“Not Mildred’s house.” His voice turned distant. “Da’s house.”

Not my house. Not our house.

“Oh. You never mentioned you still had it.” She wondered why he wasn’t living there instead of in a strange old lady’s time warp.

“Yeah. I do.” He cleared his throat. “Why don’t we run back to Mildred’s and I’ll get the house key for you. You can let yourself into Da’s, take what you need.”

“Are you sure now’s a good time?”

“Now’s great, actually. But I’ll have to drop you off, if that’s okay. I think I might head out of town earlier than I’d originally planned. Get down to Connecticut with plenty of time before I meet with Rory tomorrow morning.”

“All right,” she said, but he was already walking away, and she knew something was up.

Chapter

9

“Yeah, sorry I can’t go in with you,” Leith told her as she sat next to him in his truck. He jabbed up the air conditioner, even though the cab was already Frigidaire cold. “I gotta get on the road if I want to make it to Stamford by tonight and find a motel.”

When he’d gone inside 740 Maple to grab the key to his father’s house, he’d also come out with a packed bag.

“It’s okay,” Jen said, while wondering who the hell this pale, fidgety guy was sitting next to her. “Tell me where the photo albums are again?”

He squinted through the windshield at the brick two-bedroom, one-car ranch house plunked at the foot of a steep hill. “Da kept all the stuff like that in the den. In the big hutch along the wall. Bottom shelves. Here.” He flipped open the glove compartment and took out a huge flashlight, slapping it in her palm. “You might need this.”

“Why?”

“No power.”

She opened her door and gracelessly finagled her way to the ground. One hand on the door handle, she peered back inside the truck. But Leith wasn’t looking at her. The house had him entranced.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Sure.” A stiff nod of the head.

“When will you be back?” As if she had any right to know, or any claim on him.

“Not sure.”

Alrighty then.

His thigh twitched and flexed, preparing to lift off the brake. She took the signal and shut the door. It was barely latched before he pulled away, tires grinding in the gravel driveway. When he hit the asphalt, he gunned it back up the hill, on his way out of Gleann. She watched him go until the truck was no more than an obnoxious lumbering sound filtering through the trees. When silence fell, she turned to the only house in this quiet, lovely part of the valley.

The house she had once thought of as heaven now seemed dark and sad. It looked almost exactly the same—the same row of wind chimes dangling from the eaves, whose sound was a glorious, calming memory; the same patio furniture sitting on the giant slab of concrete serving as a front porch—but the melancholy surrounding it was ghostly.

Upon closer look, the furniture she’d sat on for so many summer nights, holding a glass of lemonade—and later a sneaked beer poured into a coffee mug—was terribly weathered. She wondered why Leith even bothered to keep it out. The concrete slab was cracked and uneven, and several sets of wind chimes were missing pieces and hung crookedly.

But the yard . . . the yard and the front flower gardens and the raised vegetable boxes were lush and lovely. Tended with care. Like a grave.

The grass had been mown in perfect diagonals, the bushes neatly trimmed. The produce was magazine perfect. She remembered that when Mr. MacDougall was alive, he’d spent hours in his yard, tinkering and digging and planting and pruning, Leith always by his side.

It made sense to her then that Leith had become what he had: a landscape architect to honor his upbringing and to satisfy his own soul. He’d kept up his old house as a memorial. But . . . why, if he didn’t live here? There was no For Sale sign anywhere, and this place hadn’t been listed on potential rentals when she’d looked through them at Sue’s just the other day.

Jen negotiated the slim flagstone walk, noting the way the flowers and shrubs perfectly draped over the edges, beautiful and artistic. They gave atmosphere to the wonderful memories made here, the ones outside of the evenings looking through photo albums or playing Scrabble at the kitchen table.

This house was where she’d first learned what a true family should be like.

Aunt Bev had brought Jen and Aimee to Gleann with the sole purpose of giving them time away from their mom, Bev’s own sister, but it had taken a few awkward years for Jen to warm up to the aunt who was essentially a stranger. She was, after all, related to her mother. But Leith and his dad had lived outside of Jen’s wicked experiences, and she’d clung to that. She’d clung to them.

A real family, she discovered, had nothing to do with the number of people involved, or the titles of the family members, or even if they were blood related. It was about interaction. Support. Jokes. Generosity. Teaching. Respect. Everything Mr. MacDougall had passed on to his son.

She couldn’t help it; she smiled as she pushed the key into the front door lock. It took a good effort to slam it home, and turning it to the left required even more power. She pushed open the door with a wobbly jerk, as it finally came free from the ill-fitting frame.

That emptiness she’d sensed outside instantly transformed into a heaviness that settled on her shoulders and dug into her soul.

Daylight spilled from the front door into the tiny, cramped den, but even that was quickly swallowed up and she could barely see. The heavy curtains in the front window were drawn, but the shadows and silhouettes told her that every piece of MacDougall furniture was placed exactly where she remembered. The couch beneath the window, the hutch against the wall to the right, the TV in the corner, the pass-through window to the kitchen straight ahead.

A musty scent assaulted her nose and made it tickle. She went to the window and yanked back the curtain. A cloud of dust rained down and she waved it back, peering through the particle-riddled air into the lightened room. As the air cleared some, she could see where her footsteps had left prints on the dusty, matted carpet. No others accompanied it; no one had walked through this room in a really long time. The layer of dust covering every surface was so thick it would take twenty vacuums to suck it all up. The air-conditioning hadn’t been turned on in ages; the smell could attest to that.

All of the knickknacks she remembered in foggy images were still there, sitting and waiting for use or attention. She passed through the den and into the tiny kitchen that had never been able to fit more than one MacDougall male at a time. The yellow plastic clock still hung next to the refrigerator, stuck on 7:56, and the waffle maker still leaned against the microwave, all coated with a gray film.

The floor groaned as she left the kitchen, walked past the hutch, and went down the hall toward the bedrooms. Mr. MacDougall’s bedroom faced the backyard that sloped severely up toward town. She recalled him saying once that he liked how dark and cool it got in there in the evenings. Leith’s was the room facing front, which had made it convenient for him to sneak in through the window when she and he had been out past curfew.

She went first into Mr. MacDougall’s room, cracking the door and flinching at the awful, dry squeal of the hinges. The room was darker than midnight. By habit she flicked the light switch, but nothing came on. She remembered the flashlight hanging loose in her hand and shot the powerful beam into the room.

The bed was made, the dresser neat. Mr. MacDougall’s gray wool cap sat on the corner edge, waiting for him to come in and put it on. Jen had rarely seen him without it.