Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 122206 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122206 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
It was perfect, but I still didn’t understand how it was only nine hundred and fifty euros a month.
It could have made double that amount easily, maybe even triple, with the location alone. Dublin was a high-traffic county. It was the reason I chose to come here. More people meant it was easier to get lost amongst them, but because there were so many people, housing was stretched thin. The rent was sky-high, but Slater Property Development, the company who built and owned The Peak complex, didn’t seem to care about that. They didn’t advertise their prices anywhere that I could find online.
I only found out what the rent would be once I came to the private viewing by appointment. I met my landlord, Mr Slater, and he personally gave me a tour as he read my application. He said he lived in the building and would personally meet each of his tenants so he knew who he was sharing a roof with. To me, that made perfect sense.
Mr Slater was a man who I found difficult to read at first glance. He suffered from awful scarring that showed on every viewable bit of skin. They weren’t burn scars, as far as I could tell, just severe scarring in the forms of jagged slashes and risen welts, but intimidating looks aside, he was a very nice man to talk to once he began the tour.
When he smiled, it completely put me at ease.
When he had approved my application at the end of our tour and our short conversation, I was so surprised that I let out a little squeal and clapped my hands together, making him huff a breath that sounded a lot like a chuckle to me. He asked me where he could post my lease to, so I told him the address of the hostel where I was currently staying in the City Centre. The man took one look at me, then googled the hostel on his phone.
With wide grey eyes, he told me I was to get my things and move into the apartment right away. He gave me my apartment’s personal entry code—each tenant had their own code because the doors were electronic—and told me he’d put my lease in my post box in the lobby the next day. I just had to email him my bank details and return the signed lease to the lobby desk for him and keep a copy for myself.
That was twelve hours ago.
I didn’t bring much from Carlow with me other than a suitcase with a few different outfits and a framed picture of me and my granda. It was my only real possession, my most prized one, too. My granda had been the most wonderful, respectful, and loving man I had ever known. He died when I was ten, and it wasn’t long after his death that my whole life changed … for the worst.
I shook my head, clearing my thoughts.
After I left Mr Slater’s company, I returned to the hostel in town where I was staying, gathered my few belongings, and left. Over the past five years at home in Carlow, I had developed a plan. Living with my physically abusive, alcoholic father and emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend was killing my soul. I had never known my mother because she’d left Daddy and me not long after my birth, then died a couple of years later by suicide. She and Daddy never married. Once Granda died from natural causes and I was all alone with Daddy, I learned just how different men could be.
They weren’t all gentlemen like my granda.
Daddy had kept me on our farm for most of my life. He allowed me a third-level education in business studies, but only at the local community college so I didn’t have to travel far. He didn’t want me to develop my own aspirations because he needed me to help him run the farm. “Helping” meant I ran the farm by myself, and Daddy reaped the profits. I didn’t do physical labour with our animals, that was down to the hired farmhands, but I worked the desk jobs of multiple people and all without pay.
Five years ago, I had been smacked around during one of Daddy’s drunken furies for the last time. He had broken my arm that night and battered my face into a swollen, bruised mess. Those blows to my head were, in a way, my beginning. I had had enough of that life and wanted out.
I dealt with all of the money on the farm, but Daddy wasn’t stupid. He was educated in business too and had a degree just like mine. The only thing he did care about was money so I had to start taking unsolicited wages discreetly. That meant I had to take small amounts of cash and tuck it away for safekeeping without anyone ever knowing. Over the years, I had managed to get away with saving three thousand, seven hundred and ninety euros. I was sure I could have taken much more, but I was terrified of being caught, so I kept what I took to a minimum.