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Starting Over at Acorn Cottage - Kate Forster



Merryknowe Bakery and Tearooms was the most visited shop in the tiny village, which wasn’t a point of pride – not when the village was dying a slow death from lack of visitors and actual inhabitants.
It wasn’t the prettiest village in Wiltshire and Rachel Brown tried to bring some elegance to the window of the bakery with her baked goods.
Sometimes she made cupcakes with pink iced roses or chocolate eclairs with satiny icing but today she had cream-filled butterfly cakes on the silver tray.
She watched the man and his child walk away from the shop until they were out of sight and she felt herself turn red when she remembered the way he’d looked at the bruise on her cheek. It’s not what you think, she had wanted to say to him.
She knew people thought it was a man who did this to her, but it wasn’t a man. Rachel had never been close enough to have a man touch her in passion or anger. There was no way she could even meet a man, not with what she had to do every day. She was a slave to her existence. Her routine was exactly the same day in or out.
Wake at four in the morning. Do the baking. Help upstairs. Wash and dress. Serve in the shop. Clean up the shop. Make dinner and clean up upstairs. Go to bed at nine and then do it all again the next day.
She had one day off a week where she had to do all the week’s washing and do the hoovering and order for the shop. She had to mop the floors downstairs with bleach and soap flakes and then she had to go through the accounts and make sure everything added up.
Maths was never her strength as a child and still now, numbers made her head fuzzy unless it was in direct relation to a recipe. But she had to get the accounts right, or she would be punished and the bruise on her cheekbone was testament to this fact.
Rachel pushed that memory out of her head and thought about the little girl who had come into her shop with her dad. She was so sweet, and Rachel wondered where her mother was, but she looked happy and well with her russet-coloured curls, sweet denim pinafore and green shoes. Rachel wished she could have shoes as pretty as the little girl’s.
At twenty-five years of age, she knew she looked older than other girls she had gone to school with. She hated the drab clothes she was told to wear, and the way her hair was lank and thin and pulled into a tight bun because it was how she was told to wear her hair, even though her scalp ached at the end of the day.
She hated the shoes she wore. Mother ordered them for her from the pharmacy because she had flat feet and was susceptible to heel spurs. They were rubber-soled and they sometimes made a squeaking sound when she walked and then she was yelled at for being too loud.


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