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Rose had assembled Charlie’s spare wood in thecorner of the room. She had plans for it, but it would have to wait till after she finished her current piece—an all-stone abstract sculpture she’d already sold for more than half a million dollars to a friend of a friend of Hilary’s famous daughter.“Ingrid’s friends cannot believe she has a connection to you,” Hilary told Rose after Ingrid returned to her life. “They can’t believe they have an exclusive connection!”
It was often strange for Rose to remember the mighty twists and turns of her life.How did I get here? How did any of this happen?
But it had.
Rose wasn’t immune to impostor syndrome. But she was getting better and better at pushing it aside, which counted for something.
Charlie agreed to meet Rose at the Grayson Estate the following morning at eight thirty. He came with a few members of a local construction crew, all of whom wore hard hats and boots with inch-thick bottoms.
Rose led the men through the grounds of the Grayson Estate and up to the stone structure. A stone porch remained with those questionable pillars and led up to a crooked doorway that looked as though it had been rattled with an earthquake. The construction guys told Rose to hang back and wait while they entered the house. Rose resented being told to remain. But she also hadn’t brought a hard hat and was wearing a pair of canvas shoes.Rookie mistake,she thought now as she wrung her hands.
It was a chilly day, lower sixties, and the wind rolled off the Nantucket Sound and swatted hercurls around her face. She cupped her elbows and gazed at the forest separating this stone fortress from the Walden Estate. When was the last time she’d been there? It must have been the day she quit.
The Walden Estate was still owned by the family, of course. Rose knew that the children returned to the estate every summer with their own children and probably with their own babysitters. She wasn’t sure if either of the elder Waldens were still alive, although they weren’t so old. Mid-sixties, maybe seventies. It was hard for Rose to envision them as anything but their gorgeous and well-dressed and beautiful selves.
Rose grabbed her phone and Googled their names but found nothing beyond a few articles about their “magnanimous contributions to Yale, Harvard, and Columbia.” Rose had heard a rumor that they’d only sent these funds to ensure their children would secure beautiful futures at an Ivy League university. She’d heard another, darker rumor that they’d had to send even more funds to Yale after Kate or Evie had gotten into trouble. Rose was pretty sure it involved vandalism, although most journalists knew to keep hush-hush about the matters of such a prosperous family.
It wasn’t hard for Rose to imagine any of the Walden children getting into trouble. It was hard to imagine that they’d ever grown up fully, though. Evie had been four in 1993, which made her thirty-five this summer. That put Hogarth at forty-one!
Rose shivered. Time was a slippery thing. Did they remember her? She’d only worked for the Waldens that summer and autumn back in 1993. It stood to reason that their memories of her had been stamped out with those of other babysitters and governesses. Rose wasn’t special.
Rose googled Hogarth and discovered he’d become a mega-millionaire in his own right—with initial help from Daddy’s millions, of course. Hogarth had founded and sold several million-dollar companies on his own and peered out from LinkedIn photographs that made him look like a prosperous professional. A bit of online digging made it seem like he’d divorced his first wife and married his secretary, but it was difficult for Rose to get the full story based on a few clicks.
Not long after that, Charlie called her name. “It’s all clear! Come on through!”
Rose’s throat was so tight that it was difficult to breathe. She shoved her phone into her pocket and delicately went up the stone steps.
How many times had she wondered about this place? How many times had she begged to come inside?
Now, here she was on the precipice. And she owned it! Nobody could tell her to turn away!
The place was just as haunted-looking as the Salt Sisters suspected. After the fire, the Graysons had done very little to clean the place up and had even left many of their once-immaculate items lost in the debris of stones, ash, and fallen wood. But because the old house was built with stone and iron, the foundation was solid. It meant it was rife for Rose’s visions for refurbishment.
Maybe Rose would even hang a photograph in the foyer of what the house had once looked like—before and after the fire. Maybe she’d stitch the story of the house into the advertisement for the bed and breakfast.
Rose followed the sound of Charlie and the construction workers’ voices and discovered them at the edge of what had once been a ballroom-dining room area. Miraculously, the dome of the room hadn’t collapsed during thefire, although Charlie was fearful about what would happen once Rose attacked it with her “plans.”
“If you want to keep the original roof, it needs to be stabilized first thing,” Charlie told her. “There is no walking through this room under any circumstances until that happens.”
Rose saluted him. “Roger, captain.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “I’m serious. If this falls, there’s no getting out of the rubble.”
Someone had painted the entire map of the stars upon the dome ceiling. It seemed outrageous that they were still visible, especially long after the fire, as the structure had sat here abandoned and without care for thirty-one years. But there they were: a splendorous array of the Big Dipper, Sagittarius, Aquila, and Centaurus. Rose’s eyes filled with tears. She’d imagined the place to be specific, detail-oriented, and beautiful, but this was beyond her wildest dreams.
“Do you remember the rumors that went around about the fire?” Charlie asked now.
Rose cast him a look that meantduh.
Charlie laughed and snapped his hand across his thigh. “Wait a minute. I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to put this all together.”
Rose’s heart pumped. He’d figured it out. But hadn’t Rose wanted him to?
You can’t leave anything in the past, not in Nantucket. Everyone in Nantucket remembers everything. Collective memory is a terrifying thing.
The construction workers looked at Rose with buggy, curious eyes.
Rose rolled her head in a circle and considered whether or not to explain herself.
