Time Will Tell Read Online Free

ahead? She frowned. The only ‘if’ was around finance.
    It was a damn good deal – a no-brainer as Barbara and then David had pointed out. They’d even offered to loan her some money if she needed it. And they were soon to be quite flush thanks to David’s father’s recent death. It was very good of them to offer, but of course Emily could never accept money from her friends.
    The actual cost wasn’t really the problem – she could manage the first year’s payment and then had time to gather the next. The problem lay in what happened after that. The house would need extensive renovation. Most of it could probably be done over time, but some things like the roof needed replacing as soon as possible. That would be costly.
    One decent hail storm and she’d be well and truly stuffed. There were pinholes in the roof that let the sun shine through onto the verandah – who knew how bad the main roof sheets were? She stared down at the rusty iron and asked no one in particular to hold it all together.
    And what if two months down the track the electricity shat itself and the whole place needed to be re-wired?
    She’d have to find some way to make money in the absence of a job, which seemed to be as rare as hen’s teeth at the moment. She was pretty sure selling jam at a Melbourne market wouldn’t cut it, no matter how good the jam and how swanky the market. Anyway, the main fruiting season was almost over. She’d have to wait until April for the figs to be ripe. She could do orange marmalade, but oranges wouldn’t be ripe for ages yet either. There had to be some other way.
    She told herself it wasn’t just about proving her mother wrong; it was about proving herself right – that she’d made the right decision leaving John, and that she could be successful in her own right, without the tag of ‘John Stratten’s wife’ hanging around her neck. She didn’t want the label of ‘wife’ at all. Possibly forever.
    Emily sighed. If only she were more of a risk-taker. Plenty of people would just jump in and worry about all the boring details later. But Emily wasn’t like that, and she doubted she ever would be. Of course she’d signed John’s financial settlement without any thought, but that was different. She took a deep breath.
    Maybe Jake would have some ideas – he seemed pretty grounded and cautious. Emily found it odd that she was okay with the thought of discussing her poor financial situation with him, a relative stranger.
    She didn’t think she’d ever have such a conversation even with her cousin Liz, and they’d known each other for ever. But Liz tended to be a bit critical and blunt, and had hurt Emily quite badly a few times. And if Liz discussed it with Aunty Peggy, she’d tell Enid, and then there’d be a whole conference of people telling her what and what not to do.
    Emily took another deep breath and marched on. Grace ran on ahead with her nose to the ground, following the scents of the early-morning rabbits, foxes, and wild cats.
    Instead of following the creek bed straight back down to the house, she turned towards the outbuildings that were to be included in the subdivision.
    What would she do with a smelly old shearing shed, she wondered, peering through a window so grimy it was almost a mirror. Nothing for a long, long time, she concluded. There was no point going inside and beginning to dream of what it could be turned into.
    Next to the shearing shed was a smaller shed with a set of double wooden doors, their grain wide and grey in colour – signs of paint long gone. The door opened stiffly but easily enough, its hinges issuing a deep metallic protesting groan. A raised slab of concrete with large rusting bolts standing up out of it sat on a dirt floor stained dark by many years of oil and fuel spills.
    The old generator room, Emily surmised, from the days before the main power