“Exactly,” Alix said. “And you know what? Years later my mother told me that one of those girls married that boy.”
Both Lexie and Toby laughed. “Your mother is a matchmaker.”
“She loves romance in any form,” Alix said.
“What happened to the pony?” Toby asked.
“At the end of the day, when the owner returned, he was livid! Mom had lied, telling him she had a farm in the country and a trainer. She’d been so convincing that he’d turned the pony over to her. When he found out the truth, he was furious, but Mom flirted with him so much that by the time he took the pony back down in the elevator, he was smiling. And by that point, Mom had to push everybody out of our apartment because they were drunk. She gave me a bath, then snuggled down with me in bed and read me a book. That it was the galleys of her own novel with the sex skipped didn’t matter. I was asleep instantly. And after that I was the most popular child in the building. Everybody cried when we moved to the suburbs.”
For a moment Lexie and Toby sat in silence, taking in the story.
“How wonderful!” Lexie said with a sigh. “I could stand some adventure in my life.”
“Doesn’t your boss—” Alix began.
“He’s too in love with himself to matter,” Lexie said.
Alix and Toby looked at each other. From what they’d seen of Roger Plymouth, he was madly in love with Lexie, not himself.
After that first evening, the young women became a threesome—when they could, that is. Both Toby and Lexie had jobs, and Alix was trying to complete her sketches for Jared’s clients.
And then, of course, there was Izzy’s wedding to work on. Without the rose arbor and with the inclusion of the chapel, everything changed. Alix came up with a theme of wildflowers based on the dishes in Kingsley House. She showed Toby a place setting and Toby made an arrangement that looked like the china pattern. They planned everything around small flowers, many of them on a stem, all of them light and airy, nothing heavy.
“I think you’re onto something,” Toby said to Alix as she began to sketch the flowers for the table settings.
For the chapel they designed swags of robin’s-egg blue ribbons that hung from the ceiling along the wall. At every loop would be a bow with bouquets of blue larkspur and tiny white daisies dripping down. They put them on a background of ornamental grasses.
“I think it’s beautiful,” Alix said, looking at what Toby had done, and Lexie agreed.
Alix photographed everything and sent it all to Izzy, but she couldn’t focus very well. Her morning sickness was bad, and she told Alix that she kept falling asleep. “You know what I like,” Izzy said. “What would you like for your wedding? That’s what I’ll take.”
Alix didn’t allow herself to think of her own wedding; if it did happen, it would be years in the future.
On the evening after Jared left, Alix got on her computer and began searching for Parthenia. With only one name to go on, it wasn’t easy. But she added a place—Nantucket—and she found a Parthenia Taggert Kendricks. The name Taggert led to the Montgomerys of Warbrooke, Maine.
“Bingo!” Alix said, then began searching to see if she could find any contemporary Montgomerys or Taggerts who might still be living in Maine. To her joy, she saw that there were a lot of them.
By the time Jared called that night, she had a great deal to tell him. “She was Parthenia Taggert, Valentina’s cousin, and they both came from Warbrooke. Parthenia married a Nantucketer named John Kendricks, but I couldn’t find much about him other than that he was a schoolmaster. I’ll email you the dates.” She hesitated.
“What’s on your mind?”
“I think you should drive to Maine and talk to those people,” she said.
“And ask about something that happened two hundred years ago?” Jared asked.
“Why not?” she said. “Maybe the family is like yours and they have a big old house full of junk that no one has thrown out in centuries.”
“There couldn’t po
ssibly be two of us.”
Personally, she didn’t think there was anyone on earth like him.
“So you think I should go?” he said.
She loved that he was asking for her encouragement and maybe even her approval. “Yes, I do.”
“I have to go to Vermont to get the hinges so maybe I’ll just drive up to Warbrooke, Maine,” Jared said.