New Beginnings in Dream Valley by S J Crabb

Most new beginnings start with a change and this is mine.
The job application.
I saw it on my way to work this morning as I scrolled through the job adverts on my phone.
Writer requires a live-in assistant for six months to assist with admin and housekeeper duties.
The pay is more than I earn here in a year, and it sounds so tempting. I could work for six months and then take six months to find another job. This could be just the break I need, except for one niggling little doubt that just won’t go away.
The live-in part.
I mean, I’m not averse to trying new things but to head off to live with a man, at least I think it’s a man, in a strange place for six months, screams murdering psychopath. If my mother even knew I was thinking of it, she would have a heart attack and for every reason why I should go, a hundred other reasons why I shouldn’t are screaming at me.
Pushing away the job dream, at least until my train journey home, I sigh and turn my attention to the last will and testament of Annalise Turtle.
Annalise Turtle stays with me as I grab my coat and umbrella from the hook by the door. Turn my back on an office that drains the life from my soul every second I spend there and head out onto the busy pavement outside and start the commute home with several thousand other people who are in this rat race with me.
Is this really my life? Annalise Turtle would think me a fool. Despite how arduous my job is, I come across a superstar sometimes and none that shines as brightly as Annalise did when she was alive.
She lived alone in a huge mansion by the looks of things. Her property portfolio is admirable, and her art collection is currently on its way to Christie’s. She had it all, bar one thing. A family. There were many admirers, as my mum would say. I like to think of them as lovers.
Picturing her rather hedonistic lifestyle, drifting from Monte Carlo one month to jetting off to the Caribbean the next, with a different companion each time, makes me long for a life like that. I bet she never watched rain drip down the windowpane. She would probably run outside and dance in it. Yes, Annalise Turtle had the right idea and the fact she amassed her great fortune by marriage doesn’t even seem to matter to me. A steady stream of ex-husbands. The longest lasting just two years and the shortest a few weeks. A gold digger of the most successful kind, who finally enjoyed her wealth alongside young men with the same idea as she had. But she was shrewd and never married them. Preferring to play the field instead and make the most of her hard-earned fortune.
No, Annalise Turtle wasn’t content with normal, ordinary or boring. She wanted it all and I should take a leaf out of her crowded little black book and do something unconventional for the first time in my life before I turn thirty.
I’m going to apply for that job as soon as I get home.