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  Roy shrugged. Didn’t answer.

  Mack sighed. Fiddled with the sketchbook. He paused a long time, then decided he had to say it sometime, even though he knew it would set off an argument he wasn’t sure he had the stomach to fight. “Mom’s the one that left, Dad, not you.”

  Dark clouds gathered in Roy’s eyes and he pushed away from the table. “Don’t talk about your mother.”

  “She wouldn’t sit around like this, if it was her,” Mack pressed, following his father. “And you know it.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Leave me alone.”

  “Why? So you can wither away like some houseplant that doesn’t get any sun?” Mack crossed in front of his father, waited until Roy lifted his gray head and met Mack’s gaze. Roy’s lighter blue eyes had filled with anger and hurt. “I’m tired of seeing you like this, Dad. Come out with me. Come work a few jobs. It’ll do you some good.”

  Roy wheeled on him. “What would do me good is if your mother would come back.”

  Mack ran a hand through his hair. “Dad…”

  “Until she does that, I’m not leaving this place.” Roy stalked out of the kitchen and headed down the basement stairs, his footsteps thudding heavy and hard as he descended into an even darker silence.

  Alex’s entire body shuddered and shimmied, and had been for the better part of Saturday. She suspected she would never walk straight again.

  And she’d yet to make more than a small dent in tearing down the walls.

  Damn. She’d thought this would be a hell of a lot easier. The TV shows made all that home repair stuff look simple, wrapping up a whole room renovation in a half hour, transforming entire houses in an hour. The hosts put a tool in Average Annie’s hands, and wham-slam, she was knocking down a wall and erecting a new one before the first commercial break.

  Yeah, well, apparently they kept a hidden home improvement team off camera, because Alex wasn’t getting much of anything done in an entire day, never mind an hour.

  Discouragement weighed heavy on her. She blew her bangs out of her eyes, dropped down onto an overturned five-gallon bucket and lowered the reciprocating saw to the floor. Okay, so she wasn’t Harriet Homebuilder. She wasn’t even Harriet’s stepsister. Or distant cousin thrice-removed.

  Mack had been right. This place was a disaster. What had Grandma been thinking?

  Alex reached into the cooler beside her and pulled out a diet soda, opened the can, then took a long swig. The fizzy carbonated beverage slid down her throat, settling in her empty stomach with a slightly acidic burn.

  Alex glanced around the house—and that eerie feeling returned again.

  She had been here before. She knew it.

  But when? The only house she remembered living in was her grandmother’s.

  This house had been abandoned for a long time. Most of the wallpaper had peeled off the walls in long strips, like a mummy losing its wrappings. The drop ceiling had lost enough tiles to expose an even worse situation above with dark concentric rings spelling water damage, either from the roof or the second floor. Or both.

  She should check out the rooms upstairs and see if something was leaking. A place like this, empty for so long, had surely been vandalized. Not that she’d know what to do about a leak, but hey, at least she could see where the problems were. Better informed than ignorant.

  Alex climbed the stairs, her sneakers sinking into the divots in the worn shag carpeting. She paused at the top, then entered the first bedroom on the right. The pale brown paint on the walls gave them an odd cast of color. Alex brushed a palm across the surface, and with it, she whisked off a thick layer of dust.

  The walls weren’t brown.

  They were pink.

  Pink. For girls.

  Alex stared at the wall. Rubbed another circle of dirt away. Tiny hairs rose on the back of her neck and her throat began to close. She snatched her hand back from the wall and stumbled back, reaching for her cell phone.

  She punched in Grandma Kenner’s number, her fingers trembling as she hit the digits on the Motorola. “Grandma, tell me about this house.”

  Tell me it’s not what I think.

  “I, uh, don’t know that much.”

  Tell me it’s the house of a friend.

  Alex caught the lie in her grandmother’s voice. Grandma Kenner had never hid anything from her before, not that Alex knew.

  Tell me it’s someone else’s house. Please.

  She backed away from the pink walls, turned and hurried down the stairs, back to the main floor. She stopped and leaned against the staircase, her heart hammering in her chest, still wanting to think this was some other place, anywhere but…

  “Grandma, whose house is this?”

  A beat passed. Another. “Do you remember it at all?”

  Did she remember? Alex pivoted and ran a hand over the living room walls. Instead of drywall, they had been covered with rough pine, stained a dark, almost ebony color. The surface seemed to claw at her skin, scratch her palms.

  The memory slammed into her, hitting in a barrage of images.

  She’d been running, playing a solitary game of pretend. Her hair caught on the corner of the wall. A sliver of wood grabbed hold like the trees in the Wizard of Oz and held on to her ponytail as she ran by, yanking her to a stop with a painful pinch.

  Alex’s hand went to the back of her head and she swore she could still feel the spot where she’d lost those strands.

  Then she moved away from the wall and the pictures began filtering in, as real as if she’d stepped two decades into the past. A broken doll on the carpet by a red pool created by a spilled cup of Kool-Aid. Alex watching a flickering television from her perch on the couch, careful to avoid the spring that poked into her leg if she didn’t sit just right. Standing by the windows, waiting, always waiting, for her mother to come home. A stranger playing babysitter, one of an endless parade of temporary friends.

  She covered her mouth, cutting off a gasp.

  No. Not this house. Of all the houses in Massachusetts, the millions of possibilities—

  She didn’t want to believe it could be this one. Not this one.

  “This is…” Alex swallowed. Her heart began to race, and in her mind the memories sputtered like the old TV used to—eating cereal straight from the box for lunch, for dinner, for every meal, because there’d been no milk, no bread, no bananas. Nothing else in the cabinets. “This is her house.”

  “Your house,” Grandma corrected. “Where you lived as a little girl.”

  “This isn’t mine. It’s hers.” She shook her head, wandering to a built-in hutch in the corner and seeing now a vague memory of dishes there. Not many, just a few, a ragtag collection of plates and cups. Castoffs. Other people’s leftovers.

  The cupboard below. She’d hid there once.

  “Your grandfather and I bought it for your mother when you were born. She left it to you when she died. You were too young, so I held on to it, paying off the mortgage, the taxes. So that when you were old enough—”

  “When I was old enough, I’d what? Want to live here again?” Pain alternated with anger, catapulting one over the other, like an emotional game of leapfrog. Alex struggled for breath, for composure. For her brain to accept the impossible. “Hell, no, Grandma. Burn the place. Tear it down.”

  “You’re still very angry.”

  “Don’t you think I have every right to be?”

  “Yes, you do, sweetheart, but…sometimes forgiveness is the best path to finding your way out of the forest.”

  This was what Alex got for having a grandmother who loved to garden. Every lesson was wrapped in a nature analogy. Even lessons Alex didn’t want to hear. “She’s dead, Grandma. There’s no need to forgive anyone.” Or talk about her. Or be in her house. Or be here at all.

  “I didn’t mean forgiving just your mother, Alex. My daughter wasn’t a perfect parent, Lord knows. She had her faults, but you’ve been awfully hard on yourself, too.”

/>   A tightness started in Alex’s chest. She let out a breath, easing the sensation, but not the arrow of truth Grandma’s words had delivered. But Grandma hadn’t lived here. She hadn’t known how much Alex wished she could go back and undo a hundred different moments. Moments that still stung, needles in her skin, her heart.

  She ran a hand down the glass front of the cabinet, the edges having the ring of familiarity but the distance of years. “This is really the house where I grew up?” Alex knew the truth but still couldn’t accept it. Couldn’t believe the place she’d lived in as a child still existed.

  “It’s where you started out. That’s not the same thing.” Grandma paused a long moment, and Alex could almost feel her trying to send a mental hug. “I knew if I told you this house belonged to your mother, you’d take a blowtorch to it before you’d set foot in it.”

  Alex huffed. “I still might.”

  “Don’t.” Grandma let out a long, slow breath. “The one thing the doom-and-gloomers around here have shown me is that you have to bring chips to the party.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That even when you have bad news, or something awful to deal with, you still have to make the best of it. Find the good in the bad. There is some good there.” Grandma’s voice softened and Alex could almost hear her smile. “Look how you turned out.”

  “That’s all your doing.”

  “I’d love to take the credit, dear, but I can’t. Your mother was far from perfect, but she loved you.”

  Alex snorted. Loved her? What had her mother known about love? What had she taught Alex about love—except that it could hurt? “If she loved me, she wouldn’t have lived the way she did. She would have put her kids first.”

  “My daughter should have done a lot of things that she didn’t do, but she did love you, you need to know that. And maybe in that house, you’ll find out how much she did. All the clues are there, if you look hard enough. Don’t you want to know about her? About you?” Grandma paused. “You hardly remember anything. You were so little, sweetheart.”

  Alex didn’t respond. She bit her lip and turned away, but the conversation lingered in the air.

  “You can do this, Alex. It’ll be good for you, too.” Grandma’s voice held the same note of firmness that had delivered lectures on everything from taking vitamins to eating oatmeal on winter mornings. “You can’t keep letting your past rule your future.”

  “It’s not.”

  Grandma harrumphed.

  “Okay, maybe it is. A little.” Alex looked around the rooms again, seeing them now not as a challenge but as a disaster she couldn’t possibly tackle. No, she couldn’t. Not this house. “But starting here? With this?”

  “What better place to start than back at the beginning? You can’t figure out where you’re going if you don’t look at where you came from.” Grandma paused. “And no one said you had to stay there, Alex. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Keep it, sell it. I don’t care. But your mother left it to you for a reason and because she did, I think you should at least hold on to the house for a little while. Maybe see what secrets it holds.”

  A house that was, as Mack had said, a dump. A complete monstrosity. It needed an unbelievable amount of work before she could put it on the market.

  Assuming Alex even wanted to do the work now that she knew the history.

  “Do you know how much work is involved here, Grandma?”

  “Yes, I do, honey.” In Grandma Kenner’s voice, Alex could tell she meant a lot more than renovating the money pit of a house. “But take it from this old lady who has made her fair share of mistakes. This is the kind of hard, hands-on work that changes the soul.”

  Alex stared at the cell phone for a long time after they hung up, as if the slim Motorola might chirp back with a better solution, before finally slipping it back into her pocket.

  Keep the house. How could she do that? When the past contained within these walls was too difficult to face, too much to handle? She closed her eyes, the images coming back in flashes, like a jerky eight-millimeter movie, flashes seen through a child’s eyes. She remembered so little about her mother.

  She’d had long brown hair, green eyes. She often wore short denim skirts. And T-shirts. She’d loved T-shirts with sayings, though Alex had been too little to read the words.

  There’d been music, lots of loud music, and people, lots and lots of people. Her mother had lived life like it was one long party, seeming to forget she had a child who needed her. Alex, beneath the table, playing with her dolls, while the people laughed and danced, and ate, and kissed, and her mother pulled her out from time to time, like her daughter was an accessory she’d just remembered. Hardly ever home, never living a normal, sit-down-to-dinner or read-books life. Even when her sister had been born. And then that awful day.

  Alex caught her breath, and it hurt, sending fire down her lungs.

  The open door. Beyond it—Brittany—so still, so very still.

  Alex closed her eyes, but the memories kept coming, a wave of them, the ones she tried never to think about, pushing past the mental locks. She saw her mother now, grief-stricken, running, running out the door, getting into her car, and taking off too fast, too upset.

  She’d run a red light, kept going past the guardrail, and left Alex alone.

  Alex sucked in the stale air around her, swallowed hard. God. She hadn’t thought of that day in years. Alex closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to block it, but the image of her baby sister appeared again. Alex wrapped her arms around her body, shivering against a sudden chill, even though it was at least ten degrees hotter in the little house than outside. She shoved the memories back into the mental box and locked it tight.

  God, no, she couldn’t handle this. It was too much.

  Her grandmother might think renovating the house would make Alex work through whatever issues she might have with her childhood, but this hammer-and-nail therapy wasn’t going to work.

  Nevertheless, Alex needed a place to live. And this place stood empty. Unused. Granted, it was also a piece of crap right now, but it was an available piece of crap Alex happened to own.

  The smart thing to do would be to work on it. Make it habitable.

  Then sell it.

  Take the money and move the hell on. She’d come this far—she could make it that much further.

  Could she? Really? Here?

  It was too much, too much to take. Too much to do. Too much for her. Hot tears edged at the corners of Alex’s eyes, but she pressed the heels of her hands hard into her eye sockets and refused to give in to defeat. To the past. She’d get beyond this. Just like she did before.

  Work. Work on the house. And stop thinking, for God’s sake.

  She crossed the room and reached again for the electric saw. Before she turned it on, her front door opened. Or, rather, it fell into the room, the hinges at that moment apparently deciding they’d had enough of holding on to the jam.

  With the sun bursting behind him like an announcement of salvation, Mack walked in. He stepped calmly over the broken door, as if he saw that kind of thing every day. “So, when’s the housewarming party?” He held out a potted plant and grinned.

  The floodgates gave way and Alex burst into tears.

  He dropped the plant onto the fireplace hearth and crossed to her. “Hey, I didn’t mean to make you cry. I know I’m no Robin Williams, so forgive my lame attempt at a joke. And the plant, just throw it out. Seriously. Throw it out the nearest window. It’ll make you feel better. I swear.”

  “I-I-c-can’t…”

  “Sure you can.” He plucked the pot off the fireplace and put it in her hands. “Just chuck it. Let it take root wherever it lands. Call it avant-garde landscaping.”

  “It’s not that, it’s…” She swiped at her face, then looked up at him, the damn tears still coming, mad as hell at herself for crying, for letting the house, the memories it triggered that had been sitting at the corners
of her mind, get to her. “This is the house where I grew up.”

  Mack paused, confusion knitting his brows, then the light dawned in his eyes, and his entire face softened. He stepped forward. “Oh, God, Alex. How…?”

  “My mother left it to me.” She let out a chuff, but the breath caught in her throat, lodged like a log. “My grandmother thinks renovating it will be some kind of therapy.”

  Now Mack closed the gap, his hands reaching for her, his touch on her bare arms as comforting as a flannel blanket, his blue eyes filled with an understanding that came from knowing her since she’d learned her ABCs. The tightness in Alex’s chest eased a bit. “And what do you think?”

  “I think…” She drew in a breath, held it, then let her gaze travel over the space. “I think maybe she’s right. But I don’t know if I’m strong enough for this.”

  “You?” A wide smile took over his features. “You are the strongest person I know—outside of maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger. Before he was the Governator. He’s let his pecs go all to hell since getting into office.”

  His words had their intended effect—she laughed, and a bit of the heaviness lifted from her shoulders. What would she do without Mack? Every time she needed him, he was there, the only person who could see through the clouds in her life and find the sunshine.

  “Where do I start, Mack?” She sighed, and tears threatened her eyes all over again, thinking of all that lay ahead, tasks too huge for one woman. Coupled with everything else—trying to launch a new job at the newspaper, rearranging her life. When she took on a To Do list, she did it big. “Where the hell do I start?”

  “Right here, Alex. With this.” He cupped the pot of geraniums. The bright red flowers wiggled a little, like they were waving at her. “Just do it, Alex. Open the window and let ’em rip.”

  She wanted to laugh but couldn’t because now she really had started to cry. Not just because of the house, or the truth that had smacked her hard in the gut, but because of Mack, being there, with a stupid pot of geraniums, and his dependable-as-sunshine goofy grin. “I c-c-can’t. The damn windows are p-p-painted shut.”