The cottage was snug but it was what she wanted from the moment she saw it. The kitchen stretched the length of the back of the house where the bank of deepset windows caught the afternoon sun and flooded the room with light. There was an old fashioned wood burning stove at one end where one of her cats laid sprawled in the double pleasure of afternoon sunshine and the stove's banked heat. At the other end of the narrow room was a scarred wooden table and several mismatched chairs. And in between stretched a well-polished counter with only the breakfast dishes in the sink to disrupt the counrty kitchen neatness.
The rest of the house wasn't quite as neat with books and magazines stack haphazardly on the shelves and pictures of her friends and family in cheerful clusters on the whitewashed walls in the living room and the towels were crooked on bar in the bathroom that occupied the space that had once been the downstairs bedroom.
Valmae climbed the narrow stairs to the slope-ceilinged loft that was her bedroom with quick, careful steps. While she was gone, the enormous, ancient English Sheepdog that had been snoozing in front of the fire stood with dignified stiffness to go and examine this new person in what was obviously his domain.