The Borrowed Cottage on Lake Windermere

When Sarah Thornton agreed to house-sit a seventeenth-century cottage on the shores of Lake Windermere in England's Lake District, the owner left just one instruction: "Love this place the way I love it." At first, Sarah thought she could do whatever she pleased. She was alone, after all. But something shifted the morning she found the owner's journal on the kitchen shelf — decades of entries about every stone repaired, every garden bed tended, every windowpane replaced by hand.…