They passed through a formal dining room with deep-red walls, a long table with seating for ten, and an antique sideboard lined with colorful plates and pitchers. It was like something from a magazine, everything polished and picture-perfect.
The kitchen was large and almost startlingly bright, with a bank of windows looking out over a pebbled beach and a small placid cove. Beyond the cove, a blue-gray sea stretched toward the horizon, flat and shimmery under the autumn sun. A farm table of scrubbed pine sat in front of the windows, adorned with a simple vase of sunflowers. On the opposite wall, a hutch lined with stoneware pitchers gave the room a French country feel, in stark contrast to the more formal living and dining rooms.
“So you’re Ethan,” Marian said, running her amber eyes over him with a peculiar intensity.
“I am.”
“You look like your father. He was always a good-looking boy. You’re taller, though. Zachary says you’re teaching at the University of New Hampshire and that you’ve written several books. Dickey must have been so proud of you, following in his footsteps. A teacher and a writer.”
Ethan frowned. “I don’t remember us talking about my work.”
“You didn’t. Zachary did a little checking after he spoke to you, to make sure you were . . . aboveboard. A pretty basic guy was how he described you. Thirty-two. Professor. Writer. Divorced. No children.”
“What, no credit report?”
Marian’s lips curled faintly. “Don’t bristle. Zachary’s just protective. And it seems only fair, with you knowing all my secrets, that I know at least a little about you—to level the playing field, as it were.” She looked at Ashlyn then, assessing her coolly. “You’re the friend. The one who found the books.”
“Yes,” Ashlyn said awkwardly. “I’m Ashlyn. Ashlyn Greer.” She remembered the books suddenly and, after a bit of fumbling, extracted them from her tote.
Marian eyed them almost warily, her hands pinned to her sides, as if she were afraid to even touch them. “Put them over there,” she said finally. “On the hutch.”
Ashlyn did as she was told, placing the books beside a blue-and-white spatterware bowl, then pulled out the packet of cards and letters and laid them on top. She exchanged an uncomfortable glance with Ethan as Marian proceeded to prepare the tea, equipping a lacquered tray with cups and saucers, and a plate of sugar-dusted cookies. The tension was palpable as the minutes spun out, marked only by the steady ticktock of the clock above the stove.
When the tea was finally ready, Marian lifted the tray and nodded toward a pair of french doors. “Get that, will one of you? It’s too cold to go out on the deck, but the view’s almost as nice on the porch, and it’s much warmer.”
The porch was fashioned entirely of glass, like a greenhouse, and ran nearly the full length of the house. Ashlyn went still as she took in the view, a stunning vista of sea and sky. She hadn’t realized the back of the house hovered out over the water. The realization left her a little dizzy. “It’s like standing at the edge of the world,” she said with undisguised awe. “It’s breathtaking.”
Marian’s face softened into a near smile. “It’s why I bought the place. I glassed in the porch so I could enjoy it all year round.”
They settled at a white wicker table with chairs covered in floral chintz. Marian filled three pretty china cups and handed them around. “Help yourself to cream and sugar, and the cookies are fresh from the bakery downtown.”
Another awkward silence fell, this one marked by the clinking of spoons as they quietly doctored their tea. Ashlyn had just reached for a cookie when Marian set down her spoon and turned her gaze on Ethan.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t at either of your parents’ funerals. Dickey and I had fallen out by the time your mother got sick, but I would have been there for him if I had known. And then he got sick. I was out of the country when he died. I didn’t find out until I got back and a friend mentioned seeing it in the paper. If I hadn’t been so pigheaded . . . I didn’t know you at all, but I felt so badly. I should have at least called.”
“It was as much my fault as yours,” Ethan said. “It honestly never crossed my mind to get in touch with you. Growing up, you were just a name. But I knew you and my father were close for a while.”
“We were.” She sighed, as if the memory pained her. “We were very close. He was always better than the rest of us. Even as a boy. And dependable. That’s why we ended up reconnecting after I came back from France. I needed a favor, so I looked him up.”
“What kind of favor?”
“There was a portrait of my mother that used to hang in our dining room. She was wearing a deep blue gown with a spray of lilies pinned to her shoulder and her hair was all done up. It disappeared not long after my father sent her to Craig House. My sister claimed not to know what happened to it, but I didn’t believe her. It irked me to think she might have it squirreled away someplace. So I asked him to do a little poking around. He never found it, but he called a few weeks later—to ask me for a favor. He was about to graduate from college and he’d met someone he was crazy about. But my sister didn’t approve.”
“My mother,” Ethan said quietly.
“Catherine, yes. He was head over heels, poor boy, but his mother had someone else in mind. Someone more . . . suitable. I was the only person he knew who’d ever stood up to the family and he thought I might have some advice on how to navigate the situation.”
“And did you?”
“I told him to walk away—to run if necessary. From them, from the money, from whatever it was they were holding over him. I told him to screw the Mannings—pardon my French—and follow his heart, since he was apparently the only one of us who actually had one. I’m glad he found happiness. Heaven knows not many of us did.”
Ashlyn had been quiet, content to hang back and observe, but Marian’s last remark struck a slightly false note. Richard hadn’t been the only member of the Manning clan with a heart. She could still feel the memory of Belle’s echoes in her fingers, the way they had arced through her the first time she touched Forever, and Other Lies, the heartbreak so raw it had made the book hard to hold. But it wasn’t her place to say so.
Ethan looked awkward holding his teacup and saucer in front of him, uncomfortable and out of place. But his smile was comfortable, genuinely warm. “Thank you. He and my mother both spoke fondly of you, but I’ve never heard the full story.”
Marian took a cookie from the plate and broke off a small piece, then brushed the crumbs from her fingers. “He brought Catherine to meet me a few weeks later. She was so lovely, and she was obviously crazy about him. I told him not to be an idiot, that when it was right it was right and he shouldn’t wait for anything. Or let anything come between them.”
“She hated that you and my father fell out. But I never knew what happened.”