“Mom says she and I spent a summer with her when I was four. And I guess they stayed in touch.”
“Okay, she’s a woman you don’t remember meeting, but she left you her house for a year. Victoria said it was because you wanted the break before you got a job. I’ve always thought the whole thing was fishy, because the old woman—”
“Miss Kingsley.”
“Right. Miss Kingsley didn’t know when she was going to die. For all she knew she could have lived to be a hundred and you’d be running your own company by then.”
“Maybe,” Alix said, “but only if I pass my tests.” It was an inside joke among architecture students that they spent longer in school than doctors, and at the end was a series of agonizing tests. But when they got out there were no jobs. “I don’t get your point.”
“I think Miss Kingsley, and probably your mother too, wanted you to meet the unmarried architect nephew, Jared Montgomery. Or in this case, Kingsley.”
“But if she’d lived to be a hundred, by that time he could have half a dozen kids.”
“Why let facts ruin a good story?”
“You’re right,” Alix said. “Miss Kingsley wanted me to meet her nephew, so she—with my mother’s encouragement—put me in the house next to him. Of course he lives and works in New York and is probably only here two or three weeks a year, but what does that matter to a whopping good story?”
“Are you saying you don’t think your mother had an ulterior motive for getting you into this old house?”
Alix knew her mother far too well to say no to that. The truth was that Alix didn’t care why or how this had been arranged. All that mattered was that she was being given this unbelievable opportunity. And was it actually possible that Jared Montgomery would be living right next door to her? In a guesthouse on the same property? “I will pick his brain clean,” she said. “I’m going to learn everything he knows, from design down to the drains. Remind me to send my mother roses. Come on, let’s go to the house.”
“No more ice cream?” Izzy asked.
“Are you kidding? Let’s walk fast and work up a sweat. Why did you let me eat all that chocolate?”
“Of all the ungrateful—” Izzy began but Alix’s laugh cut her off. “Very funny. Pardon me for not laughing. We have three days before he returns so we have a lot of work to do.”
“And I hear the shopping on Nantucket is good,” Alix said.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Izzy said. “I’ll do the shopping. You need to work. This is going to be the presentation of your life.”
“I do have a few ideas in my head,” Alix said, and Izzy laughed, as Alix always had an abundance of design ideas.
As they started walking, the first thing they noticed, now that the specter of what-Eric-did-to-Alix was no longer hanging over them, was the incredibly beautiful view of downtown Nantucket. The street was cobblestones, difficult to walk or drive on, but so very beautiful. The sidewalk was wide and laid with bricks. Over the centuries the trees and the settling of the earth had made them undulate and flow in an artistic way.
But what stood out the most for Alix were the buildings. One after another, each was exquisite. Perfect in design and execution.
“I think I’m going to faint,” Alix said as she stood in one spot and stared down the street at the town’s beauty.
“Yeah, it’s even better than the pictures I saw.”
“It’s … I don’t know, but I think it’s heaven. And …”
Izzy was looking at her friend in curiosity. They’d met each other on the first day of architecture school and they’d both been trim, pretty young women, but there the similarities stopped. Izzy’s ambition was to live in a small town and have an office where she did remodeling work. Her primary goal in life was a husband and children.
But Alix had inherited from her father a deep love of building. Her paternal grandfather had been a contractor and his son had spent his summers building houses. In the winter her father had worked in a shop and made cabinets. He’d earned his degree in architecture before Alix was born, and later it had been natural to him to begin teaching at the university level.
Her parents had divorced when Alix was a child and, as a result, she had grown up in two worlds. One was with her father, which involved everything about building, from her father’s design to hammering in the studs to choosing paint colors for the interior. And he loved teaching his daughter what he knew. She could read blueprints by the time she was in first grade.
The other half of her life revolved around her mother’s writing. Part of the year Alix and her mother lived quietly, just the two of them, while Victoria wrote novels that the whole world enjoyed. Every August her mother went away to a cabin in Colorado to isolate herself so she could plot that year’s novel. Her wildly popular books took a seafaring family down through the ages. When each book was finished, there were cocktail parties, extravagant dinners, and vacations. Alix’s life with her mother was a wonderful mix of quiet work and great excitement.
Alix had loved it all! She liked sitting on the tailgate of a pickup with her father’s crew and eating sandwiches, and she liked wearing a designer dress and laughing with the top publishing people in the world.
“They’re all the same,” Alix always said. “They all work for a living. Whether their tools are claw hammers or six-syllable words, they’re all workers.”
Between her two very successful parents, Alix had come out talented and ambitious. She had her father’s love of building and her mother’s belief that the top was the only place to be.
Izzy looked at Alix, her friend’s eyes glazed as she studied Nantucket, and Izzy almost felt sorry for Jared Montgomery. When Alix wanted to know something, she was insatiable.