The Art of Letting Go: Or, How I Lost Control of My Guest House (and Maybe My Life)

When soft-spoken artist Sienna rents out her guesthouse, she expects polite guests and quiet weekends. But when one woman overstays her welcome, the line between hospitality and haunting begins to blur. Set in a sleepy garden full of secrets, this is a story about memory, mystery, and the spaces between who we are and who we were meant to be.

They say your home reflects your state of mind.

Which is ironic because for the last few months, my guesthouse has been occupied by a woman who wears long kaftans, hosts a book club for strangers I've never met, and has, quietly, mystifyingly, forgotten to leave.

She said she was here for a weekend. That was four months ago.

And now she's reading my journal aloud on a Thursday evening while holding court on a blanket under the lemon tree.

But maybe I should back up.

My name's Sienna. I'm 33, soft-spoken, and apparently too polite for my own good. I'm an artist who paints like I'm rewriting the past. I take the big guys, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, and I soften their edges, bending their brushstrokes into something gentler.

Into something more honest.

My version of "The Creation of Adam" has the two hands reaching for each other, not to give life, but to offer comfort. In "The Starry Night," I've painted tiny women sleeping in the swirls of the sky.

I don't copy. I reclaim. Or at least, I used to.

I live in the front house of a quiet property my parents left me when they moved to Scotland to open a secondhand bookstore-slash-scone café. They said they were following "the scent of wild thyme and ghosts in old books."

I think they just wanted something romantic to retire into. They left me the house like a goodbye note I hadn't asked for, but needed anyway.

The main house is mine.

The guesthouse became my side hustle. A charming little Airbnb I named "The Artist's Nook." It's where people come to write their novels, recover from breakups, or hide from their children with matching pajamas and herbal tea.

For the most part, it's been sweet.

There was Jacques, the French writer who stayed for a week and smoked on the porch like he was mourning 1892. He only ever wrote between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m., always by candlelight, and claimed that the scent of lavender made him weep.

On his last morning, he left a note tucked under his coffee mug.

"Never paint with apology, Sienna."

Before Jacques, there was a pair of retired botanists from another state.

They stayed for two weeks and left the entire guesthouse smelling faintly of mint and rosehips. They pressed wildflowers into my sketchbooks without asking, an invasion I found oddly tender, and gifted me a tin of chamomile on their last day.

"Your garden has trauma, Sienna," the woman said. "But it has promise, too."

And although I laughed at the phrasing, I knew exactly what they meant.

Then came Tilly.

Tilly arrived in mid-spring, trailing the sound of bangles and lemon-scented oil, with a wheelie suitcase that squeaked every third step. She wore long kaftans with dramatic prints, and a hat that looked like it belonged to a fortune-teller in a 1970s tarot deck. She brought banana bread that she swore was gluten-free but definitely wasn't.

"I'll just be two nights," she said, giving me a look that suggested we'd known each other in a past life.

She brought her own tea blend and packs of biscuits.

At first, I liked her. She complimented my artwork, told me my version of "Girl with a Pearl Earring" looked like someone who'd survive something unspoken. Her words stayed with me.

But then came her third night. And her fourth. She extended her stay casually, like asking for another spoonful of jam.

"I'm just in-between lives right now," she said, fluffing the guest pillows like they were hers.

I didn't stop her. Not then.

By the second week, Tilly was hosting a book club in my backyard.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, the kind of day where the air feels like it's holding its breath. I was halfway through mixing a new palette, honeyed sienna, soft plum, and a smoky lavender I hadn't yet named.

I'd been trying to replicate the sky just before it bruises into the evening. That was when I looked out the kitchen window and saw them, five women I'd never seen before, sitting in a circle beneath the lemon tree like they'd always belonged there.

They were perched on my patio chairs, sipping tea from mugs I was sure belonged to the main house.

Tilly sat at the center like a high priestess in a weather-worn kaftan, reading aloud from "The Bell Jar" with the slow, reverent cadence of someone conducting a séance. One woman was crying quietly, the kind of cry that doesn't need comforting, just company.

I stepped out, still holding my paintbrush.

"Oh, Sienna!" Tilly looked up, eyes gleaming. "Come join us, petal. We're just unpacking our ghosts."

There was something about the way she said we that made me feel like a guest in my own life.

I didn't join them.

Instead, I turned around, walked back inside, and scrubbed my palette clean until the water ran gray.

Things began to shift.

I stopped painting.

It didn't happen all at once. It was subtle at first, the palettes didn't excite me, the brush bristles felt too stiff, and the colors looked dull, no matter how carefully I mixed them.

Every canvas I started felt stiff and wrong, like the surface was resisting me. I tried to paint my version of "Ophelia." I imagined her floating peacefully, reclaimed and radiant, but she wouldn't float.

No matter what I did, she just sank, her eyes half-closed like she'd given up long before the water reached her.

I painted over her. Then I stopped altogether.

"Get it together, Sienna," I told myself while staring at the ceiling one night. "How can you lose focus of who you are?"

But I didn't get it together. Instead, I sat in front of blank pages for hours. Sometimes I didn't even realize the light had shifted or that I'd missed lunch. I would run my fingers over dry brushes, waiting for a feeling that never came.

I forgot what they were for.

Sir Pudding, the cat and my confidant, refused to go near the guesthouse. He'd sit at the edge of the garden, tail twitching, watching the windows like he expected something, or someone, to emerge.

His eyes were always narrowed, always alert. I started to wonder if I should be too.

I hadn't been inside the guesthouse in days, but something tugged at me that afternoon. I'd started avoiding it, not sure what I'd find, or who I'd become if I stepped inside. Tilly was out, she said that she needed to get fresh peaches from the market.

A leather-bound, gold-embossed book was lying on the guesthouse coffee table. Inside was an inscription in my mother's handwriting:

"For when you're ready to remember."

I didn't remember ever owning it but it felt familiar. There was a page marked with a dried violet.

Was this my journal? Why didn't I remember the inscription? Or the violet?

"You are not meant to live in the echoes of other people's lives. You are meant to be the sound."

"Trust you, Mom," I muttered. "Trust you to give me something in riddles."

I closed the book.

I confronted Tilly in the garden two days later.

She was pruning my rosemary bush with the kind of focus usually reserved for performing surgery or casting spells. Her hands were sure, gentle, reverent, as if she believed herbs could hold memory or speak if you listened closely enough.

She hummed as she worked, some old tune I couldn't place, something too familiar for comfort. The scent of rosemary and something citrusy clung to the air.

She wore my sunhat.

Not one like it, it was my sunhat. It was the one I kept hanging by the back door. She hadn't asked. She never did.

"Tilly," I said, careful but firm. "We need to talk. Please."

"You're going to ask me to leave," she said, not looking or sounding surprised.

"I am."

"Good," she nodded slowly, like she'd been expecting it. "You were starting to forget yourself."

"What does that mean?" I asked, though I already had a sick feeling in my stomach. I wasn't even sure if this was about the Airbnb money anymore.

Some of part of me wondered if she'd been here before, not just in the guesthouse but in the stories people told, a name never spoken, just a presence felt.

She dusted her hands on her dress like she'd just finished a job well done.

"I never meant to stay this long, but the house, and you... You needed someone to hold the place open," she said.

"For what?"

"For you, Sienna," she said. "To come back to it."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to laugh. But all I could think about was the painting I had ruined that morning. I'd tried to do a self-portrait, a quiet, simple thing. But it had turned into a blur of gray and black.

There was no softness, no warmth, and absolutely no recognizable expression. It was just made up of frantic strokes and deep shadows. I had stared at it for 20 minutes before tearing it off the easel and throwing it face-down in the sink.

"But why me?" I stared at her now, confused, unnerved, and deeply tired.

Tilly smiled softly, almost like she pitied me.

"I've had more money than I knew what to do with. But I've never found a place that felt like home. Until now. This house breathes like someone I used to love. And you, you reminded me of a version of myself I forgot to nurture."

I couldn't tell if it was flattery or prophecy.

"Don't you ever feel like this house is waiting for you to remember something?" she touched my wrist gently.

She said she would leave the following weekend. But not before hosting one last book club.

That Thursday, the backyard filled again. Tilly insisted the chairs be arranged in a sort of spiral this time.

"It's more ancient, more intuitive, Sienna," she said, waving off my attempt to straighten the folding table.

She'd laid out a faded quilt, scattered tarot cards on it, and perched a candle in a teacup filled with salt. When I asked if it was for ambience, she looked at me over her glasses.

"Protection, my darling," she said. "This house has moods."

Earlier that day, she asked me, no, told me, to make her pumpkin pie and sticky chicken wings for the gathering.

"I've been craving it all week," she said breezily. "Something earthy and something messy. Like closure."

It made no sense. I had no idea where the craving came from or why I said yes. But I found myself in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, roasting pumpkin cubes and watching sugar turn to syrup. I even put rosemary in the chicken glaze.

For her. For the ritual. For reasons I didn't fully understand.

By dusk, the women began arriving. Some I thought I recognized, others I didn't. Or maybe they were the same ones from before, just blurred around the edges, like a memory retold too often.

They sat in the spiral, mugs steaming, tarot cards face-down in front of them, as if they'd been waiting for this exact moment.

Tilly sat in the center, cross-legged, holding a worn leather book.

I stood at the edge of the patio, watching.

"Sienna," she called gently, lifting the book like it was holy. "We're reading from this tonight."

My chest tightened.

It was my journal.

She opened it to a page I hadn't shared, one I didn't even remember writing. Her voice, as she read, was calm and clear.

"Sometimes I think if I disappeared, no one would notice for days."

The woman beside her inhaled sharply. Another nodded, her eyes shining.

"I've felt that," she whispered.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to rip the book from Tilly's hands. I wanted to storm into the kitchen and throw the sticky wings across the lawn. But instead, I sat down.

The tea beside me was still warm. The words, hearing them spoken, felt different. They weren't shameful anymore. They were just true.

Tilly closed the book and looked directly at me.

"You're not lost," she said. "You're just not the version of yourself you were meant to be."

She left three days later, just as promised.

No note. No dramatic goodbye. There was just an empty mug in the sink, a faint trace of lavender oil in the guesthouse, and the distinct feeling that the silence she left behind had weight.

I stood at the threshold for a while after she'd gone, half-expecting her to come back for something she'd forgotten.

But she didn't.

The guesthouse feels empty now. But I've started painting again.

It came back gradually, first as a pull toward the easel, then as a whisper of color in my hands. Yesterday, I began something new. A reinterpretation of "Judith Beheading Holofernes," except this time, Judith isn't violent.

There's no sword. No blood. She's cradling her own shadow, holding it like a memory or a mirror. Her expression is soft. Tired, but full. And where the blade should be, I painted a gold streak that runs from her wrist to her ribs.

She looks like she's finally forgiven herself. Or maybe that's just what I needed to see.

I opened the journal that Tilly had read at her book club. Another page was marked. I don't know how she knew I would turn to it next. But I did.

"The art was never the escape. It was the map to your growth."

I sat with that for a long time.

But the feeling stays with me. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's Tilly.

Or maybe it's me, stepping into the version of myself I hadn't dared to paint before.

It's been a few months.

The air's cooler now, with that crisp, early-autumn sharpness that smells like endings and ripe fruit. I've planted marigolds near the guesthouse. They're holding up better than I expected.

This morning, my newest guest arrived.

Her name is Matilda.

She's lovely, warm, thoughtful, and maybe a little distracted in a poetic way. She's a writer working on a book about the liminality of worlds, as she put it.

"The spaces between things," she explained, as I handed her the spare key. "I write about what slips through, what we feel but can't prove... the mirrors that don't quite show our faces back the same way."

There was something familiar about her smile, though I was certain we'd never met.

Still, I made tea and cut into a strawberry and lemon sponge cake. She insisted we sit in the garden to enjoy it. She said that the light felt "gentler" there.

We spoke quietly between bites and sips, the kind of conversation that settles behind your ribs.

I told her about the botanist couple and about Jacques.

"He once quoted Jean Rhys to me," I said. "It went like, 'I have eyes that are really mirrors, look into them and you will see yourself.'"

She loved that.

I didn't mention Tilly.

Sir Pudding stayed curled on the windowsill, eyes narrowed in that wary way that used to mean something. But when Matilda unpacked, he didn't flinch. He just blinked, slow and knowing, like he recognized something I didn't.

"Would you like a reading?" Matilda asked suddenly, setting down her teacup with both hands.

"A what?" I looked up.

She reached into her tote and pulled out a velvet pouch. It was the same tarot deck Tilly used. The same shimmered backs. The same worn feel in the air.

"Just a small one. A quick one," she smiled. "Before I settle in."

She began to shuffle. The wind stirred the rosemary. A feather skittered across the table.

Matilda paused, her thumb resting on the edge of the first card. She tilted her head.

"You've done this before," she said, not as a question.

I didn't move. The feather dropped at my feet.

"I think so," I said softly. "And I'm ready to see what it means this time."

The wind shifted. The rosemary brushed against my ankle. Somewhere inside the house, a page turned.

If you've enjoyed this story, here's another one for you: When a casual comment at a family dinner cuts deeper than anyone realizes, Danica is forced to confront the silence she's carried for over a year. Set against a backdrop of quiet grief and unspoken love, this is a story about what we hold, what we hide, and what it takes to finally let go.

This work is inspired by real events and people, but it has been fictionalized for creative purposes. Names, characters, and details have been changed to protect privacy and enhance the narrative. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

The author and publisher make no claims to the accuracy of events or the portrayal of characters and are not liable for any misinterpretation. This story is provided “as is,” and any opinions expressed are those of the characters and do not reflect the views of the author or publisher.