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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 itslimbs 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.
