The Guest House Read Online Free PDF

architectural photography, seeing the curves and edges of a building’s construction much in the same way a portrait photographer might capture the lines of the human form. It was a natural desire; growing up around her parents’ building business, she had been raised to appreciate architecture in all its iterations, from the sweetly scented skeletons of new lumber frames to the weary and parched bones of an old property, but it was the details she loved most: the parts of a room that most people passed by without seeing, the beauty and grace in a simple drawer pull or a built-in cabinet; the textures of historic fabric, the roughness of hand-hewn beams; worn hardware, cabinet pulls and latches; the puzzle pieces of dovetails; mortises and tenons. If she’d had more time, she would have dug through boxes to find some of her older work, but these shots would do, she decided, as she scrolled through several of the digital portfolios she’d compiled during her graduate program. She hoped Cooper would find the samples acceptable.
    Excitement charged through her. After all the summers she’d spent in the Moss house, all the times she’d marveled at its interiors and wanted to capture every inch on film, now she’d finally have her chance. If only her family could have been half as excited for her—but what had Lexi expected? The roots of their battle reached far and grew deep. Lexi doubted anything could uproot her family’s distaste for the Mosses now.

    L ike all kids who grew up in Harrisport, Lexi knew about the Moss house long before she’d ever seen it. Even if you’d never set foot on its lush and rolling back lawn (and why would you unless you’d been hired to mow it?), even if you’d never walked through its kitchen and caught a whiff of fresh-glazed pastries, you knew it was the house where the lavish display of fireworks blew up the sky every Fourth of July, rivaling Provincetown’s show year after year. The fact that Lexi’s parents had been hired to build a guest house on the property in the sixties led friends to believe that Lexi had a superior knowledge of the inner workings of the summer family from North Carolina, but the truth was that growing up, Lexi couldn’t have cared less about the Mosses or their fireworks. She’d gleaned early on the rules of engagement when it came to summer families, and she had no interest in playing a game she couldn’t win.
    It hadn’t helped, of course, that for as long as she could remember, every time the subject of the Moss family came up around her father, his expression would darken and, without fail, the usually fair and forgiving Hank Wright would purge a shocking serving of vitriol.
    “Maybe he and Tucker Moss got into some big fight,” Kim had suggested once when they were young. “Maybe they beat the shit out of each other that summer they built the guest house.”
    “It’s possible,” Lexi had replied, though she’d never known her father to lose his temper that way. Still, it had seemed a likely theory, for what else could possibly have happened to leave such a sour taste in his mouth so many years later?
    The summer after her senior year, Lexi became determined to find out.
    “Why does Dad hate the Mosses so much?”
    She’d joined her mother at the sink to work on the dinner dishes and just come right out with it, startling Edie with the question almost as much as she’d startled herself.
    “He doesn’t hate them,” Edie had insisted, keeping her eyes fixed on the basin of dirty dishes. “You read too much into things. You know how impatient your father gets with summer people. He’d say the same thing about the Douglases or the Flemings.”
    But Lexi didn’t believe it. An hour later, when the house had grown quiet, she’d borrowed her father’s truck and driven to the off-white cape Owen and Heather had been renting just outside the village.
    Lexi had smelled the charcoal as soon as she’d pulled into the driveway. Lilacs grew