She could hear her father and Davey in the laun-dry-room door and backed up a step, releasing her grip on Andrew. He lowered his arms and rolled back on his heels, his eyes half-closed. She met his suspicious gaze straight-on, but had the uncomfortable feeling he could see right into her brain and pull out the image stored there of the yellowed skull lying in the silty dirt of her cellar.

"I came by to remind you to bring a key to the carriage house." His voice was quiet, dead calm, his eyes still half-closed, still appraising her. "We'll need to look after the kittens while you're in Boston."

"Yes. Of course." Not that he couldn't get in, easily, without a key.

"You sure you're okay?"

"I think so." She sniffled, wrinkling up her nose to prove it was the dust. "I must be allergic to something down there."

Andrew said nothing, but his expression was serious, even humorless. He knew she was hiding something. She could feel it. And here she'd just presented him with another lie he could chalk up against her. But what did she really know about him? If there was a dead body in the cellar, wasn't it possible he knew about it? Or Harl did? She had to be careful.

Davey and her father lumbered up out of the cellar, and Tess could feel the blood rush to her face when they saw Andrew back in her yard. They'd jump to conclusions. They always did.

But Andrew retreated quickly, though not quite rudely.

Tess turned to her father. Obviously he and Davey hadn't stumbled onto any skeleton. If they had, they'd have said something by now. She took this as a positive development. "Pop, why don't I get you and Davey something cold to drink?"

She brought out cold sodas, and they walked out to the main road and across to the water, down to the wet, packed sand. It was low tide, the surf gentle, quiet in the late-day sun. Tess regarded the two men at her side with affection. They were the most prominent men in her life, constant, uncompromisingly honest. Her father was a longtime widower, Davey twice married, two old friends who worked hard and asked so little of her. She knew her father just wanted grandchildren and Little League games, and that Davey, who had grown kids of his own, would get in the dirt with them, show them how to hold the bat, the way he had shown Tess as a kid.

The problem was, she didn't have a man in her life. The men she met either didn't understand her father and Davey and the rest of the guys at Jim's Place, or they understood them too well. She didn't mind saying she wanted a relationship, but she wasn't going to settle for the wrong man just to have one. She knew she could be happy on her own. That had never been a question.

As for children-that was something else altogether. She was so young when her mother died, and there'd never been another maternal figure in her life. She didn't have a natural trust of her maternal instincts, didn't even know if she had any.

"You should have told me about this place," her father said. Davey had gone up ahead, his hands shoved in his pockets as he walked within inches of the water.

Tess nodded. "I know." She glanced over at him, this man who'd been by her side for so long. "You won't think I'm giving up on men if I decide to keep it?"

She was quoting his own words back to him, one of his most stubborn, most old-fashioned convictions that if a woman bought property, it meant she was giving up on having a man in her life. It was one thing to buy a house if she were widowed or divorced-but single? Never married? It was tossing in the towel, he'd told her at least a hundred times.

"Giving up? Nah. Not after meeting that Thorne guy."

Tess groaned. "Pop, if I decide to keep the carriage house, it won't be because of who lives next door."

He sighed, watching two gulls careen toward the shallow water before he replied. "Listen to me, Tess. You don't want to end up like me, all alone, or like Davey, with a couple of ex-wives hounding him for money all the time. Getting a place of your own- yeah, it's like saying you give up, you don't care if you find someone." He added frankly, "Men can sense that, you know."

"They cannot."

"Mark my words." He grabbed up a clamshell and flung it into the surf. "It's that last little prick you went out with. He threw you off."

"He didn't throw me off. He was a jerk. He'd check the stock market when we had lunch. No more investment bankers for me."

She smiled, well aware she wouldn't change how her father thought about relationships, or about her. But there was more to his concern than an old-fash-ioned outlook on women and marriage, only they'd always avoided going that deep. It was too painful, not just for her, but for him, too. She was terrified of motherhood, terrified of dying too soon, leaving behind children who loved and needed her. Not because they couldn't go on, but because they did.

She pushed away the thought, as she always did.

Davey swung back to them, obviously sensing what she and her father had been talking about. "One day, Tess, you won't have to worry about your old man getting in your business. The two of us'll be on our walkers in the home."

"Davey Ahearn in a home?" Tess laughed. "You tell me one home in metropolitan Boston that would have you. No way. You're not moving from the neighborhood until you go to the great big plunger in the sky."

As she turned to head back, she saw Andrew out on the beach with his daughter. They were throwing a Frisbee, and Tess could hear Dolly's squeals of laughter above the surf and gulls, the hum of the wind. She imagined them thirty years from now, Dolly as a grown woman out on the beach with her father, who was still alone, who'd sacrificed so much for his daughter.

Dinner was on the back porch. Hamburgers off the grill, salad, watermelon and chocolate chip cookies from a local bakery. Tess drove over, having decided she'd head straight back to Boston after dinner. A night in familiar surroundings would clear her head. She felt less of a sense of urgency now that her father and Davey hadn't found anything in the cellar, more convinced she really had conjured up a skull last night. Or a ghost.

Harl didn't stay for dinner, instead taking his plate back to his shop, muttering that he had work to do. Dolly tugged on Tess's hand and whispered, "Harl always has work to do."

Tess laughed, knowing the feeling. "That's good, isn't it? You wouldn't want him to be bored."

"Chew-bee thinks he's a bank robber."

"Who?"

Andrew set a plate of grilled hamburgers on the table. Function beat out charm on the back porch, but the setting on the warm May evening, the scent of lilac, grass and sea, was all the atmosphere Tess needed. He said, "Chew-bee is one of Dolly's pretend friends. She sometimes says things Dolly knows she shouldn't say."

"Harl used to be a policeman," Dolly explained to her company. "I told Chew-bee, but she doesn't listen."

Tess understood pretend friends. As father and daughter argued back and forth, she noted that Andrew never made Dolly say that Chew-bee wasn't real. He never imposed his own concrete way of thinking on her, which was one reason, Tess thought, Dolly exercised her creative imagination so freely, something first-grade teachers wouldn't necessarily appreciate. Tess liked the open way the two talked to each other. She'd never gotten along well with controlling, dictatorial men. Being opinionated was something else altogether. She knew the difference between a man with strong opinions and one who wanted to control everyone in his life.

But she didn't just notice Andrew's manner with his daughter, she also noticed how he moved, the way his eyes changed with the light, the play of muscles in his arms, every tiny scar. Part of her wanted to blame lack of sleep and the strangeness of her first weekend in Beacon-by-the-Sea for making her hyperaware of her surroundings. But another part of her knew it was more than that, wanted it to be.