“Are you going to tell me what the surprise is?” she asked.

“Wait and see,” he said.

When they approached the gates to Cherry Hill, the sight of the discreet FOR SALE sign gave her pause. It had been six weeks since Sallie had announced she was putting the estate on the market and abruptly decamped for her new house in Highlands, North Carolina.

The rusted wrought-iron gates were open, and Mason easily swung the car down the driveway.

“Mason,” Annajane said uneasily. “Look, I know it’s your childhood home and all, but I really don’t want to go up to the house tonight.”

“Relax,” he said, pulling her across the bench seat toward him. “I have no interest in going there, either.”

“Ever?”

His jaw muscle did that twitchy thing. “Mama offered to sell it to me. I told her no thanks. Pokey doesn’t want it either.”

“What about Davis?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t talked to him. But I doubt Sallie would sell it to him. They might be thick as thieves, but she has to know that if Davis did get the house, he’d tear it down in a minute, probably build mini-warehouses or something. Sallie’s funny about the place. She doesn’t want to live there anymore, but she doesn’t want it torn down, either.”

“I’m still shocked she put it on the market,” Annajane said.

“Yeah, well, she knows nobody around here has got three point two million to buy Cherry Hill. Listing it, that’s her way of thumbing her nose at everybody in Passcoe.”

“Especially me,” Annajane said.

He turned the car onto the dirt road leading to the lake house, but, to Annajane’s surprise, the road wasn’t dirt anymore. It had been paved so recently she could still smell asphalt and tar. The underbrush had been cleared, too; the huge old oaks picked clean of their coatings of kudzu; the shoulders stripped of the privet and weeds, with sod laid down; and ribbons of new shrubbery planted. She could see islands of azaleas and rhododendrons and camellias.

“Hey,” Annajane said, craning her neck to see the new landscaping. “What’s going on here?”

“The new owner made some improvements,” Mason said.

“Sallie sold off the lake house?” Annajane didn’t bother to hide the disappointment in her voice.

“She never came down here anyway,” Mason said, a bitter edge to his voice. “It was too primitive for her taste.”

“You were the only one in the family who ever really cared about the lake or the lake house,” Annajane said. “I wish you’d told me before it closed. It would have been nice to come back and look around again, for old time’s sake.”

“That’s what we’re doing now,” Mason said. “Once more, for old time’s sake.”

She caught a glimpse of something bright blue through the treetops as they got closer to the caretaker’s cottage.

“What’s happened here?” she asked, half-standing in her seat.

“You’ll see,” he said.

Without the tangle of fallen pine trees, kudzu, and privet, the old stone cottage stood proudly now on its point looking out over the lake, which could also be seen now. The blue she’d glimpsed earlier turned out to be a huge tarp that had been secured over the roof.

Annajane breathed a sigh of relief. “At least they didn’t tear the house down,” she said, turning to Mason. “If they’re fixing the roof, maybe they’re planning on trying to save the house?”

“Maybe,” he said, bringing the fun car to a stop at a new graveled parking court that had been laid to one side of the cottage. “Whoever bought the place has obviously got more dollars than sense.” He pointed past the house, and, even in the twilight, she could see the stacks of lumber and building materials and, beyond that, what looked like new pilings stretching out into the lake. “They’ve started rebuilding the dock. You believe that?”

“We used to talk about doing that,” she said quietly. “Remember? We were going to build a two-story boathouse? With a fireplace and a deck on the top level?”

“And a screened-in sleeping porch,” Mason added. He got out of the car and came around and opened her door. “Come on. Let’s take a peek inside.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to see. This was our special place, Mason. Even when it was rotting and falling down, I always thought, at the back of my mind, maybe someday we’d find our way back here. Knowing that can never happen now, even if it wasn’t ever really realistic, it’s just so unbearably sad.”

“Just one look,” Mason cajoled. “Aren’t you the least bit curious?”

“No,” she said stubbornly. “Honestly, can we just go back to the Pinecone now? So I can wallow in self-pity for an hour or so?”

“Later,” Mason said.

She reluctantly allowed herself to be escorted to the door, noticing, along the way, the new flowerbeds; the new walkway constructed of worn, antique bricks; and, finally, the cottage’s front door, which had been newly sanded and painted a gleaming periwinkle blue.

“At least they kept my color for the door,” Annajane said. She pointed at the worn brass hardware, which had been buffed up, not to a garish bright gold, but to the mellow color of good old brass. “And they saved the old hinges and even the old knocker.”

Mason produced a key from his pocket and, noting her surprise, said only, “The new owner’s a decent guy.”

He let her walk in first. If the outside of the cottage was mostly unchanged, it was a different story inside. The tiny, cramped entry hall was gone. In fact, all the walls were gone.

She was standing in one large, airy room. It smelled of sawdust and cut pine, and what remained of the day’s light poured in through a wall of new windows overlooking the lake. The windows were open, and a slight breeze blew in off the lake. The water-stained plaster ceilings were gone, exposing age-darkened ceiling beams, and the old wooden floors were scarred and dusty, but intact.

“Oh my God,” Annajane said, her voice echoing in the empty room. “They’ve gutted it!”

“Look at the views of the lake,” he suggested. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Unbelievable,” she agreed. It was then she noticed a large old brass bed, situated in the right corner, near the fireplace, which looked like it had been recently reworked. The bed was dressed with white linens and an old quilt, which was neatly folded at the foot. A table had been fashioned from two-by-fours laid over a pair of sawhorses, and a couple of bright orange sheetrock buckets had been upended to use as chairs. There was a picnic basket on the table and a stub of a candle stuck into an empty wine bottle.

“Mason, look,” she said, pointing at the bed and table. “The new owners must be staying here. Now I really do feel like a trespasser. We need to go, before they come back.”

But he wasn’t listening to her. He walked over to the table, picked up a box of matches, and lit the candle.

“What?” But she knew. Maybe she’d suspected as soon as she saw the bank of new windows.

“The new owners are right here,” Mason said, giving her the brass skeleton key he’d used to open the front door. He took her by the hand and seated her on one of the buckets. He began extracting a number of foil-wrapped packets from the picnic basket, opening each one for her inspection. It wasn’t the stuff of a romantic picnic. No imported cheeses or fresh fruit, pâté or crusty french bread. Instead, the meal he offered consisted of ham sandwiches on mushy white bread with bright yellow mustard and crunchy pickles, individual bags of potato chips, and store-bought chocolate chip cookies.

“You remembered,” she marveled.

“Our first meal out here,” he said. “You packed the food and I brought the beer. A very deliberate seduction on my part.”

“Except the cookies I brought were oatmeal raisin. That was before I knew you were a raisin hater.”

“A rookie mistake. Could have happened to anybody,” he said graciously.

He sat on the bucket opposite hers and reached into the picnic basket one more time, bringing out two chilled bottles of Quixie. He unscrewed the caps and handed her one.