‘You’re going to love this,’ she grinned as she led her to a cupola on the rooftop.
‘What’s this?’ said Donna, sounding like a gleeful child.
Jennifer opened a small door and they stepped out on to a platform that surrounded the circular room.
‘It’s a widow’s walk,’ she said, inhaling the balmy night air. ‘Lots of houses on the coast have them. Apparently they were for the ladies of the house, so they could come out and look for their mariner husbands returning from sea.’
‘And I take it some of them never came back.’
‘I guess,’ said Jennifer, glancing towards the Lake House. ‘I guess it makes it either the saddest or the most romantic part of the house.’
Donna leaned on the balcony and looked wistfully out into the fairy-light-studded darkness.
‘Why don’t you and my mother speak?’ asked Jennifer quietly.
‘I don’t know. I tried,’ Donna said with a sad laugh. ‘She moved to Charleston and fell off the radar. We didn’t even know where she was. We’d get the odd Christmas card as if to tell us, I’m out here, I’m all right, but there was never any number to call or address to get back in touch.’
‘Who’s we?’ asked Jennifer, puzzled.
‘Our parents. Your grandmom and grandpop.’
She frowned. ‘But I thought they died when Mom was eighteen.’
> ‘No,’ said Donna, shaking her head. ‘It was a long time after that. Sylvia had married your father but you hadn’t been born.’
‘What happened?’ said Jennifer, not sure that she was following correctly. ‘I thought they died in a car crash.’
‘Car crash?’ said Donna with surprise. ‘No, they’d been in poor health for a long time. We were dirt-poor, with no money for medical bills, so I nursed them both for a couple of years. I suppose that’s why I was angry with Sylvia for so long, for not doing her bit. But she had a new life by then. The life she always wanted. If there’s one thing about my sister, it’s that she’s unsentimental, especially when it comes to getting what she wants. Just ask Ethan Jamieson.’
‘Ethan Jamieson?’ repeated Jennifer. The name was familiar. She was certain it was the man whose photograph her mother had showed her. Sylvia Wyatt’s lost love. ‘The war photographer she met in Charleston?’
‘War photographer?’ said Donna in surprise. ‘No, Ethan was Sylvia’s high school sweetheart. They were madly in love and I’m not surprised. He was the most handsome guy you ever did see. But when Sylva hit twenty, she wasn’t hanging around Dixie any more. I’m not sure Ethan’s job in the timber yard cut it either. She left town, left Ethan and never came back to either of them again.’
Jennifer went quiet, betrayed by the lies her mother had spun. Not just the other night, when she had shown her the photo of Ethan; her whole life, what little Jennifer knew of it, had been a convincingly told fiction.
‘I should get back to the party and find Frank before he gets up to any mischief,’ Donna said. ‘I just wanted to have a proper chat with you. I hope it’s the first of many.’
‘I should come down to Pensacola.’
‘You should.’ Donna broke out into a grin. ‘We’ve got beaches as white as sugar, and Frank’s got a bar. We make the meanest margaritas. Do you have a boyfriend?’
Jennifer nodded.
‘Bring him for a weekend. We’ll have so much fun.’
Jennifer couldn’t imagine Connor in a bar in Pensacola, but she said yes anyway.
Donna gave her niece a tight hug, and for a moment Jennifer was lost in a cloud of blond curls.
‘I’m so glad I came,’ she said, pulling away. ‘When your papa invited me, I wasn’t going to accept, not after all this time, but Frank says it’s never too late to say I love you.’
As Jennifer climbed through the small door back into the house, she had a feeling that her aunt was wrong.
Chapter Nineteen
After a few minutes spent chatting to Donna’s husband Frank, Jennifer snaked her way around the side of the house to the far reaches of the back garden, where the party crowds had thinned.
She needed a few moments of quiet. She was not naturally gregarious, so being the centre of attention, making small talk with the dozens of family friends her parents had invited, felt quite exhausting. Besides, she needed some space to think. Donna’s revelations had shocked her. Her mother was a complicated woman, but she couldn’t believe she had told so many lies. Perhaps Sylvia had been embarrassed about her background, and her family’s poverty, but her story about Ethan Jamieson – assuming Donna had been telling the truth – was a complete fabrication.