Page 32 of Escape to Lighthouse Cove

“Oh!” Grace pressed one hand to her chest, laughing a little. “Sorry, you surprised me.”

“You surprisedme,” Isaiah replied, smiling. “Are you exploring?”

“Yes… is that okay?”

“Of course. It’s high time these grounds got some use. Noah walks them every day, but he’s the only one.” He stopped abruptly, seeming as if he wanted to say more but was waiting for Grace to prompt him.

She had the sense that the old man was expectant, even eager, to talk about Noah, to tell her all his good qualities and the trauma he’d been through that had made him so broken, but she realized she didn’t want to hear about it, not from Isaiah, anyway. If Noah wanted her to know more about his life, she’d let him tell her himself, and she hoped that he would.

So she smiled and nodded and then said gently, “I’m glad he gets some fresh air. If I follow this path, will I find my way back eventually?” There was, she thought ruefully, a metaphor there, and a pretty obvious one at that.

Isaiah smiled, understanding in his faded eyes. “Yes, it takes you around the house and then back to the front, on the other side. Be careful as you go, though, because around the back of the house there is a steep drop-off. You certainly need to watch your step.”

Another metaphor, Grace thought, smiling inwardly. “Thanks for the warning,” she told Isaiah, and kept walking.

Great black-backed and herring gulls wheeled high overhead as she picked her way along the path, through dense azalea and bayberry bushes. She’d found a guide to native plants at the lodge, and on her walks she’d spent some time trying to identify the local plants—blueberry and flowering raspberry, meadowsweet and dogwood and pepperbush, all of them hardy enough to survive the salty winds coming off the water. She and Jacob had spent a pleasant few hours collecting and logging their specimens, and Jacob had even drawn a few. Only that morning they’d spotted a black-winged razorbill swooping over their little stretch of beach, and Jacob had pointed to it excitedly.

“You’re right, they’re endangered,” Grace had replied, knowing instinctively that that was what he was thinking. “It’s good we’ve seen one here. Maybe we can look into their natural habitat, help them to find a cozy place.” She’d ruffled his hair, and he’d grinned, which had madehergrin, because lately she’d so rarely seen his smile.

Whoever had planted these gardens had mostly chosen to stick with native plants, Grace reflected, which made sense.Grow where you were plantedonly worked when the soil and climate were right, which maybe was another metaphor, although she’d made so many she wasn’t sure what she was trying to say about life except maybe you just needed to live it, wherever you were and as best as you could, and accept you were going to get broken along the way, as everybody did.

On the far side of the house, she came to where the cliff dropped steeply to a tide-covered beach, and she even spied the rock where she and Jacob had perched far below, awaiting their rescue. She followed the path carefully along the back of the house, the view of the ocean endless, stretching all the way to the horizon, shimmering gold under the late-afternoon sun. The wind was strong, and she was glad for the railing that kept her from potentially tumbling over.

Around the other side of the house, she was back in unruly gardens, and she paused in front of a rusted wrought-iron gate that led to a small, enclosed garden that looked as if it had been carefully tended. After hesitating for a moment, Grace tried the latch, the gate creaking in protest as she opened it and stepped through.

Although much of Grayhaven’s grounds seemed, despite Isaiah’s attentive care, to be slowly losing the battle to wilderness, it was clear this garden was taken care of, and tenderly at that. The rose bushes were pruned, the soil weed-free and freshly turned over. A little stone bench, the moss that had been growing over it clearly scraped away, was at the end of a short path, and Grace sat down there with a little sigh of satisfaction.

It was placed perfectly for a view of the ocean, the rocky cliffs veering down toward a small cove, the water stretching endlessly beyond. When she turned her head the other way, the dark walls of the house loomed before her, but for some reason they didn’t seem quite so unfriendly now. Maybe because she was familiar with what—and who—they contained. What was known, orbecomingknown, wasn’t so intimidating.

She heard the sound of footsteps on the gravel, and then the creak of the gate. She turned and saw Noah coming into the garden, smiling.

“There you are,” he said, and Grace found herself smiling back.

18

Noah walked slowly toward her, glad that Grace was smiling. They really did seem to have put their rocky start behind them, and he was grateful. The wind lifted her golden hair from her shoulders, brought color into her pale cheeks.

“Is the chess lesson over already?” she asked, and he nodded.

“Yes, although I think Jacob could have gone for another hour or more. He’s playing Isaiah now, but he’s borderline obsessed.”

She laughed lightly. “I know, he has been ever since he learned about a year ago. He seems so young to like such a difficult game. I can’t even get my head around the rules.”

“You could if you wanted to,” Noah told her. He’d met many, many people who insisted they couldn’t possibly understand chess, only to be surprised when they realized the rules weren’t that hard. Thestrategy, of course, was another matter entirely.

“Maybe,” she allowed, sounding unconvinced, but still smiling. They held each other’s gazes for a moment, and again, as before, Noah felt an unspooling between them, almost as if there was an invisible thread between them and it had just been pulled taut.

“This was my mother’s rose garden,” he remarked as he looked around at the neatly tended bushes. “She loved it out here. I didn’t realize Isaiah was taking such good care of it. The weather isn’t great for roses, but my mother insisted on keeping it up.” He smiled faintly. “I think she’d be glad to know it was still being cared for.”

“Where is your mother now?” Grace asked.

The smile faded from Noah’s mouth and eyes. “She lives in Arizona. My dad died when I was in my twenties, and my mom and I… we… we don’t speak.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

He shrugged. “It is what it is.” Which gave away nothing, but he didn’t want to go into all the details of why his mother had stopped speaking to him now, or frankly, ever. “I thought maybe…” he began haltingly, “if you wanted… you could stay for dinner? It won’t be much, but I can whip up some pasta and sauce if I’m forced to. And there’s a few nice bottles of wine in the cellar.” Did that, he wondered with a lurch of something like panic, sound too much like a date? Like he wanted it to be a date?

Because that wasn’t the case. At all.