The Guest House Read Online Free PDF Page B

against the garage, swollen with lavender blossoms, but she’d pushed past them without stopping for a sniff, intent on finding her brother in the backyard, where he stood over the grill, monitoring a pair of sizzling steaks.
    He looked up and smiled. “Hey, Lex, what’s going on? Hungry?”
    She took a seat in one of the rickety lawn chairs and sat forward, arms crossed, wanting to get right to it. “Did something happen with Dad and the Mosses?”
    Owen looked at her through the chimney of cooking smoke that climbed toward the star-sprinkled sky. “Why would you ask that?” he said.
    Lexi held his gaze, just in case he meant to derail her as her mother had done. “Mom won’t tell me, but I know something happened, so what was it?”
    Owen frowned down at the grill.
    Lexi bit at the inside of her cheek. “Dad and Tucker Moss got into it over something, didn’t they?”
    “You could say that.” Owen hooked the long-handled spatula on the edge of the grill and came over to take the other chair, sitting forward like she was. “It was over Mom, actually. She and Moss were together once.”
    Lexi sat back, startled at the admission. “What do you mean,
once
?” she asked. “You mean like once upon a time? Or like,
just
once?”
    “I mean they were together that summer.”
    “But Mom always said that was the summer she and Dad fell in love.”
    “It was,” said Owen.
    “So what happened?”
    “I don’t know, Lex. Just that Tucker Moss broke her heart before she started seeing Dad. It’s not exactly a popular topic of conversation.”
    The steaks popped. Owen climbed to his feet and returned to the grill.
    “That’s why Dad refused to try for their roof replacement job a few years ago,” he said. “It would have been huge money—and it’s not like we didn’t need it—but he wouldn’t even put in a bid.”
    Lexi stared at the grass. “They should have told me,” she said numbly. “I should have been told.”
    “Why? What difference does it make now?”
    All the difference in the world. Don’t you understand?
    Heather came out of the house then, carrying a glass of wine. “How much longer on the steaks?”
    Lexi rose, her legs shaky. “I should go.”
    “Lex, wait.” Owen moved toward her. “Don’t go yet. We should keep talking about this.”
    But there was nothing more to talk about, Lexi decided as she walked back to the truck and climbed in, feeling the knot inside her stomach cinch. It was terrible news. The very worst. For she’d done something awful, something she couldn’t undo. Something she wasn’t sure she wanted to even if she could, and this truth of her mother’s unfortunate romance had simply come too late.
    Lexi had already fallen hopelessly and irreversibly in love with Hudson Moss.

3
    M orning rolled across the harbor, slow as sap behind a heavy fog, the mist still so thick when light finally dawned that it was nearly impossible to see the water from the shore. Lexi took the long way through town. She loved the early hours, when the sidewalks weren’t yet crowded and the storefronts were still shuttered, the farmers’ market vendors just setting up. No matter how many times Lexi passed the rows of squat, dormered capes that flanked the village, she never tired of their rambling charm, the climbing roses that spilled down trellises like overfrosted cakes, the wreaths of dried wisteria vines that hung from doors and gateposts.
    It was easy to see what drew people to her hometown summer after summer. Lexi was no more immune to the beauty of the Cape than anyone who’d just arrived to it for the first time.
    Even with the added travel, Lexi reached the entrance to Birch Drive at ten to eight, impossibly punctual, as she’d been her whole life. Melancholy trickled into her thoughts as she steered down the road. Had she somehow expected the landscape to appear changed since the last time she’d driven through it? How could it? Trees that had been there a hundred times