Afterwards House

Maud Applegarth came to Thistledown House to sell it. She stayed because somebody had to remember the cocoa.Freshly widowed and newly the owner of a crumbling Victorian boarding house she's never seen, Maud expects paperwork, damp, and a quick sale. What she finds is seven tenants who didn't quite finish their stories: a huntsman who can't sleep, a stepsister done playing the villain, a wolf who'd rather grow prize marrows than terrorise anyone, a gingerbread man slowly running out of time, and a goose who pays the rent in solid gold eggs.Then a damp, meticulous inspector from the Office of Narrative Continuity turns up with thirty days and a clipboard, and the news that every resident must prove they've built a life beyond the page — or be sent back to live their worst moment on a loop, forever, for the sake of a story that was never really about them.Maud has spent her whole life being sensible on other people's behalf. Now she has one month to fight for a houseful of people who were never supposed to get a second act — and to work out what, exactly, she's been putting off finishing in her own.The Afterwards House is a cozy, wry, deeply felt fantasy about what comes after "e;happily ever after,"e; for readers of Legends & Lattes and The House in the Cerulean Sea.