by the gleam of lapis and ready to light. Fresh flowers stood on the Hepplewhite table she prized. Pillows sat fluffed and welcoming on the three sofas ranged around the room, and the wide planked chestnut floor gleamed like a mirror.
She’d had someone come in, he decided, then rubbed his forehead where a headache threatened to bloom.
She’d told him, hadn’t she? Told him she had someone looking out for the place. A neighbor, someone who did the heavy cleaning for her. He hadn’t forgotten she’d told him, he’d just lost the information for a moment in the fog that too often crawled in to blur his mind.
Now looking out for Bluff House was his job. To tend to it, to, as his grandmother had asked, keep life in it. And maybe, she’d said, it would pump some life back into him.
He picked up his bags, looked at the stairs. Then just stood.
She’d been found there, there at the base of the steps. By a neighbor—the same neighbor? Wasn’t it the same neighbor who cleaned for her? Someone, thank God, had come by to check on her, and found her lying there unconscious, bruised, bleeding, with a shattered elbow, a broken hip, cracked ribs, a concussion.
She might’ve died, he thought. The doctors expressed amazement that she’d stubbornly refused to. None of the family routinely checked on her daily, no one thought to call, and no one, including himself, would have worried if she hadn’t answered for a day or two.
Who might have died after a terrible fall, if not for a neighbor—and her own indefatigable will.
Now she reigned in a suite of rooms in his parents’ home while she recovered from her injuries. There she’d stay until deemed strong enough to come back to Bluff House—or if his parents had their way, there she would stay, period.
He wanted to think of her back here, in the house she loved, sitting out on the terrace with her evening martini, looking out at the ocean. Or puttering in her garden, maybe setting up her easel to paint.
He wanted to think of her vital and tough, not helpless and broken on the floor while he’d been pouring a second cup of morning coffee.
So he’d do his best until she came home. He’d keep life in her house, such as his was.
Eli picked up his bags, started upstairs. He’d take the room he’d always used on visits—or had before those visits stretched out fewer and farther between. Lindsay had hated Whiskey Beach, Bluff House, and had made trips there into a cold war with his grandmother rigidly polite on one side, his wife deliberately snide on the other. And he’d been squeezed in the middle.
So he’d taken the easy way, he thought now. He could be sorry about that, sorry he’d stopped coming, sorry he’d made excuses and had limited his time with his grandmother to her trips to Boston. But he couldn’t turn back the clock.
He stepped into the bedroom. Flowers here, too, he noted, and the same soft green walls, two of his grandmother’s watercolors he’d always particularly liked.
He put his bags on the bench at the foot of the sleigh bed, stripped off his coat.
Here, things had stayed the same. The little desk under the window, the wide atrium doors leading to the terrace, the wingback chair and the little footstool with the cover his grandmother’s mother had needlepointed long ago.
It occurred to him that for the first time in a very long time he felt—almost—at home. Opening his bag, he dug out his toiletry kit, then found fresh towels, fancy seashell soaps. The scent of lemons in the bath.
He stripped down without glancing at the mirror. He’d lost weight, too much weight, over the last year. He didn’t need to remind himself of it. He turned on the shower, stepped in, hoping to burn some of the fatigue away. He knew from experience if he went to bed exhausted and stressed, he’d sleep fitfully, wake with that dragging hangover.
When he stepped out he grabbed one of the towels from the stack, again caught the whiff of lemon as he scrubbed it over his hair. Damp, it curled past the nape of his neck, a mop of dark blond longer than it had been since his early twenties. But then he hadn’t seen his usual barber, Enrique, for nearly a year. He hardly had the need for a hundred-fifty-dollar haircut, or the collection of Italian suits and shoes