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who thinks her generation invented love. “It’s just that it’s been such a long time . . .”
    “Why is a sixtysomething-year-old woman still carrying a torch for her high school sweetheart?” Eleanor finished my thought. “I don’t think it’s the man. It’s the life that could have been.”
    “But she’s had a good life, hasn’t she?” I asked. “Why have any regrets about the road not taken?”
    “Oh, I hate that,” Eleanor said. “That idea that we can’t have any regrets because our experiences make us who we are. That’s greeting-card psychology. We all have regrets. The people we’ve hurt, the times fear held us back from exciting possibilities . . .”
    “The weird fabric we bought and could never find a use for,” I added.
    Eleanor and Susanne laughed.
    “Not fabric,” Susanne said. “You never regret a fabric purchase, no matter how weird.”
    After Susanne left to get the Chinese food, I settled back on the floor, laid my head on Barney’s back, and let him lick my hand. I envied his uncomplicated life of dog treats and unending love. “If she’s going to have regrets anyway, what good does coming here do her?” I finally asked my grandmother.
    “She needs to make her peace with them,” Eleanor said. “Bernie is wondering what might have been, and she can’t shake herself out of it. People get stuck like that sometimes.”
    She reached out and brushed a few stray hairs off my forehead, stroking my head gently. “It’s like when you make a quilt,” she said. “You see a pattern you like and you think you want to make something just like it for yourself. But as you find fabrics, and cut and sew, the idea becomes something else. Something real, but something different from that pattern. If you measure the success of your quilt, or your life, by what you started out to do, more often than not you will decide you’ve failed. But if you realize that the pattern you followed is the one you created for yourself, you will love the quilt you made, and the life you made, more than the one you thought you were supposed to make.”

    Twenty minutes later while I was still thinking over my grandmother’s words, Susanne opened the door to the room, her hands filled with plastic bags. “This place is spooky. When I drove up, I thought I saw a light coming from the woods. Then I swear I saw something run from the back of the house.”
    “Probably a deer,” I suggested.
    “Maybe, but it didn’t run like a deer. It sort of floated. I couldn’t see what it was because the porch light was out. It must have burned out when I was gone.”
    The thought of something out there, in the dark, hovering around this broken-down inn, made me shiver, but I put it out of my mind. It was going to be a long week if I succumbed to my imagination.
    “Whatever it was, it’s gone,” I said. “And tomorrow we’ll be quilting. Nothing’s going to spoil that.”

CHAPTER 5
    Quilt retreats are usually weekend or weeklong quilting classes where experts, often nationally known teachers, give participants a chance to immerse themselves in a new technique or pattern. During the day, the teacher instructs the class, and in the evening the students are welcome to sew on their own or wander into town. The retreats are often set in the country, so there’s little to do but quilt, talk about quilting, and look at quilts. And that’s just what most of us want to do anyway.
    It was going to be the first retreat for the Patchwork Bed-and-Breakfast, but, instead of comforting her, this seemed to make Susanne nervous. She had piled every possible tool, book, fabric scrap, and finished and half-finished quilt she could find into her car.
    I’d volunteered to work as Susanne’s assistant. I wasn’t sure what that would involve beyond helping set up the classroom, but it seemed to provide Susanne with some relief to know that there would be a friendly face in the room. In her mind, the class would be filled with