The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners Read Online Free PDF

open, knowing what that was like. In that moment, in honor of another girl who’d helped him, he knew he wanted to be a friend to Pell. She waved at his grandfather, as if they were lifelong friends, as if she had heard his words and agreed completely with his assessment of life.
    Good as the sea.
    That was something Rafe’s grandmother used to say. His throat ached. He had so much to make up for. If he could help someone else, maybe he could get through.
    And maybe Pell could too.

    Pell was really here. Lyra could hardly believe it; she had started burying her feelings years ago, but how impossible. She had worked hard to stop being a mother—as if it were a switch she could throw. Walking through the olive orchard, she tried to breathe as emotions stormed through her.
    The light changed, diffusing the water from aquamarine to cobalt blue. The sky’s color deepened. She walked through the garden, trying to calm down. As she did, she thought of Grosse Pointe, the garden she’d kept at home, the statue of Hermes she’d set in the shady corner of the backyard.
    The marble statue of the god had originally come from Capri; Lyra had shipped him home the summer of her Grand Tour after college graduation. The trip, and relics from every city in Europe, had been her mother’s graduation gift.
    Edith Nicholson had mapped out Lyra’s life: debut, college, Europe, board membership at the Bellevue Garden Society, marriage. Lyra would be expected to marry someone who would summer in Newport, own an estate near the Nicholsons’ on Bellevue Avenue or on Ocean Drive, have the cabana beside her mother’s at Bailey’s Beach.
    Lyra had no doubt that her mother wished that while traveling she’d meet the heir to a British mining fortune, or an Italian manufacturing fortune, a titled-someone with a villa in Tuscany or a château in the Dordogne. But there could be no exotic European love, because there was Taylor Davis. Lyra knew her mother hoped she’d forget him that summer—not because he wasn’t kind, intelligent, or wealthy. Just because, in the eyes of Edith Nicholson, he wasn’t enough .
    Her mother had arranged for Lyra to be fitted for a Chanel suit in Paris, riding boots in Milan. She’d sent her to a glassblower on Murano, told her to choose the most exquisite chandelier in the studio, for her future home. Lyra had felt she was being trained to buy, to fill her heart with things instead of nature, spirit, poetry, ineffable beauty. She felt strangely unmoved by the whole trip—until secretly meeting Taylor in Rome.
    She had first met him during their prep school years; it was hard to pinpoint the exact moment they spotted each other. She went to Miss Porter’s, he to Newport Academy. She’d see him when she went home; they had mutual friends, and they would hang out at dances, parties, football games. He always seemed to be around, until the first time she noticed he wasn’t. That was the crazy thing about Taylor; she never really paid attention to him until he wasn’t there.
    Taylor. His face filled her mind now: angular features, sharp jaw, deep-set, thoughtful hazel eyes, warm smile. His light brown hair curled when he swam in salt water. He was a serious boy with an easy laugh; everyone said he’d be a lawyer like his father. Lyra liked him a lot, especially the way he seemed so uninterested in her family’s name or money. He talked about his parents as if he really enjoyed them, cared about them. Lyra noticed that.
    Midway through Taylor’s senior year of college, his parents died in a car accident. Lyra and several friends from Vassar had headed up to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, for the Princeton game. Without even admitting it to herself, Lyra was hoping to see Taylor. He was the quarterback, but he didn’t play that day. She heard the news about his parents—driving home late at night, wet leaves, a spinout into oncoming traffic, both killed instantly.
    The next day she flew to