing me here.’ She felt so ungrateful when he was trying really hard to impress. But really she’d have been content with grabbing a burger from the Shake Shack and strolling through the park. It was Brandon who favoured fine dining, not her. He’d chosen tonight’s wine, the bottle of red he topped her glass up from now, a Merlot . . .