Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Present Day
T he fact that Rose still ran forty-five miles a week at the age of fifty-two was nothing the Salt Sisters let her forget.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Hilary said during a yoga class in early August, flinging her head back as she spread her fingers across the mat. “My bones ache in the middle of the night if I walk too far on the beach. You’re only three years younger than me!”
“It’s just what I like to do.” Rose laughed. “Trust me. If I could stay sane and not run, I would. But it’s better than therapy. I swear.”
The Nantucket Historic Society Yoga Center teacher gave them a look that meant shush. Rose giggled and re-focused on her stretch, drawing her arms out on either side and adjusting the way her weight sat on her hips. Beside her, Hilary was long and slender, evoking the elegance of her mother, the famous actress Isabella Helin. Rose’s heart swelled with love for her. It had been twenty years since Rose had accidentally met Stella and Hilary. Twenty years since the narrative of her life had staggered off a cliff.
But Hilary had invited Rose into her home that summer. Rose had regrouped. She’d discovered her breath.
Not long after that, Hilary founded the Salt Sisters—a group of women who came together in grief; women who came together to support one another with open hearts and open minds. No matter what happens. By then, Rose had nobody. She ran to the Salt Sisters with her arms outstretched.
So many years later, Rose was dizzy with gratitude and had so many best friends in the Salt Sisters to call her own. Never could she have imagined her life going so well, especially after everything that happened.
Thirty minutes later, the yoga teacher said, “Namaste,” and opened the doors to let them free. Rose and Hilary rolled up their mats and padded into the clear blue day. Rose had needed the stretch and strength-training. She’d been running herself ragged lately, stretching out her legs for farther and farther miles, opening her heart. What are you running from? she sometimes caught herself asking. But she didn’t know. She just liked to put distance between herself and her home. She just liked to dig into the depths of her thoughts and figure things out.
Not that I’m any closer to understanding who I am or what I want, even at fifty-two.
Maybe that will be the journey of the rest of my life.
Hilary and Rose decided to grab lunch at a little Italian restaurant with to-die-for Mediterranean salads. It was just past one thirty, and the sun towered in the summer sky. Hilary was talking about her new boyfriend— a man she’d met when she’d worked as a costume designer for an indie film. They had plans to cook tonight and watch a film, apparently. Rose felt her heart bruise. It was a consistent reminder of the fact of her life: she was doomed to live out the rest of it alone.
Not that Rose hadn’t tried to date over the years.
Hilary poured her a glass of ice water and gave her a look that meant she could read Rose’s mind. “What happened with that guy? What was his name? Roger?”
Rose snorted and raised the glass of water in a salute. “After some very light internet stalking, I figured out Roger has a wife and no fewer than six children.”
Hilary winced. “That’s the third guy this summer, isn’t it?”
“The thing is, men used to be craftier about cheating,” Rose said. “Now, it’s insulting that he wanted to cheat on his wife with me, and he was unwilling to hide it. We’re in the age of social media. We’re in the age of Google. It took me ten seconds to figure out where he went to college, where he and his wife got married, and the names of his six kids.”
Hilary sighed and rubbed her temples. Like many of the other Salt Sisters, both of them had been cheated on in the past. They agreed it was a perpetual metaphorical splinter, a pain they always felt in their big toe that they couldn’t quite get out.
“Don’t feel bad for me,” Rose ordered Hilary. “You know how awful it feels to be on the receiving end of that.”
“I know. I do.” Hilary winced. “I just can’t help but feel that somebody special is going to come sweep you off your feet.”
“Unfortunately, he won’t be able to catch me. I run too fast,” Rose quipped.
After lunch, Rose said goodbye to Hilary and dipped into a local woodworker shop to chat with the owner about a potential sale. Charlie, the woodworker, knew Rose well and always stocked spare odds and ends for her, knowing she was apt to poke her head in and see what he couldn’t use. Together, they piled fifteen pounds of wood into the back of her truck and secured it with pink bungee cords. Rose paid in cash at the register and chatted with Charlie about his recent sale—a gorgeous secretary desk he’d hand detailed for a very rich client.
“Can I take a peek?” Rose begged.
Charlie led her into the back so she could investigate “his pride and joy.” Rose knew he’d charged the client eighty-five thousand dollars for it.
“She’s coming to pick it up this afternoon,” Charlie said sadly, walking a circle around the piece. “It’s like somebody taking a piece of my soul out of my body and taking it home.”
Rose puffed out her cheeks and tried to engage with every little unique detail on the staggering secretary's desk. Although she’d been among the Nantucket elite—and a dear friend of the wealthy Hilary Salt for twenty years—it was often still difficult for her to take herself out of her small-town Mississippi mindset and make peace with the fact that the wealthy threw their money around like that.
“Did she show you where in the house she’s going to put it?” Rose asked.
Charlie nodded and placed his hands on his hips. “It’s a gorgeous room. Soulless, though. ”
“It won’t be soulless once this finds its home there,” Rose assured him.
Something in the corner of Rose’s eye caught her attention. She twisted back toward a bulletin board stretched across the wall in Charlie’s woodworking room. Yellowed papers hung with photographs of some of Charlie’s tremendous work over the years, plus photographs of Charlie and his new wife, Julia Copperfield, his high school sweetheart. On the far right was a larger pamphlet on which a picture of an old and crumbling house was printed.
Rose’s heart seized with recognition. She was drawn to it. There, in front of the pamphlet, she read the listing: FOR SALE - NEEDS WORK. They wanted five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it, which seemed outrageous for its state. But still. But still, she couldn’t believe it was finally for sale.
She felt as though she was levitating.
Charlie came up beside her and followed her gaze.
“Who gave you that flyer?” Rose asked. Her voice shook.
“Julia hung it up,” Charlie said, speaking of his wife. “She gets romantic about old, abandoned places like that. After it burned down when we were teenagers, we used to drive by and try to get in.”
“But there were guard dogs,” Rose remembered.
Charlie cocked his head. “I didn’t realize you were already on the island by then.”
“I’d just arrived when it happened,” Rose said.
She didn’t say, It burned down the day I got here. It was too weird. Too convenient.
“It must have been ’92?” Charlie said.
“It was 1993,” Rose said because the date was burned into her mind forever. “June 16.”
Charlie whistled. “Good memory.”
“Does your wife want to buy it? Is that it?”
Charlie laughed. “I don’t know. Probably not. She has so much on her plate with the publishing company. I can’t imagine she’d want to add a huge fixer-upper like that.”
Rose’s heart pumped.
“If only someone who was really good with materials like wood and stone could buy it and fix it up,” Charlie said, giving Rose a side-eye and knowing look.
“Ha.” Rose snorted.
“You should at least make an appointment to see the inside,” Charlie urged her. “Maybe it isn’t as bad as it seems?”
“Maybe.” Rose swallowed the lump in her throat and stepped away from the pamphlet. Don’t you dare think about it, she thought. Put it to rest.
But of course, the minute she returned to her truck, there was no question of where she was headed. Rose slammed her foot on the gas, blared the radio, and felt frantic and alive in ways she hadn’t in years, decades. She hated the idea of “signs,” but she couldn’t escape the knowledge that that pamphlet had been one. A manifestation.
Rose drove past the old Walden Estate and cut back beyond the forest that separated the two properties. Sure enough, in front of the old stone mansion was a massive FOR SALE sign with a phone number matching the pamphlet in Charlie’s workshop.
Nobody had lived at the property for many years by now, and it showed. The forest had begun to crawl toward the mansion, sprawling around it, flailing its limbs toward the cracked or glassless windows. The roof of the ancient gazebo along the wild stretch of beach had sunken in, and it looked as though the columns on the main house’s porch were ready to crumble at any moment. Who would ever want to buy this place? Rose wondered.
The property itself was gorgeous, with nearly a quarter of a mile of private white beach—a beach that needed to be cleaned and cleared, but a beach nonetheless. If the house wasn’t there in the first place, they probably would have demanded far more than the current asking price. The house was in the way.
Rose knew that whoever ended up with the property would ultimately have the house bulldozed.
Hunger spiked along Rose’s tongue, but it wasn’t traditional hunger. It was something else. An urgent desire for something. A need. Rose got out of her truck and imagined herself striding through the gate and opening the door. She imagined claiming space for herself in that old estate—that estate that still carried so many secrets within its crumbling walls.
There was still so much Rose didn’t know.
There was still so much Rose craved to know.
But Rose had tried desperately to put these mysteries to bed for the previous thirty-one years. She’d felt doomed to never understand them. She’d felt at the mercy of time.
Rose stood there next to her truck. When the wind picked up and shifted tree limbs that shielded much of the property, a slice of sunlight came over her face and blinded her.
Nothing is stopping you from doing whatever you want, she suddenly thought.
Rose grabbed her cell and called her financial planner. She had a financial planner these days after being the kind of woman who’d worked herself to the bone to get where she was. She’d never received a handout.
“Good afternoon, Becca,” Rose said with an uncertain smile. “I have a proposition. It’s up to you to tell me if I’m crazy or not.”
“Uh-oh,” Becca said. She was accustomed to Rose’s crazy ideas. She was accustomed to advising her to slow down and think . “Let’s hear it.”
“I want to buy an old and historic house in Siasconset,” Rose said. “I want to buy it and flip it and transform it into an iconic bed-and-breakfast or hotel.” She grimaced. “Tell me I’m insane.”
Becca laughed. “I’ll run the numbers and call you back. Send the details?”
“It’s the old Grayson Estate,” Rose said, her voice shaking. “Five hundred and fifty thousand asking price.”
Becca let out another bark of laughter. Rose wondered if she saw right through her. Or had Becca told her financial adviser too much about her past?
“There’s never a dull moment with you, Rose,” Becca said. “I’ll call you back soon.”
They hung up. Rose stood alone at the edge of a property that still seemed to whisper I know all about you. It terrified Rose. But it terrified her so much that she felt she had to shut it up once and for all. And the only way to do that was through ownership. It was suddenly and tremendously clear.