James Nealy needs to create a garden

James Nealy is haunted by irrational fears and inescapable compulsions. A successful software developer, he’s thrown himself into a new goal—to finally conquer the noise in his mind. And he has a plan. He’ll confront his darkest fears and build something beautiful: a garden. When he meets Tilly Silverberg, he knows she holds the key…even if she doesn’t think so.

After her husband’s death, gardening became Tilly’s livelihood and her salvation. Her thriving North Carolina business and her young son, Isaac, are the excuses she needs to hide from the world. So when oddly attractive, incredibly tenacious James arrives on her doorstep, demanding she take him on as a client, her answer is a flat no.

When a family emergency lures Tilly back to England, she’s secretly glad. With Isaac in tow, she retreats to her childhood village, which has always stayed obligingly the same. Until now. Her best friend is keeping secrets. Her mother is plotting. Her first love is unexpectedly, temptingly available. And then James appears on her doorstep.

Away from home, James and Tilly begin to forge an unlikely bond, tenuous at first but taking root every day. And as they work to build a garden together, something begins to blossom between them—despite all the reasons against it.

The Unfinished Garden

Barbara Claypole White

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Larry and Zachariah

And for my parents, Rev. Douglas Eric and Anne Claypole White

Contents

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Acknowledgments

Questions for Discussion

Interview with Barbara Claypole White

Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there

—Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow

—Swedish proverb

Chapter 1

Tilly leaned over the railing and prodded the copperhead with the yard broom. Nothing much scared her these days other than snakes and hospitals, which she found oddly depressing. You needed jolts of fear, little hits of adrenaline, to appreciate the buzz of life.

A tailless skink scurried past her gardening clog, and a pair of hummingbirds chittered as they raced to and from the feeder. In the forest, the hawk screeched for its mate.

The venomous snake, however, refused to budge.

Growing up in the English countryside, the most terrifying creature Tilly encountered was a Charolais cow. Isaac, her child guru of everything indigenous and nasty in rural North Carolina, had stared, gobsmacked, when she’d shared that gem five minutes ago.

The porch vibrated as he pogoed up and down, no doubt rehearsing the pleasure of bragging to his chums: My copperhead’s bigger than yours.

So what if she didn’t belong here, any more than that manky elderberry hiding behind her tropical plants? This was Isaac’s universe, and she would never rip him away from it. She had failed her son three years earlier. She wouldn’t fail him again. Although, once in a while, it might be refreshing to breathe air that wasn’t as congealed as leftover leek and potato soup.

Tilly panted through a sigh. The heat had sprung early this year, sideswiped her without the gradual warming of late spring. August weather in the first week of June? Bugger, her summer was set to revolve around watering. She should have been watering this afternoon—not trying to outwit a comatose snake. Or repotting perennials. Or planning to fire her assistant. Of course, firing Sari meant finding time to interview a replacement, since the business had been twirling beyond her control long before Sari had appeared as the opposing force that stops an object in motion. Isaac had been reading Newton! A Giant in Science! lately. Inertia was his topic of the week.

If she’d paid more attention on the day Sari torpedoed into her life like a Norse berserker on Red Bull, Tilly would have realized Sari wasn’t applying for a job; bloody woman was prowling for a cause. Just yesterday, she had tried to persuade Tilly to meet with some wealthy software developer about landscaping his new la-di-da property. Landscaping, really? Piedmont Perennials was a wholesale nursery. Besides, design clients would expect plans revealed in drawn-to-scale diagrams, and Tilly couldn’t compile a functional grocery list.

Isaac stopped bouncing. “What’s next, Mom?”

Damned if I know. Killing the snake was neither a thought she could follow nor an example she wanted to set for her critter-loving son. And no way could she find the courage to shovel up Mr. Copperhead and toss him toward the creek.

Tilly grinned at Isaac. Sticks of flaxen hair poked out like scarecrow straw from under his faded cap, and the front of his T-shirt was caught in the elastic of his Spiderman underwear. As usual, his pull-on shorts rested halfway down his hips. He was small for an eight-year-old, and every time Tilly looked at him, she saw playground bait. Which was the real reason she kept him at the private Montessori, not the math skills or his inexplicable passion for science.

“I’m fixin’ to find that varmint a new home,” she said. “’Cos he sure as heck can’t ’ave this one.”

As predicted, Isaac giggled through her English-accented Southern-speak. His laughter gave her precious seconds to think. No time to allow him to doubt, even for a millisecond, that his mother was able to handle every situation that rocked their lives. Except, of course, one involving snakes. And hospitals. But she wasn’t going there in her mind, not today.

“What about calling that wildlife guy from the school field trip?” Isaac said. “Doesn’t he rescue unwanted snakes?”

“Angel Bug, you’re a genius. I guess I’ll have to keep you around.”

She expected him to puff up with pride. Instead he frowned and looked so like David that Tilly had to bite her lip.

“What do you think Daddy would do about the snake?”

Tilly no longer instigated the what-would-Daddy-do game, even though she screamed silently with memories: David waking from a nightmare, his voice full of need, “Promise you’ll never leave me, babe”; David reaching for her with hot breath, greedy hands, and whispers of “Jesus. You make me so horny.” David asleep on the sofa with baby Isaac tucked into his arm.

Isaac was only five when David died. How many of their child’s memories were regurgitated stories she fed him? Did Isaac remember his father’s passion, his contagious energy, his insistence that she sprinkle mothballs around the sandbox to bar snakes? David had loathed the bugs and the snakes. Mind you, he’d hated everything about life in the South, although not his status as the youngest distinguished professor in the University of North Carolina system.

A memory pounced, and Tilly smiled: David teetering on the sofa as he hurled an academic tome at a creepy-crawly moseying across the floor.

Her husband had done nothing without panache.

“What would Daddy do?” Tilly scratched the burning itch of fresh chigger bites under her arm. “Pitch a wobbly, then insist we move to snake-free Manhattan.”

And once David chose a course of action, there was no U-turn.

“Daddy would have made us leave? That’s awful.”

But was it? Tilly stared into the forest that isolated them at night behind a wall of primal noise. This property had been on the market for two years when she and David bought it. No one wanted the unfinished house that was falling to ruin, the overgrown creek clogged with decades of trash, or the forest littered with refuse from a builder who abandoned the site after his money ran out. And yet the first time Tilly saw this land, she fell in love. Wild jack-in-the-pulpits poked through the forest floor, and untamed beauty whispered to her. But she left England for one reason, and that reason no longer existed, despite the Daddy game.

Tilly never talked about David’s death, but the fact of it kept her company every day, like an echo. The ICU doctor had given her options and then asked how she would like to proceed. Like, a word that suggested choice. Funny thing, though, she never considered the choice was hers. One second of blind, misplaced faith, of assuming she knew what her husband wanted, of uttering one short sentence: “David has a living will.” That’s all it had taken to destroy both their lives.

The phone rang inside the house, but neither Tilly, nor the copperhead, stirred.

* * *

The forest smelled different on hot evenings, like an oven set to four hundred and twenty-five degrees and cooking nothing but air. Tilly sipped her gin and tonic, closed her eyes, and listened to the pounding of the basketball on the concrete slab.

“Mom?” Isaac stopped shooting hoops. “Are we expecting someone?”

Please let it not be the chatty wildlife bloke returning with the copperhead. Please.

A silver convertible—Alfa Romeo, fancy—swung into a flawless turn and stopped under the basketball hoop. Damn, too late to sneak back inside, lock the door and pretend no one was home. The bearded driver tugged off his sunglasses and sat, motionless, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Who is he?” Isaac whispered.

“Beats me,” Tilly said. “Haven’t got the foggiest.”

The driver opened the door but didn’t emerge.

“He looks like Blackbeard.” Isaac stepped behind his mother.

“He’s most likely lost. Don’t worry, Angel Bug. I’ve got this covered.” She tottered forward, trying not to spill her drink. “Can I help you, sir?”

The stranger, dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt—in this heat?—didn’t reply. He had retrieved a backpack from the passenger seat and was fiddling with its zipper. Gradually, as if the movement were choreographed, he turned.

“You’re barefoot.” He made no attempt to hide his disapproval.

She glanced into the driver’s-side footwell. “And you aren’t.” Blimey, not so much as a sweetie wrapper on the floor of his car. Now that was impressive.

“James Nealy.” Nealy…was that Irish? James Nealy, a name you snapped out with a click of your tongue. A name, like James Bond, that meant business.

He scowled at her, and she tried not to gawp. But really, he had the most stunning eyes. They were dappled with layers of light and dark like polished tiger’s-eye. “I have a six o’clock appointment.”

“You’re the software developer? Bugger. I thought I canceled you.”

Isaac tittered.

“Is that so?” Was there a hint of amusement in those eyes?

“Sorry. I meant, oh dear, my lovely assistant was supposed to call and cancel. I’m a nursery owner, Mr. Nealy, not a landscaper for hire. Can’t help, I’m afraid.”

That was it. Sari was so fired.

James emerged from his litterless car and slung the backpack over his shoulder. He definitely had that piratical look, although his beard seemed more like week-old growth. And his grizzled hair, which was straight and floppy at the front where it hung to his eyes, yet a mess of curls at his neck, was too short for a buccaneer. For some reason, she thought of contradictions in weather—a downpour through sunlight or the clear, bright day after a tropical storm. Maybe it was the result of speeding along in a convertible, but his hair gave the impression of having recently broken free from a style. Could he be growing it? If so, bad decision. She stroked her damp nape. Hair that unruly needed to be tamed or snipped off.

He turned to close the car door, pausing twice to tap a silent rhythm against his thigh with his index finger.

Isaac sidled up to her. “He looks like Ms. Lezlie does when we’re bouncing off the classroom walls. As if he’s bursting with yells he can’t let out.”

“Hmm,” Tilly replied.

Insects droned through the forest and the compressor grunted to life.

“Isaac, love.” She inhaled thick, syrupy air and imagined the humidity clinging to her like an exhausted two-year-old. “Time to do something cool and quiet indoors.”

“Awww, Mommmmm.” Isaac’s basketball fell to the concrete with a gentle boing, and James trapped it with his foot. Isaac glanced up, unsure.

James cocked his head to the right. “Tar Heel or Duke fan?”

“Tar Heel, of course,” Isaac said.

“Good man.” James winked.

Isaac beamed and then skittered into the garage to put away the basketball before bounding up the front steps two at a time.

Okay, so James Nealy had been nice to her son. That bought him five minutes.

James straightened up and towered over her. Well, most people did when you were five foot two, except for David. David had been the ideal height.

She swiped her palm down her cutoffs and extended her hand. “I’m Tilly, by the way. Tilly Silverberg.”

James twitched, the slightest of tics, and his hand darted forward, touched hers and darted back. David always shook hands with a firm, double-handed grasp, drawing you into his space. But James’s palm was cool, his loose handshake more of a dismissal than a greeting. His face remained impassive while his fingers flexed as if he had a cramp.

“Your assistant mentioned $25,000. I’m willing to double that.”

Sari had discussed a figure with him? Wait a minute. He was offering her $50,000? She could redecorate, buy a new truck, go on a cruise—not that she wanted to. Since the crippling bout of seasickness on her honeymoon, she had avoided boats. And exactly why had she agreed to go snorkeling off the Great Barrier Reef when she hated snorkeling? Because it was always easier to say yes to David.

But widowhood had taught her to say no.

A crow cawed deep in the forest, and Tilly shuddered. Actually, it was more of a full-bodied spasm. Fifty thousand dollars, but at what price? There was a reason she hadn’t expanded into retail despite Sari’s best efforts; there was a reason she let Sari deliver customers’ orders. How could she find the oomph to engage in other people’s lives? Hanging on to Isaac’s and her own was challenging enough.

And Isaac, her pint-size sage, may have been right about James Nealy. He was all wound up with nowhere to go, his fingers writhing with more nervous energy than those of a philandering priest waiting to be skewered by lightning. She should back away, right?

James flicked his hair from his face once, twice, and tossed her a look that was almost a dare, that seemed to say, “Go ahead. Ask what invisible demon snaps at my heels.” And she nearly did, on the off chance it might be the same as hers.

She sighed. “I can recommend an excellent landscaper in Chapel Hill.”

“I don’t need a referral.” James scanned the forest, first to the right, then to the left. “Your property has this controlled feeling, yet the borders speak of nature rioting. Breaking free, but in an orderly way. Your garden by the road is organized bedlam.”

Tilly screwed up her face. Was that a compliment?

“The plants all grow into each other,” he continued, his speech speeding up. “But they’re balanced in height and color, contained by shrubs shaped to fit. Individuality within structure. It’s perfect.” He cupped his long, thin fingers into a chalice. “It’s perfect.”

“Thank you.” I think. Did he really believe there was a thought process behind her garden? She worked on instinct, nothing else, and after thirteen years of hard slog, had barely begun. How could this man, who was in such a rush that he had extracted his checkbook and a pen from his bag, understand?

“Shall I pay half up front and the balance when you’re done?”

“Listen, flattery’s lovely, but I have no experience in garden design.”

“No experience? What do you call that?” He pointed to the woodland path that snaked through arching sprays of poet’s laurel and hearts-a-bursting to open up around a small border edged with fallen cedar limbs. Mottled tiarellas wove through black-stemmed maidenhair ferns; a mass of Indian pinks with tubular flowers embraced the birdbath she’d rescued from the dump; the delicate arms of native Solomon’s seal and goldenrod danced behind.

“Instinct,” she said.

“Fine. I’ll pay $50,000 for your instinct.”

She would laugh, but the heat had siphoned off her energy.

“Mr. Nealy.” Tilly leaned toward James and gave what she hoped was a firm smile, like opening your door a crack to a stranger but not letting him inside. “I appreciate your willingness to pay such a large sum for my instinct. But Sari told me that you’re building a house.” Tilly pulled back. “You should be searching for a landscaper, not a nursery owner.”

James picked a single, dark hair from his black T-shirt. Was he even listening? Mind you, offering to double his payment without so much as a peeved expression suggested more money than sense. According to Sari, he had made appointments with every local business listed in the yellow pages under landscape architects, landscape designers, landscape contractors and nurseries. That was beyond thorough and not the behavior of someone she wanted to work for…if she were wavering in her decision, which she wasn’t.

“I don’t have the right qualifications for this job,” Tilly said. “My answer has to be no.”

His hand shot to his hair, then jerked down to massage his shoulder awkwardly. “You have a gift, and I’m willing to pay for it. How are career definitions relevant?”

Tilly swiped sweat from her hairline. No perspiration rolled down his face, no damp splodges marred his slim-fitting T-shirt. She had no eye for fashion, but Tilly understood cut and fabric. That simple black T-shirt probably cost more than her weekly grocery shop. Certainly more than today’s red tank top, which was one dollar’s worth of the thrift store’s finest.

James cracked open his checkbook.

“People don’t say no to you very often. Do they?”

“I need this garden.” He clicked the top of his pen then repeated the gesture.

Interesting. Need and garden in the same sentence. Now he was talking her language.

“I need this garden.” He grew still like the eye of a storm.

“Yes, I rather gathered that. Shame it’s not for sale.”

Tilly caught the scent of gardenia, that finicky little bugger she had come to love for its determination to survive. She braced for an outburst, but James surprised her with a smile. A warm smile that softened his face of angles and shadows and touched her in a way his handshake had not. If he were some fellow shopper queuing next to her in a checkout line and he threw her that smile, she might be tempted to give him the once-over. Not that she eyed up men anymore.

“I’m sorry.” Tilly flicked a dribble of sweat from her pitiful cleavage. “This heat is making me cranky, and I don’t mean to be rude, but I can’t help you.”

“You prefer rain to this interminable heat?” James scrutinized the sky.

“God, yes. I’m a rain freak. How did you know?”

“English accent.”

The hawk drifted overhead, and Tilly watched it disappear into the forest. “People tend to guess Australian, since my accent’s such a hybrid. English lilt, American terminology, although I swear in English. I’m not sure my voice knows where it belongs.” And what did she hope to achieve by confessing that?

“The rest of you feels the same way?” James studied her.

The polite response would be a shrug. The impolite response would be to say, “None of your business.” Tilly chose neither. Longing stabbed her, longing for Bramwell Chase, the Northamptonshire village that anchored her life. Longing for Woodend, the four-hundred-year-old house that breathed her history. Haddington history, from before she was Mrs. Silverberg.

“Some days.” Bugger. Why did she have to cripple herself with honesty? Other people told juicy little fibs and fat whoppers of deceit all the time. But with one baby truth, she had shoved the conversation in a direction she had no desire to follow. “You’re clearly comfortable, though, sweltering in the nineties.” Her mouth was dry, her throat scratchy. She swept her tongue over her gums to find moisture. It didn’t help.

“I’m familiar, not comfortable, with this weather.” James returned the checkbook and pen to his backpack, but Tilly sensed he was regrouping, not conceding. “It reminds me of childhood summers, and childhoods have a powerful hold over us. I’m sure you agree.”

Tilly didn’t trust herself to answer. A thrush trilled from the mimosa tree, but she imagined the music of the blackbird’s lullaby at Woodend. She pictured the paddock rolling toward fields dotted with clumps of bracken and the ancient trees of The Chase, the medieval hunting woods, looming beyond. If she closed her eyes, she might even smell her mother’s lavender. Tilly wasn’t aware of starting to walk, but she and James were sauntering toward the forest. Anyone watching might have assumed they were friends out for a stroll, which proved a person should trust with her heart, not with her eyes.

“Where’s your childhood home?” Marvelous. She meant to terminate the conversation, not prolong it. But when was the last time she had a bona fide I’ll–tell-you-mine-if-you’ll-tell-me-yours chat with anyone? Just last week, Rowena, Tilly’s best friend since they were four years old, had written a snarky email that started, “Answer this or I’m giving you the boot.” And yet Tilly had discovered an amazing truth in the last few years: the further you drifted away from others, the easier it was to keep going.

Had James not heard her question? “Where—”

“Rural Illinois,” he said.

Aha! That was why he wasn’t sweating. “Farming stock?”

“I’ve tried hard not to be.”

Tilly fished the remaining shard of ice from her gin and tonic and crunched it between her teeth, dampening the crescendo of cicada buzz. “Look, I’m melting faster than the ice in my gin, and I have to start supper. I apologize for wasting your time. I should have made it clear to Sari that I had no intention of taking the business in a different direction.” Actually, she had stated it every which way and then some. Sari, a dean’s wife with a master’s degree in communications, had understood just fine.

“If I took you on as a client, I would be rushing helter-skelter into something new, something I can’t handle right now. I appreciate your interest in my work, but I can’t help you. We all need things, Mr. Nealy. We rarely get them.”

“I’m curious. What is it that you need?”

Tilly rubbed her left hand across her mouth, jabbing her thumb into her jawbone. “Peace,” she replied.

“In the Middle East?” He dipped toward her as if to catch her words.

“Peace from others.” She held his gaze and felt the remnants of her bonhomie sizzle up in the heat. “I need the world to bugger off and leave me alone with my thoughts.” And my guilt.

Sinew jutted from his neck. “That’s a dangerous place to be, alone with your thoughts.”

Tilly gulped back why, because she didn’t want to know. Her thoughts were like tender perennials in a greenhouse, and she didn’t need some stranger to crack the glass.

He blinked rapidly, and his mottled eyes filled with an expression she recognized. She hit a fawn once, driving along Creeping Cedars at dusk. Sprawled on the verge, the poor animal lay mangled and broken, its quivering eyes speaking to Tilly of the desire to bolt, hampered by the knowledge that there was no escape. The same fear she saw now in James.

Vulnerability, the one thing she could never resist.

A burst of sunlight caught on James’s small, black ear stud. A black pearl?

“Please,” James said. “Please show me your garden.”

She would have agreed even without the second please. “On two conditions.” She slugged her gin. “You understand that I’m not agreeing to take you on. And I fix you a drink while I freshen up mine.”

But James didn’t answer. He was wandering along Tilly’s woodland trail, his index finger tapping against his thigh.

Chapter 2

Faster. James floored the gas pedal, even though faster was never fast enough. Twenty-five years ago, he would have been tearing across farm tracks on his Kawasaki H2, a motorbike that had earned its nickname of Widowmaker. Tonight he was racing along some county road in his Alfa Romeo Spider with the top down and the Gipsy Kings blaring. He conjured up his favorite scene from Weekend at Bernie’s in which a corpse water-skied into a buoy, but couldn’t even rustle up a smile. Movie slapstick was his happy pill, although obviously not this evening.

He glimpsed his reflection in the rearview mirror. God Almighty, some stranger could zip past the Alfa right now and have no inkling of the horror festering inside its driver. At worst, he looked like a guy trapped in a killer hangover and the black-only fashion dictum of the eighties. No one would guess that he was, quite simply, a man trapped. James had read somewhere that life was about how you lived in the present moment, which might be true for millions of people without obsessive-compulsive disorder. But for James, living in the moment was hell. And he never got so much as a day pass.

Would he ever find peace, or would he always be that kid terrified of the boogeyman hiding in his own psyche?

He could feel germs mutating in the soil. Soil Tilly had transferred to him. Why, why had he shaken hands?

The Alfa screeched onto the gravel in front of an abandoned gas station and James leaped from the car, leaving the engine running. He grabbed one of six bottles of Purell from the glove compartment and emptied it over his hands, shaking out every last drop. Terrific. Now his palms were sticky as well as contaminated. Cringing, he rubbed them together until they throbbed.

A squirrel shot in front of him, rustling dried-up leaves as it disappeared into the forest, squawking. Smart little rodent. I’d run from me, too, if I could, buddy.

Shaking his hands dry, James glanced up. He needed big sky, Illinois sky, not this wimpy patch of cerulean obscured by trees. Even in Chicago, he could see more sky than he could in Chapel Hill, where the forest closed in from every angle. And at night, the roads were dark like pitch, trapping him, blind, in purgatory.

Was it too late to reconsider this whole move? Yes, it was. He had started down this path the only way he knew how—with absolute commitment. There could be no running back to Illinois. He had made sure of that by selling everything—the farm, the business, his apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Everything but the Widowmaker and the Alfa.

He had moved south with one purpose: to be part of the exposure therapy trials at Duke University, and finally, finally learn how to reclaim his life from fear.

A rusty white pickup truck lurched down the road, an animal crate on its flatbed rattling against restraints. His father had offered to cage him once—a drunken joke that wasn’t remotely funny. Regret rose in his gut, and James hardened himself against it. Back then no one, not even James, had understood that his bizarre behavior and repetitive thoughts were caused by an anxiety disorder. And his dad? His dad died believing that his only kid was damaged beyond repair. But James was going to prove him wrong. Hell, yes. He was going to prove his dad wrong. OCD had nearly destroyed James’s life once. And he would do whatever it took to become that guy, that normal guy, who could shrug and say, “You know what? Once is enough.”

The original plan had derailed, but he wouldn’t turn back. Not that he could even if he wanted to, since he’d never been able to walk away from anything. OCD was behind that, too. It was the root cause of every success, every failure, every gesture, every desire, every thought…every thought.

This was his amended plan, 1b. No! 2a. Odd numbers tingled through him like slow-working poison and jinxed everything. This plan held the promise of freedom—freedom from the nightly window and door checks, freedom to sleep past the 4:30-a.m. treadmill call. Freedom to expose himself to the minefield of unallocated time. Doing nothing was akin to unrolling the welcome mat for every funky ritual his short-circuiting brain could sling at him. It was beautifully, impossibly straightforward, his plan: face his fear. And not just any fear, but the mother lode. The biggest fucking fear of all. Dirt.

James’s pulse sped up, and his heart became a jackhammer pounding into his ribs. He swallowed hard and tasted panic, metallic as if his throat were lined with copper. The voice inside his head that wasn’t his own drowned out everything as it chanted over and over, “You’re going to die, die from disease in the soil.” He started rocking. Movement, he needed movement. The voice told him to twist his hair, told him if he didn’t, he would catch cancer from the soil and die. But he didn’t have to listen! This wasn’t a real thought. This was brain trash, right?

Or he could just twist his hair twice. Then twice again and twice again. Six was a wonderful number. Soft and round and calm. But rituals were cheap fixes. Compulsions only fed the OCD monster. It would return, stronger, unless he fought back.

He thumped his fists into his thigh. Don’t cave, don’t twist your hair. If you can fight for ten minutes, the urge will pass. He counted to forty and stopped. Ten minutes? Hell, he couldn’t make it to one.

Was he crazy to retire at forty-five and abandon work, the only distraction that restrained fear? There would be no more relabeling irrational anxiety as the stress of running a successful software company. No, those days were over. Now he was free to follow the lead of his faulty brain wherever it led.

Me and my fucked-up shadow.

James tapped his lucky watch. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap.

Now he’d contaminated his watch.

Panic gnawed at his stomach. Germs were mutating in the soil, breeding like bunny fucking rabbits, but he was not going to twist his hair. James sucked in a breath to the count of four. He held it for two seconds then exhaled. One, two, three, four. Repeat, James, repeat. Slow the breath, and the heart and mind will follow.

Everything would be okay if he could just hire a landscaper—Tilly Silverberg—under the pretext of beautifying his new ten-acre property, when really, he would watch and learn from a professional. She’d made it clear no amount of money would change her mind, which was intriguing. Not that he was cynical, but money talked. There had to be another way. Did that bring him to plan 2b?

James concentrated on slowing down his breath, winding down his fear, and reliving the moment he had seen her garden on the edge of the woods. His pulse had slowed, his thoughts had fallen silent, and he’d known, just known: whatever lay at the end of that driveway held the key to his plan.

Piedmont Perennials had been his final appointment at 6:00 p.m. Six, a sign that everything would be okay, except for that god-awful honking. James glanced up as a skein of geese flew over in textbook formation—an imperfect, imbalanced V with one side longer than the other. Symmetry soothed his fractured mind, but the lack of it….

James jerked around, searching for a focal point, a diversion, anything.

Stop. Please, just stop. And a picture of Tilly dropped into his mind. She moved with the elegance of a prima ballerina, albeit one in a scarlet top and frayed cutoffs. Scarlet, she was a woman of bright colors who could spin through life laughing, gin in hand. But there was a sadness in those huge, pale eyes. Yes, she was beautiful, but beauty held no meaning for him. He was attracted only to women who were as screwed up as he was, even if they hid it better. Fuck. Not good, not good. Eighteen months celibate and focused on one thing—fixing himself. Fighting terror sucked up enough emotional energy. How could he salvage any for the mess of love and desire? Besides, being alone was his default button. Best for others, best for him. And yet…Tilly had made him smile.

His insides were heaving with fear, and she made him smile.

Her feet, poised for a pirouette, were so small, so vulnerable—so bare. Bare and dirty. And covered in soil. Soil on her feet, soil on her hands, soil she’d transferred to him. Soil poisoning her, poisoning him.

Boss back the thought, James. Boss it back.

Bossing back, the most basic weapon in the cognitive-behavioral therapy arsenal, sounded as easy as flipping on the turn signal. Don’t want that thought? Toss it and change direction. And yet summoning those three short words, boss it back, demanded enough focus to cripple him.

Why, why had he shaken hands with a gardener, a woman with dirt under her thumbnail? He must get to the rental apartment and throw everything, even his Pumas in the washing machine. Scour himself clean and then scrub the car inside and out.

Lose himself in time-consuming routine, his comfort and his curse.

But first, vomit.

Chapter 3

The ache in her right shoulder blade, an old symptom of her scoliosis, continued to throb to the cacophony of spring peepers. Or had they already become bog-standard tree frogs by early June? One of those Southern things Tilly could never figure out. Read-aloud time, that most precious part of the day, had slipped by unnoticed, so she’d promised Isaac he could come back outside in his jammies to catch fireflies.

The phone rang and Tilly picked it up on the first ring. “Piedmont Perennials.” She swallowed a yawn.

“Tilly? James Nealy.” His voice was deeper on the phone. Or did she mean sexier?

Bugger it. She really must start checking caller ID. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” He paused. “Listen, I realize you’re probably doing bedtime with your son.”

At least he was aware of that fact. Half a Brownie point in his favor.

“And I’m sorry, I’m sorry…I know I took up enough of your time yesterday evening, and you’ve made your position perfectly clear. Perfectly clear. But I’m—” he hesitated “—obsessed with your garden, and sadly for you, that won’t change. Name your price and conditions. I’ll agree to anything.”

“How about agreeing to find someone else?”

“Not an option.” In the forest, a blue jay jeered. “It has to be you. Your garden speaks to me.”

She laughed. She had a gardening groupie? Was this how David had felt every time a grad student drooled over one of his lectures? Not a bad sensation, really. “Are you always this sure?”

“I have good intuition, Tilly. I wouldn’t be retired at forty-five if I didn’t.”

“Lucky you, because mine is crap.” One irreversible mistake, that’s all it had taken to dull her intuition into nonexistence. Tilly shivered, despite the clawing humidity. For a second she was back in the cold, white hospital room. Some days she wasn’t sure she’d ever left.

A carpenter bee looped past, searching for a place to burrow. It would, no doubt, drill a pretty little hole in her cedar railing. One bee, one hole, meant nothing, but small things had a nasty habit of becoming big things. And she didn’t want to think about the damage a colony of bees could inflict.

“So there is a chance for me?” James said.

Obviously, she hadn’t mastered no quite as well as she’d thought. “You know, I really, really want to dislike you.”

“Yes, I can have that effect on people. Although they tend to skip the want part.”

Tilly smiled. If he kept this up, she might have to change her mind. “It’s late, and you’re right. I’m in the middle of bedtime.”

“Can I call tomorrow?”

“You’re pushing it.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“Do you always apologize this much?”

“It’s one of my more annoying habits.”

“You might want to work on that.”

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone line. “I’m trying.” His voice was lower, quieter.

“Good night,” Tilly said, and hit the off button before James could reply.

She scuffed up a dusting of red clay with her gardening clog and imagined rain. English summer rain that pattered and pinged and smelled fresh, clean and cool. James’s talk of childhoods the day before had unsettled her, left her with an aftertaste she couldn’t nix. A quick fantasy blindsided her—running home to her mother, her twin sisters, Caitlin and Bree, and of course, Rowena. Tilly may have changed her name and citizenship, but she was English at heart, just as she would always be a Haddington.

Isaac, who had been searching the edge of one of her shade beds for who-knew-which disgusting creepy-crawly, rose and yanked up his pajama bottoms. “Thinking of Daddy?”

“Nope.” Her eyes followed a vapor trail toward the stratosphere.

“England?”

“Busted.” Bugger, she was a pitifully easy read. Thank God she never had secrets to keep. “I was remembering gloriously wet summers when I was your age. Snakeless, too.”

Isaac recoiled as if she’d driven over skunk roadkill with the truck’s windows open. “Are you going to drag us back?”

“Wow. Why would you ask that?” Avoidance, smart move.

“You think everything’s better in England.” Isaac twisted his foot, and a hunk of guilt constricted in her stomach. “But I want to live here, in our house, for ever and ever.”

“I know, my love. I used to feel the same way about Woodend.”

“Do you still?”

Not a fair question. Woodend was the place that caught her when she fell from life, and it always would be. Isaac continued to wait for an answer, but a sugarcoated one she couldn’t give.

“Woodend is a place of memories. I was born there. I met Daddy there….” Tilly stared at the dogwood tree they had planted on the sixth-month anniversary of David’s death.

“This is a place of memories, too, Mom. Yours and mine and Daddy’s.”

But the memories here were polluted with grief. Once again she had shared too much and disappointed Isaac. Yes, he was old in intellect, but emotionally he was far younger than eight.

“You’re right.” Tilly swelled with love. Sometimes just looking at Isaac made her chest heave with the imagined horror of a thousand what-ifs. “I’m sorry. I’m a little lost today.”

“That’s okay, Mom. I have lost days, too. Hey, I need to pee. Want me to do it by the cold frame to keep the deer away?”

“Please. But watch your aim.” Tilly turned toward the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

“Mommy?”

“Isaac?” She spun around.

Pajama pants shoved to his knees, he was clutching his penis. “I have a tick. Near my willy.” His free hand agitated as if he were shaking a maraca. “It’s latched on.”

“Piff. I can get that sucker off.” Finally, a problem she could fix.

A groan of thunder tumbled toward them as the edge of the forest retreated into darkness. How had she failed to notice the towering storm cloud banked over the upper canopy? The sky exploded with a boom that rattled through the window casements and through Tilly. She jerked back into spider thread, the kind you never saw, and then blam! You were wrapped in goo, snared by a teeny-tiny, almost invisible, arachnid.

* * *

An arm slipped around her waist, breath tickled her neck and familiar fingers teased the sensitive spot above her hipbone. The blades of the fan sliced through the bedroom air, and tree frogs serenaded with the noises of the night. “I love you,” David whispered in the soft mid-Atlantic accent that masked his Brooklyn roots.

Tilly tried to turn and touch the ridge of scar on his right cheek, but her limbs remained weighted to the mattress. The mockingbird shrilled from its nest, and David’s arms retreated.

Don’t go, my love, don’t go. It can’t hurt you. It’s just a bird.

Tilly jolted upright in bed, her heart thumping. She glanced at the ceiling, but there was no creak from the room above to suggest that Isaac, who slept on the edge of his bed in deference to his plush lizards and snakes, had, yet again, fallen out.

Dawn was creeping around the blinds, sneaking into her bedroom with a fresh reminder that she was welcoming another day as a widow. And her phone was ringing at—she squinted toward David’s space-age alarm clock—6:00 a.m.? It better not be James Nealy again, unless…dear God, no. No. Her breath quickened; her mind swirled in memories. Was it four o’clock on a black November morning with rain pounding the deck, the air crackling with a late-season thunderstorm, and her mother’s voice, quiet but solid, “Your father’s fading. Come home”? Or was it 12:01 on a balmy May night with spring peepers jingling in the forest and one of David’s inner-circle graduate students crying as she whispered, “David’s been rushed to hospital”? Why did life boil down to phone calls in the middle of the night? Who this time? Her mother, one of her sisters, Rowena?

Tilly yanked the phone from its base. “Yes?” Her voice raced out with her breath.

“Oh, you’re there. Thank the Lord.”

“Mum? Why are you calling at this hour?”

“I woke you, didn’t I? I’m terribly sorry, darling.” This was not the voice of a woman who had spent forty years drilling English history into teenage girls at a small private school. Nor was it the voice of a woman who had lost two babies to crib death, but scuppered fear and grief to see two more pregnancies to term. This was the voice of a woman who, the summer after her husband died, hid in a family heirloom.

The nearly forgotten image stirred: her mother crouched against grief in the Victorian wardrobe, refusing to come out for anyone but Tilly, the daughter who lived an ocean away.

“Wake me?” Tilly rubbed her eyes. “You know me, up with the larks. Bright and chirpy at—” she glanced at the clock again. Six bloody a.m.? “—six a.m.”

“Darling, is something wrong?”

“Shouldn’t I be asking that question?”

Tilly scooted across David’s side of the bed and swung her legs to the hardwood floor. She used to dream of a rug in the bedroom, but David liked his floors smooth, bare and refinished every three years. Maybe this winter she would splurge, buy a rug. Or maybe not.

“Bit out of sorts,” her mother said. “Fancied a chat.”

Tilly gnawed off a hangnail. “Did something happen, Mum?”

Half a day away, her mother heaved out the biggest sigh Tilly had ever heard.

“Mum? You’re scaring me.” Tilly twisted the phone cord around her wrist, then untwisted it. Oh God, was her mother’s voice muffled? Was she hiding in the wardrobe again? Tilly drummed her toes on the floor. Where were her flip-flops? Where?

“Now you’re not to fuss. I’m absolutely fine. I’ve had a bit of a fall and broken my leg. Of all the ridiculous things. And I have five stitches in my left hand. Where Monty bit me.”

“He what?” Tilly shot up. Her mother’s springer spaniel, named after a British World War II general, was a wack job.

“Don’t yell, darling. It was an accident. He was aiming for the hedgehog.”

“Hedgehog?”

“It’s all rather embarrassing.”

“I’m coming home, right now.” As soon as I find my flip-flops. Tilly dived under the bed. Well, lookie here—the overdue library books and the breast health pamphlet she’d been searching for. And wow, how about all those dust bunnies?

“Don’t be ridiculous. You are not coming home.” Thank God, her mother was using her teacher’s voice, the one that had enforced zero tolerance in the classroom long before American educators adopted the phrase. “I’m perfectly fine. Feeling a tad foolish is all. I called to commiserate, not cause worry. It’s perfect gardening weather, and I’m confined to the drawing room with my feet up. My list for today included tying back the sweet peas.”

Typical, her mother was upset by the disruption, not the accident. Apart from the summer of her breakdown, Mrs. Virginia Haddington lived a neat life, greeting each day with a list written in specially ordered blue fountain pen ink. Oh God. In the ten years since her father’s death, Tilly had been the gatekeeper of her mother’s mental health, making sure she was taking time to garden, to read, to enjoy a social life. But in all those years, Tilly had never once worried about her mother’s physical well-being. Sure, she was only seventy, but her mother had never broken a bone before.

Mrs. Haddington gave a sniff. “It’s that blasted muntjac’s fault, the one that treats my vegetable garden as an all-night buffet. I’m at my wit’s end, Tilly. My broad beans are gone. Simply gone. When I was up at the Hall the other day, trying to persuade Rowena to join the rota for the church flowers—”

Tilly snorted. Her mother had to be joking. Rowena could barely tell the difference between a stinging nettle and a rose. And she had no interest in learning otherwise.

Her mother ignored the interruption and kept going. “I bumped into the gamekeeper and asked if I could borrow his shotgun, but the blighter refused to lend it to me.”

Tilly rolled her eyes. Her mother had known the gamekeeper for thirty years, but still refused to call him John. Of course, the only person in the village who used his real name was Rowena, his boss. The Roxtons, Rowena’s family, had owned and managed the three thousand acres of woods and farmland surrounding the village for generations. But on Rowena’s thirtieth birthday, Lord and Lady Roxton gifted the property to their only child and skipped off to a new life on Crete. A dumbfounded Rowena, left only with a vague reassurance that she wouldn’t be clobbered with inheritance tax provided Lord Roxton outlived the gift by seven years, had quit a successful career in the London art world to save her ailing inheritance: the Bramwell Chase estate and Bramwell Hall. As the new lady of the manor, she had hired contract farmers, financed a roof for her crumbling historic mansion by renting it to a movie crew, and had just scraped past the seven-year marker. Considering she was mining a financial dinosaur, Ro was holding her own, but no thanks to her parents.

“Wait a minute,” Tilly said. “You were planning to shoot Bambi?” She imagined a new version of the Daddy game. What would Grammy do about the copperhead? Easy-peasy. Bash in the snake’s head with the hoe and then put the kettle on for tea. “You’ve never fired a gun.”

“Nonsense. I was a dab hand with your uncle’s air rifle. Deer are large rodents, Tilly, and one should treat them as such. When I have rats, I pay the rat catcher to kill them. Why is shooting a deer any different?”

Tilly chewed her lip, determined not to swallow the bait. Her mother and Rowena had collaborated many times to accuse anti-beagling, anti-fox-hunting, anti-pheasant-shooting Tilly of being a namby-pamby country dweller.

“I’m sorry, Mum. My head’s spinning, and I’m barely awake.” Although her heart, galloping every which way, suggested otherwise. “How did we get from hedgehogs to deer?”

“A hedgehog. Singular.”

Tilly rolled her eyes and silently renewed her vow never to be a mother who grasped every teachable moment and strode forth with it.

“Well, since the gamekeeper wouldn’t help, I came up with my own solution. Very creative, too. When I took Monty out for his bedtime turn around the garden, I brought along that giant water blaster Rowena gave Isaac. Thought I’d soak the muntjac if I saw him. Works with next door’s Lab when he bursts through the hedge to attack poor Monty.”

Poor was hardly an adjective to describe her mother’s dog. Not since he’d mauled a baby rabbit to death and terrorized the window cleaner with the carcass.

“What a ridiculous gift that water gun was. If only Rowena would settle down with a nice man, start a family….”

“The deer, Mum?”

“The deer? Oh, right. The deer.”

Anxiety returned in waves. When she and Isaac were home at Christmas, Tilly had noticed her mother developing a new habit of becoming lost in her speech, as if she couldn’t retain her thoughts. Was this early-onset dementia, history about to repeat itself, or wet brain from decades of drinking gin?

“It’s quite simple really. Instead of a deer, Monty found a hedgehog. I tripped over the blessed thing in the dark, and then everything degenerated into a Dad’s Army sketch.”

Tilly laughed, remembering her’s father favorite television sitcom, but stopped when she heard only silence from her mother. “How long till the plaster comes off?”

“Eight weeks.”

“Eight weeks! Who’s going to help you bathe, get dressed, walk Monty?”

“I’ll muddle through. The twins don’t leave for Australia for two weeks, which is an absolute stroke of luck. And Marigold’s rallied my support system. Bless her, she does have a tendency towards drama.” That was an understatement. Marigold, her mother’s bosom pal of forty years, could create drama out of a downed washing line. “Trust me, darling—” Mrs. Haddington lowered her voice and sounded so far away “—this is nothing like before.”

“You’ve had another panic attack,” Tilly said. “Haven’t you?”

Her mother hesitated for a second too long. “It was nothing.”

“Right, we’ll arrive after the twins leave and stay until the plaster comes off. Can you spring for the tickets? I’m strapped for cash since the electrics went on my truck.”

If the panic attacks had returned, what choice did Tilly have? She had safeguarded her mother’s secrets once. If need be, she would do so again.

“Darling, don’t be rash. What will happen to the nursery if you leave for six weeks during the peak season?”

“Sari’ll happen. She can take over.” Bummer, she couldn’t fire Sari after all.

The night before, Tilly had found the phone message explaining Sari’s impromptu beach getaway and how, in the excitement, she had misplaced James’s number and been unable to cancel his appointment. Right, that made sense. Clearly, Sari had forgotten blabbing about her terror of oceans—despite her love of sleeping with a sound machine set to play waves. Tilly had ignored the confession as an attempt at girl bonding. Besides, once you understood someone’s fears, you were trapped in her world.

Could she trust the daily grind of the nursery to a person who had lied so blatantly? An employee who couldn’t sit still for ten minutes let alone direct nothing but a hose for five hours a day? But Tilly felt oddly disconnected, aware only of Woodend lit up ahead, waiting for her.

“Besides, how can I miss seeing you recline the summer away like Lady Muck?”

Tilly loved her mother’s bawdy laugh, so unexpected for a petite woman who came down to cook breakfast every morning wearing red lipstick and Chanel No. 5 eau de parfum. But the laughter ended. “There’s another reason you might not want to come home.”

“The village cut off with foot and mouth again? More mad cow disease?”

“Rowena has a new tenant at Manor Farm.” Her mother took a deep breath. “Tilly, it’s Sebastian. He’s living in Bramwell Chase.”

Tilly dropped the phone.

Chapter 4

James slid from Warrior I to Warrior II and deepened the stretch. The warrior poses are about strength and endurance. The muscles in his calf tightened as a warm current of energy flowed through his body and into the ground, rooting him, making him strong. Defective, but strong. His thoughts became clouds floating away, and he concentrated on the rhythm of his breathing, trying to ignore the feeling that picked at the back of his mind. A feeling he must not acknowledge. A distraction he could not afford. Not if he was going to kick-start his plan.

He found his focal point—the edge of his yoga mat—and shifted his balance forward, raising his right leg and his arms behind him. If he held the pose for six breaths, he would relax into Downward-Facing Dog and then treat himself to a headstand. When he was upside down, everything was in sync. His mind and body aligned.

One, two, three, four—he began to quaver—five…no, there it was again, that swell of desire. Let it drift by, James. He tried hard, so hard, to push it away but couldn’t. And with a resigned sigh, he toppled.

Lying on his yoga mat, James stared up at the ceiling. Was that a stain in the corner? He sat up. A stain he hadn’t noticed before? Mold? He stood. Anthrax?

Don’t go psycho on me, James. A stain is often just a stain.

It was getting harder to find his own thoughts. The voice was gaining strength, feeding off his lack of sleep, feeding off the stress of the move, feeding off his attraction to Tilly.

Two days. It had been two days and she hadn’t returned his call. What if her answering machine was broken? What if she wouldn’t call unless he moved his coffee mug to the right of the phone? He always put his mug on the right. Always. And this morning he’d put it on the left, which proved he had messed with his routine, dallied on the wild side with those who put their coffee mugs wherever the hell they pleased. See what progress he was making?

Why hadn’t she returned his call?

He was running out of time and options. Tomorrow she and Isaac flew to England, which he only knew because Isaac had told him when he’d called last week. Isaac said his mom was rushing around like a crazed squirrel and it was best not to disturb her. He’d promised to give her the message, but had he? What if he hadn’t given her the message? What if her answering machine was broken? What if that stain really was anthrax?

Why hadn’t she returned his call?

Only two things had slowed the swarming gnats of anxiety in the past two weeks: Tilly’s garden and Tilly’s smile. And he needed to see both.

* * *

James glanced at the fogged-up shower and tried not to think about previous tenants, about the dead skin cells they’d sloughed off, about the dirt they’d tracked in. He hadn’t lived in rented accommodations since he was a student. And then he’d been too fucked-up to think about anything. He rubbed condensation from the mirror and tossed the damp bath sheet into the shower. The laundry would have to wait. He tried to hold on to that thought, but it slipped away and doubt crept back in, roaming his gut, searching for a hold, second-guessing the decision he had made ten minutes earlier.

Decision-making was exhausting, a haze of uncertainty entwining one consequence around another. And there would be consequences for what he was about to do, but it was a risk worth taking. Tilly could help him—he knew it. And if the thought of seeing her again gave him a hit of pure desire, that was an inconvenience he could overcome.

The psychologist in Chicago had told him obsessions and compulsions were like wild mushrooms popping up constantly. That he needed to stay vigilant, always mindful of situations that could trigger his OCD, which didn’t help when he was attracted to a woman who lived her life in dirt. A woman who didn’t seem to care that the flatbed of her truck resembled a bag lady’s shopping cart. If Tilly agreed to work for him, would she let him clean out her truck?

James admired the small tattoo of a coiled, black snake on his right hip, his constant reminder that when it came to snakes, he was phobia-free. Possibly even brave. And he was lucky—might as well monopolize on this good mood—that his body had aged well. On the other hand, that wasn’t so much luck as a freakish amount of exercise. Was fear behind that, too, a determination to control his body if not his mind?

James stretched and enjoyed the air caressing his skin. Naked, he was released from fabrics that itched and scratched. Labels were the worst offenders. But then again, none of his clothes had labels for long. He amputated every one.

If he didn’t know better, he might say he was relaxed, which was not an adjective he ever used to describe himself. James didn’t do relaxed. Volted-up was how Sam, his best friend of forty-two years, described James. He liked that analogy. Besides, nervous energy had its uses. No to-do list was a match for James.

He leaned forward, the edge of the vanity cutting into his stomach. Retirement was playing havoc with his grooming. His hair hadn’t been this long since grad school and the beard still threw him. He barely recognized the face staring back. Or was that the point. If he changed the outside, would the inside follow?

Humming “Straight to Hell” by The Clash, James walked into the bedroom and slid open the closet door with his elbow. He reached into a rack of black, long-sleeved shirts and pulled his lucky Vivienne Westwood off its cedar hanger. Why not? He had nothing to lose except his pride, and that had never stopped him when a woman was concerned.

Chapter 5

You had to admire a middle-aged woman, even one as invasive as evening primrose, who accentuated her large breasts and rolls of stomach flesh with Lycra. No hiding behind plus-size smocks for Sari. Although her puce wedgies, adorned with large plastic flowers that flapped like dying lunar moths, pushed the limits of taste.

Bucking through a sneeze, Sari tripped over an exposed tree root. “Gesundheit,” she said.

What, she doesn’t trust me to bless her? Tilly continued marching toward the greenhouse.

“Time to fix the driveway, hon.” Sari trotted to keep up.

If you didn’t barrel down my driveway five mornings a week, screeching a duet with Bruce Springsteen and kicking up gravel, it wouldn’t need fixing. Tilly bit back the retort. Speedy-Sari-bumps, that’s what Isaac called the craters Sari’s tires had gouged into the driveway. Potholes and noise, Sari had brought both into Tilly’s life.

“You still pissed about the James thing? Is that why you don’t want a lift to the airport tomorrow?” Sari smiled, but the gesture was laced with menace. Her challenge might have worked three years earlier, before guilt became a constant companion. But now? Hey, good luck on that one.

“Sari, you’ll be too busy here to drive us to the airport.” Tilly’s voice dragged in the heat. “And ignore James if he calls.” Just as I’m ignoring my memories of Sebastian. But there he was again: her first love, taking up space in her mind.

“James is…loaded.” Sari increased her pace with a pant. “I…looked him up on Google.”

Sari rabbited on, sharing details of her Google search. James had invented an interactive web game that millions of people were addicted to, including Sari’s two teenage boys. She dismissed the game as having to do with accumulating assets and dominating the world. As always, it was the bottom line that interested Sari: James had made enough money to sell his software company in Chicago and retire to North Carolina at forty-five.

Sari batted away a mosquito. “Tils, you need to step outside your comfort zone, discover the world of clients rich and ready for the taking.”

Tils. A lazy word that slid from the side of Sari’s mouth, an abbreviation of an already abbreviated name. Tilly shook back her hair, forgetting she’d lopped it off a few weeks earlier with the kitchen scissors. Something clicked and scrunched in her head. Her brain rusting up in the heat? She shook her head again. Click, scrunch. What depressing sounds to come from the center of your consciousness.

“You have zilch vision,” Sari said.

“Yup. Visionless and proud of it.” There was no point disagreeing. Tilly didn’t want vision, she wanted survival—hers and Isaac’s. The jury was still debating the survival of Piedmont Perennials, a business that had sprung out of the infertility of grief. Her secret fantasy niggled, the one in which the business folded and she and Isaac retreated to England. Of course, Issac would be devastated, which made her daydream his nightmare. No, Piedmont Perennials had to survive, and for that Tilly needed the woman she longed to fire.

“Come on, hon. Look around you.” Sari circled her arms as if she were an overweight swimmer flailing in a rubber ring. “You’ve created five acres of landscaped heaven out of jungle. You know a thing or two about landscape design.”

How had Sari sneaked into Tilly’s life? Was it the tricolor cookies? She had already disarmed Tilly with a nasally slide of vowels and dropped r’s that screamed “Brooklyn!” before dumping the pièce de résistance: Sari grew up two blocks from David’s childhood home in Sheepshead Bay and still bought tricolors, moist and rich with raspberry, almond and semisweet chocolate, from the bakery in David’s old neighborhood. She even had a box in her freezer and had promised to share. The tricolors, when Sari finally brought them over, were stale.

The pileated woodpecker hammered into a tree then flapped away. He was the reason Tilly hadn’t hacked down the decapitated pine that, as Sari loved to point out, leaned over the propane tank. See? Sari was clued in. All would be fine, just fine.

“Sari, you’ve been a godsend.” True, until the James debacle. “If you didn’t load up my truck and not return till every shrub was sold, I’d be donating plants to the Salvation Army.” True again. “But you want to rush around corners and see what’s next, and I want to poodle along. Wholesale customers are easy. They demand x, y, z on such a date and I, or rather you, deliver. But design clients?” Tilly shuddered. “They’d suck up all my make-nice happy juices.”

Sari harrumphed, and they trudged on.

Be nice, Tilly. Or at least fake it. “Look. My business is thriving, so why gamble? You have to dig in, hold on, because in twenty-four hours your whole life can come crashing down. One afternoon you’re plowing along I-40, late for school pickup, when your husband draws alongside in his MGB, laughs—” Tilly stumbled over her most precious memory “—blows you a kiss and speeds out of your life. Twelve hours later you’re watching him die from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a hereditary heart condition no one in his family has heard of.”

Not just watching him die, letting him die.

Tilly ground her fist into the pain spiking out across her forehead. Silence, rare in the forest, followed.

They had reached the greenhouse and next to it, the studio, David’s office and hallowed lair. The thick, sweet scent of wild honeysuckle hit Tilly like a sugar rush, but it also brought the familiar letdown, the sinking in her stomach. This place should resonate with David’s presence. Standing here, she wanted to believe some essence of him watched her, that if she swung around she could catch him as easily as Isaac caught fireflies. But despite the tommyrot she encouraged their son to believe, David was nowhere. Death led to nothing.

Through the trees, a pair of turkey vultures tugged at the guts of a groundhog splattered across Creeping Cedars Road. At least in nature death led to some great, cosmic recycling of life. Roadkill became a feast, fallen leaves nourished new growth and rotting logs became bug suburbia. Tilly stared up at the giant oak, now a mutant thanks to the limbs the tree surgeon had removed from one side. Despite his dire prediction that the tree was dying, it was still home to a spectacular trumpet vine; and she would never give permission to fell such a magnificent piece of living history. The oak was safe on her watch, because she was just as mulish as David had been.

Tilly smiled at her Piss Off I’m Working sign and swung open the greenhouse door. Usually once she stepped inside, the greenhouse worked its calming magic. With a membrane of opaque plastic that let in only light, it was as if nothing else existed. But today, Sari followed, filling Tilly’s hidey-hole with the powdery odor of department store makeup halls.

Tilly grabbed the edge of the potting sink and breathed through her mouth.

“Jesus.” Sari gagged. “If I were in charge, I’d rip off the plastic and put in glass. Open the place up. I feel like I’m simmering in a Crock-Pot.”

Tilly carved out a dirt angel with her foot. Please, God, protect my nursery from this woman. Sari didn’t have to like this part of the job, but she did have to come in here every day for the next six weeks. Tilly appraised her artwork and smiled.

“What?” Sari said. “You think it’s funny this place freaks me out?”

“Of course not.” Tilly looked up. “Although it’s hard to imagine you scared of anything.”

“You don’t think everyone has fears?”

Tilly picked up a bundle of white plastic plant labels and put them back down. “Okay, then. What’s the deal with you and oceans?”

“I nearly drowned as a kid. Would’ve, too, if some stranger hadn’t jumped in while my dad stood on the beach yelling, ‘Kick your legs.’ And afterward all he said was, ‘You need to listen.’ Pretty rich since the bastard couldn’t swim.”

Bastard, never a word Tilly would use to describe her own father, who had taught her to swim in the freezing ocean off the Cornish Coast, his hands floating beneath her. Whole weeks went by and she didn’t think of him, but there would always be a gap in her life where he had stood. And, inexplicably, she thought of James Nealy’s comment about childhoods.

“I’m gonna get some quotes on a watering system while you’re off playing happy families,” Sari said. “I mean, c’mon. How cost effective can manual watering be?”

Tilly sighed; Sari had blown the moment.

“We’ve been over this, Sari. The electric bills would tear into my profits.”

“Yeah? What about your time? Is it better to spend five hours a day watching a hose piss or five hours a day potting up saleable plants?”

“Watering systems fail, but the worst thing a hose does is leak. Besides, if I can feel the water flow, I know the job’s being done.”

“Jesus, Tils. Lighten up. You wanna spend your life worrying about what might happen?”

If they were friends, Tilly would point out how ludicrous that question was. After all, the thing she had dreaded most had happened. What did a person have left to worry about after that? The mister system whooshed on, spraying a film of water over the newly rooted cuttings. The paddles of the fan whirred into action, and a belt of hot air walloped Tilly across the face.

“This is why you have to check the greenhouse every day.” Tilly pointed at the fan and then drew a diagonal line through the air with her finger. “See how the fan blows the mist away from this flat? These cuttings will die if you don’t watch that.”

“Understood. That it?”

“No. See this mister up here?” Tilly poked a spluttering nozzle, and tepid water drizzled down her arm. “It gets clogged. Then these cuttings will die.”

“Yup. Cuttings die, excellent. I’m outta here. See ya up at the house.” Sari tugged the door open, and a pale vehicle, probably the FedEx van, flashed past. At least Sari could sign for a package without killing anything.

Sod it. Tilly gave the mister head another poke. She was tempting disaster, but if the nursery went belly-up, so be it. She and Isaac would have to stay in Bramwell Chase. Or maybe not, now that Sebastian had decided to nest there. Tilly pinched absentmindedly at her left breast. What was he up to? Bramwell Chase had never been his home. Sebastian was a Yorkshire lad, and according to his mother’s last letter, happily ensconced in Hong Kong.

At fourteen, Sebastian was her life. By nineteen, he was her ex-lover, and even though they drifted through two reunions and a near miss before she met David, Sebastian remained part of her life. When her father was dying, Tilly flew home alone, insisting David fulfill his commitment to a well-paid lecture in Montreal. (If he had ever balanced the checkbook, he would have known how desperately they needed the money.) Tilly had swept in, determined to take care of everything, but the magnitude of family grief had nearly crushed her. Until Sebastian had stepped forward to handle the practical side of death, freeing Tilly to console her mother and sisters. After that, their friendship was sealed. Or so she thought.

Tilly made plenty of excuses for his lack of contact in the years that followed. He had a new wife, a new baby; they moved and had another baby. But then her world imploded. David died, grief eviscerated her, and Sebastian mailed a condolence card signed by his family like a corporate greeting. And for that—Tilly tugged open the greenhouse door—she would never forgive him.

* * *

A basketball pounded the concrete and a man laughed. No, absolutely not. Tilly curved around the giant red oak and groaned. Tucked between Sari’s bumper-sticker-covered Passat and the tumble of logs that passed for the log pile, was a sparkling Alfa Romeo convertible. Oh, this was too much. She had a thousand things to do, half of which she couldn’t remember, but would if she wasn’t being harassed by a wealthy retiree who was giving her son advice on free-throws and encouraging her only employee to giggle like a sixteen-year-old on date night.

Tilly paused at the end of the driveway, hands on hips. She was, if no longer a Haddington in name, a Haddington in heart. One never has an excuse for rudeness. Although James Nealy was testing her on that particular philosophy.

Since the conversation with her mother two weeks earlier, Tilly had developed a strategy for handling James: ignore him. She figured by the time she left for England, he would have lost interest. No one could be that persistent. No one, it seemed, except James.

“How many times do I have to say, ‘I can’t help you’?” She kept her voice light, jovial even, but anger foamed inside.

“I like repetition.” He grinned, flashing even, white teeth. So, James thought he could whittle her down, did he? Big mistake, because she could play a mighty fierce game of chicken.

“Well, gotta run.” Sari headed to her car. “James? It’s been real.”

“Want to tell me why you’re here?” Tilly said to James. She could take him, no problem.

“Want to tell me why you don’t answer your messages?”

Tilly threaded her thumbs through her belt loops and gave her bring-it-on smile. But as the Passat squealed onto the driveway, she glanced at Isaac, and the fight drained out of her. Poor love, even the promise of hostility brought a flush of dread to Isaac’s cheeks.

“Now I feel as if I’m the one who’s always apologizing,” Tilly said. And how unreasonable was that, since James was at fault? “But I’m sorry. As Isaac told you last week, I have a family emergency to handle in England. We leave tomorrow. That makes me kinda busy.”

There was a difference between persistence, which Tilly applauded, and pestering, which she abhorred. When someone pushed too hard, her instinct was to hunker down. It was a Tilly thing. And if her resolve had wavered with James’s admiration of her garden, it had hardened the moment her life had started circling the family drain and he’d begun leaving phone messages that started with “Maybe you didn’t receive my previous message.”

And why was he wearing a black long-sleeved shirt in ninety degrees? Maybe he preferred air-conditioning to nature. A person, in other words, who had nothing in common with Tilly.

James crossed and uncrossed his fingers in a silent jig. “I believe Maple View Farm’s ice cream is nationally acclaimed. And since you live two minutes away, I was hoping, if I promised to deliver you back here in half an hour, that you and Isaac might accompany me to their country store?”

“Could we, Mom? Pretty please with Cool Whip and sprinkles on top?” Isaac’s grin stretched until he resembled The Joker.

“I’m a little grubby for socializing.” Tilly brushed a cobweb from her T-shirt.

“You look beautiful.” James sounded as if he were stating a historical fact. Okay, so she warmed to him. Not because he had thrown her a compliment, although that was appreciated, but because she was certain James would have said, “Yes, you look like shit,” if he had believed it. And honesty at all times was another Haddington trait, Tilly’s favorite.

“Shall we take my car?” James asked Isaac, who punched the air with enough excitement to spontaneously combust.

* * *

The forest often closed in around her, but on the farm shop porch, Tilly could breathe. When the real estate agent had first driven her by the farm, thirteen years ago, Tilly’s heart had skipped at the lowing of a cow, the stench of livestock and the sight of a fox ambling across a plowed field. How excited she’d been to discover this yawning landscape of green space that reminded her of the Bramwell Chase estate.

The view hadn’t changed in thirteen years, which was perfect. Monotony was Tilly’s life preserver. Maybe that was why gardening fed her soul. She loved the predictability of seasonal change, the certainty that redbuds heralded spring, that lantana was the belle of summer, that Coreopsis integrifolia lit up her garden every Halloween. And yet—she shifted and her cutoffs chafed against her sweaty thighs—gardening, like life, was about the unexpected.

She eyed the stranger sitting next to her, his waffle cone mummified in layers of paper napkins. Now that Isaac had run off to tumble over the hay bale, James had retreated into silence, licking his two scoops of black walnut into a smooth, dripless nub with a single-mindedness that she had come to associate with him after only two meetings. How did she get here, sitting on a rocking chair next to someone she was trying to avoid? A stranger who projected complete focus while eating ice cream but whose constantly moving fingers hinted at something out of control.

James rose, opened the garbage can flap with his elbow, and lobbed his untouched cone inside.

“Why spend so long deciding which cone to have if you weren’t going to eat it?” Tilly nibbled through the end of her sugar cone and sucked out double chocolate chip ice cream.

“Life is in the details, Tilly.”

When they were talking, she forgot they weren’t friends. “You’ve got something against cones?”

“Ones that have been sitting out in the air all day, yes.”

“Worried you might catch a deadly disease?”

“Possibly.” His eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, but he appeared to stare at her. Silence pressed on her chest, the silence of strangers who had no understanding and no shared history. “I need to go inside and wash my hands,” James said and vanished.

A mud dauber hummed under the porch roof, and a memory tumbled out, so vivid Tilly had to gasp. Swear to God, she could hear Sebastian’s giggle, the giggle that fizzed like soda spilling from a shaken bottle. Her memories must be scrambled if she was confusing wasps, Sebastian and laughter. He was terrified of wasps. Always had been, always would be, because he refused to acknowledge it. She took a huge, gulping breath and nearly choked on a lungful of clotted, late-afternoon heat. Sebastian didn’t deserve her thoughts. She wasn’t allowing him to steal them.

She waved to Isaac, who was tumbling around with two smaller kids, making buddies with ease thanks to equal doses of his father’s charisma and his grandfather’s canny way with people. She had never been as open and trusting as a child. Of course, she had been painfully shy for most of her life. Amazing how widowhood had knocked that out of her.

The shop door jangled and James reappeared. He shook his hair from his face and smiled at her. She grinned back; it was impossible not to.

* * *

Her smile, her smile doused the swell of anxiety.

“This is very noble of you,” James said as he resettled next to her. He tugged at a loose thread on the hem of his shirt. “Going to look after your mother.”

“My mother doesn’t need looking after.” Tilly took a tiny, birdlike bite from her cone. “I’m merely helping out.”

James stopped moving. He recognized self-talk when he heard it, the belief that positive words could lead to positive thoughts. How he wished that were true. In an instant, he wanted to know her hopes, her fears, her family story. The works.

“Do you have siblings?” he said.

“I have two sisters, twins. Eight years younger than me. They were preemies, so it was a case of join in the mothering or fall by the wayside. And then my father died and—” Tilly strained to keep Isaac in her sights. “Boring family stuff.”

Of course, that explained the big-sister bullishness, the duty run back to England. Finally, he had context within which to place her. “You’re the family glue.”

“I guess so.” Her approval gave him a kick of triumph, the pride of being a kid with his first gold star—hell, his first trophy! When was the last time he made someone feel good about herself, paid attention long enough to want to make someone feel good?

But her expression suggested sadness, and failure swamped him.

“We used to be closer.” Tilly paused to chew a fingernail, and James suppressed his revulsion. “Truth is, I’ve distanced myself. Widowhood’s streamlined me. What you see today is the leaner, meaner Tilly.”

Shit, he didn’t see that one coming. “I assumed you were divorced.”

“I wish. God, no, I didn’t mean that. You’re not…are you?”

“No. Never married.” Thankfully, one mistake he hadn’t made. But Tilly, a widow? Had he become so self-absorbed that he no longer recognized the emotion he understood better than any other: grief?

“How long?” He tried to make eye contact, but she was focused on another fingernail. She wasn’t going to chew that one, too, was she? Couldn’t she see the speck of dirt down by her cuticle? Anxiety curdled inside him, waiting to contaminate his thoughts. James shifted and silently counted six cows in the field opposite.

“Three years.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. The bottom may have fallen out of my world, but I have two passions, motherhood and gardening, and I get to indulge in both.” Her voice was overly bright. “Hey, who needs Prozac when you can get down and dirty in the soil?”

God Almighty, how could she say that? James shot up and jabbed his hands into his hair. The chain that anchored his rocker to all the other rocking chairs clanked, and Tilly stared at him. He should try and explain, but he couldn’t. His mouth was dry, and words wouldn’t form. All he could hear was his father’s voice, slurred with Jack Daniel’s and his Irish heritage: You fucking eejit, James. This, this was why he stayed away from women, why he’d expelled desire from his life. It was too hard, too fucking hard.

Isaac waved and James tried to walk toward him in a straight line, but the impulse was too strong. He had to step on every other dandelion, otherwise he’d die, die from the cancer breeding in the soil. Tilly was watching; he could feel her eyes on him. Don’t do it, she’ll think you’re crazy. But he could smell disease and death waiting in the soil, ready to pounce. Fuck, he must look like a kid zigzagging through a game of don’t-step-on-the-cracks.

The panic eased, shifted like a rusted-up gear moving again. James’s pulse slowed to its normal beat, but nothing mattered beyond his failure. Once again, he had succumbed to the compulsion. And what of Tilly? He glanced over his shoulder. Was she embarrassed, shocked, or scared to be out in public with a freak?

* * *

Did she miss something? One minute they were talking, the next James shot up and began weaving toward the hitching post in the most bizarre manner, like a child playing a game of don’t-step-on-the-cracks. But that wasn’t nearly as weird as him glancing at her and then turning away before she had time to respond. Embarrassed. He was embarrassed, which made her want to run after him, arms wide-open for a big hug. And that might be a little kooky for both of them, so best not. It was sad, however, that he had such a low opinion of her. She may be strung out on her own needs, but the day she became judgmental, someone should bonk her on the head.

What had he said on the phone about “one of my more annoying habits”? Was this goofy walk another one? Some kind of tic, like his twitching hands? Maybe he had a muscular problem. Okay, so now she was flat-out intrigued.

Tilly pushed up from the rocking chair and followed James quietly.

“Hey, James.” Isaac rushed toward him. “Why’re you walking funny?”

Excellent question, Angel Bug. Wouldn’t mind hearing the answer myself. Tilly stopped and made a big deal out of scratching a no-see-um bite.

“It’s a habit I have, one I can’t stop,” James said. “Does that make sense?”

Bingo.

“Sure. My best friend says that when he gets into trouble at school.”

“What habits does your friend have?”

“He jumps up and down. It helps with his sensory integration. If he bounces out his wiggles—” Isaac demonstrated, and Tilly smiled “—he feels less buzzy. Do you feel less buzzy when you walk funny?”

“For a moment. Then I feel worse. More buzzy.”

Fascinating. Buzzy sounded more mental than muscular. So James had some psychological thingy, like sensory integration, that caused him to act a little doolally? Sweat trickled down her armpits, but she didn’t dare move.

“If it makes you feel worse, why do it?” Isaac said to James.

The answer slammed into her: he doesn’t have a choice. Man, she knew how that felt, to be stuck going through the motions, trapped in a life you were never supposed to live. Behaving as a widow, when every instinct screamed that you were still a wife.

James took two folded tissues from his pocket, arranged one and then the other over his hand and bent down to pick something. “I do it because I have to step on every other dandelion.”

“Why?”

“My brain tells me I have to.” James handed Isaac the flower.

“Can’t you tell your brain you don’t want to?” Isaac chewed on the inside of his cheek, the same way he did when working through an advanced math problem.

James tossed back his hair, twice, and laughed. Some women would likely find him attractive. Rowena would label him a sexy beast. The stunning eyes helped, the kilowatt grin, that deep, warm laugh. But it was also the way he spoke—carefully, as if he’d given life a great deal of thought. Or maybe, like Tilly, he’d seen too much of it.

“Do you ever get hiccups?” James asked Isaac.

Isaac rolled his eyes. “Allllll the time. Especially after eating little carrots. Yum.”

“Yum indeed. Little carrots are my favorite snack. Fortunately they don’t give me hiccups, which is good, because I get terrible hiccups. But mine are silent. No one can hear them except me.” James paused, and Isaac nodded. James still hadn’t hinted that he was aware of Tilly, but she sensed he was talking to her, too. “You see, I have a hiccup in my brain. My brain hiccups out the same thought, again and again. Let’s say you get this idea, to step on a dandelion. You do it and then skip off to the hay bale. The original thought, to step on the dandelion, has gone. But if I have the same idea, my brain repeats the message—step on the dandelion, step on the dandelion,” James said in a booming, theatrical voice, and Isaac giggled. “There’s a technical name for my hiccups, but the easiest explanation is that my thoughts get stuck.”

My thoughts get stuck. Tilly nodded slowly. A phrase that makes sense.

“You mean like getting stuck on the idea of my mom doing your garden?”

“Exactly.”

Isaac sucked in his breath. “How do you get unstuck?”

Good question. Do I have an out clause if I end up working for this chap? Of course, going to England the next day made that whole scenario pretty unlikely. James seemed to be on a mission to start pronto and she couldn’t commit to anything before the school year started.

“How do you get rid of your hiccups?” James asked.

“My mom drops an ice cube down my back.” Isaac gave an exaggerated shiver. “Yuck.”

“Well, if your mother can help me create a garden—” James tugged off his sunglasses and gazed at Tilly “—that will be my ice cube.”

“Cool,” Isaac said, and reached for James’s hand.

James hesitated. “I’m not good at holding hands. Another bad habit.”

“No biggie.” Isaac slotted his arm through James’s, and they smiled at each other.

Poor James. She couldn’t imagine not being able to hold hands. She loved that feeling of being weighted to another person. Holding hands was the best of the best, and the one thing she missed most about her marriage. More than sex, more than kissing. David had been a hand holder. He couldn’t even sit next to Tilly on the sofa without reaching for her.

Tilly flattened her hand over her heart…and shrieked. Her sugar cone had collapsed, and icy sludge oozed down her legs.

Chapter 6

James paced the apartment with his hands clasped behind his neck, and tried to ignore the irritating flopping noises his leather slides made on the wood floor. He could take a Clonazepam, that might help. But there was no specific anxiety to dull, no chemical that could alleviate the tumble of emotions racking his mind, half of which were contradictory. The silhouettes of furniture surrounding him were exactly where they had been the day before. Nothing in this room—including the stack of week-old New York Times in the corner and the four remotes lined up on the right side of the coffee table—had changed, so why did the world around him feel so different? Was it because Tilly had gone, or was it because the hope of her had gone?

He tugged open the balcony door and sat heavily on a hard, wrought-iron chair, one of a pair he’d picked up earlier in Chapel Hill. He should have tried them out for comfort, but he needed, he came, he saw, he bought. He had relocated with nothing but essentials and too few even of those.

A fat moon as luminous as an Illinois harvest moon lit up the sky and unleashed a rush of adolescent memories. All of them involved sneaking out at night, but not to find pleasure. His ongoing mission had been to plant evidence. He had flung joint butts into the barn, abandoned Jim Beam bottles on farm machinery and placed ripped condom packets in the back of his dad’s truck. God Almighty, it was a miracle that he and his father hadn’t killed each other. Maybe that was the reason his dad had caved on the Kawasaki. Why else would a parent let his teenager buy a motorbike designed only for speed and danger? Although James had never taken risks with that bike, never gone near it when he was high or drunk, never let anyone else touch it. He still wheeled it out once a month to clean it and to reminisce, but he would never ride it again. He was many things but irresponsible was no longer one of them.

See, Dad? James raised his face to the moon. I’m a fully functioning adult, despite your predictions.

How many years since he and his father had exchanged words? James knew the exact time his garbage was picked up every Thursday, but he couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had talked with his dad. And now, of course, it was irrelevant. His dad was dead. Both his parents were.

The Carolina night skies were spectacular. He’d never seen stars like this. Maybe he should get a telescope. Isaac would like that, wouldn’t he? James groaned and buried his face in his hands.

Get real. Isaac isn’t your kid.

Fatherhood—another relationship he’d screwed up. Yes, Daniel took his phone calls these days, but he still refused to call him Dad, which was fair enough. James had done little to earn the title. In fact, he lacked the whole happy-family gene. That wasn’t self-pity; that was honesty.

James flipped his hand over and stared at his lifeline in the moonlight. He rarely looked at it, since it splintered into three. Nothing good ever came from an odd number.

It was time to shake off his preoccupation with Isaac and Tilly. A widow and single mother had enough to deal with; she didn’t need someone as demanding as him. And Isaac certainly didn’t need him as a male role model.

Maybe he should treat thoughts of Tilly and Isaac as if they were obsessions, tackling them with the big three of cognitive-behavioral therapy—boss back the thought, use logic, use disassociation. Or maybe he should give up the fight. Roll over and play lovesick.

He glanced at his watch: 9:00 p.m. or 2:00 a.m. in England. How many times had he checked the American Airlines website? Tracking them was easy, since there was only one flight a day from Raleigh to London. They would land in five hours, then clear customs and immigration. How long before they arrived at Tilly’s mother’s house?

Let it go, James. Stick with the plan.

But he couldn’t. Meeting Tilly and Isaac felt almost inevitable; he was incapable of resisting. For years, James had struggled with trust, a one-way street that led only to a dead end. But Isaac and Tilly had sneaked under his defenses, and he wasn’t sure how.

Those not-so-subtle hints he’d given Tilly at Maple View Farm were the closest he’d ever come to revealing his secret: “Hi, my name is James and I’m obsessive-compulsive.” Had he been testing them on some subconscious level? If so, they had both aced the quiz.

He glanced back up at the Milky Way. When light came and his day started, Tilly’s would be half over.

Chapter 7

Tilly breathed in recycled air, heavy on the antiseptic and burned coffee, and grinned. She loved night flights with the dimmed cabin lights, the stirring of passengers settling to movies or sleep and the constant thrum of engines. She and Isaac were submerged in airplane twilight, wrapped up in blankets in a row of two. Life didn’t get any better.

“I like James.” Isaac nestled into her, and Tilly fought the urge to tug him closer. “Do you like him, Mom?”

She mussed his hair with her nose. Just For Kids mango splash shampoo. Best smell ever. “I’m not good at meeting people, you know that.” Not exactly an answer, but then she hadn’t prepared for the question. She hadn’t given James a second thought since the ice cream incident. Although she was still miffed that he had asked her to sit on a towel for the short ride home. Who kept a clean towel, in a ginormous Ziploc, in the trunk of his car?

“But do you like him?”

The people in front had left their blind up. Tilly peered through their window, but there was nothing to see beyond the small, white light blinking on the tip of the wing.

“I guess.” She sat back. “Although I have no idea why.”

“Does that matter?”

“I suppose not. It’s just normally when you make a new friend you find common ground, a shared passion. Like gardening.”

Isaac scowled. “Ro hates gardening, and she’s your best friend.”

“That’s different. We’ve been on the same life raft since we were four years old. I could pick up the phone and say help, and she would catch the first available flight.” Just as Ro had done after David died, camping overnight at Heathrow to come standby via LaGuardia. Tilly remembered the cab speeding down the driveway, Rowena flinging open the door while the vehicle was still moving, her only words, Where’s Isaac?

Tilly twirled a lock of Isaac’s hair around her finger. “Besides, she spoils you rotten.”

“So—” Isaac picked a piece of fluff from Bownba, the once-fluffy FAO Schwarz teddy that now resembled a squashed possum. “You like James, then?”

“Clearly not as much as you do.” Should she worry that her eight-year-old still dragged his teddy bear to bed every night? Tilly attempted to squish her feet under the seat in front, but between the bottle of duty-free Bombay Sapphire, her canvas backpack and her floral Doc Martens boots, there was no room.

“Are we going to help him?”

Why was her son suddenly more tenacious than a Jack Russell terrier? Bugger it. She had been enjoying the growing distance between herself and James, herself and Sari, herself and the stings of everyday life. Thanks to Isaac, they rushed back, and all she wanted was a reprieve.

“You need to understand, Isaac—” Oh crap, now he looked crestfallen. “It’s not that I don’t want to help James, but he has that neat I-want-it-this-way thing that screams perfectionist.” Or worse, a Virgo, like Sebastian, and the last thing she needed was another Virgo. Although, technically, she didn’t have a Virgo in her life, not anymore.

“Cripes. Not like you and me, then.”

“Exactly!” Tilly wagged a finger. “Think of the trail of possessions you and I can leave across two continents. A woman as scattered as me could drive a man as uptight as James seriously nuts. You do the math. It ain’t gonna work.” She would be barmy to get involved with someone that persnickety. Which didn’t explain why she had agreed to talk with James in September.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about this,” Isaac said with great solemnity. “I hate hiccups. They scare me because I want them to stop, but nothing I do works. I need you to help me. That’s a horrid feeling, isn’t it? That your body won’t do what you want it to do.”

“Sounds like middle age,” Tilly mumbled.

“I bet it’s a whole lot worse if it’s your brain that won’t cooperate.” Isaac paused. “I think we should help James.”

“Nicely expressed, Angel Bug. I’ll consider your opinion, but right now you need sleep.” And I need peace and quiet. Tilly patted fleecy travel blanket into the gaps around Isaac.

“Tell me the story of how you and Daddy met.”

Tilly covered her mouth. At best, this story was happiness and despair tied up with a bow. At worst, it was a form of self-mutilation, a cut that bled with the life she had lost, or rather thrown away.

“Please?” Isaac looked up with huge Haddington eyes, as pale as her father’s had been. Thank God for genetics. Even a hint of them tethered you to the past.

Tilly smoothed down his bushy hair but it bounced free, sticking out every which way. “Our story begins one summer.”

“Just like now, Mommy.”

“Except this summer is a new chapter in the epic story of Isaac and Super Mom.” Tilly struck her Popeye pose and Isaac snickered. Given the turmoil in her gut, however, Tilly felt less as if she were about to write an exciting new chapter in their lives, and more as if she were free-falling without a parachute, waiting for the big splat when Sari destroyed her business, and Sebastian…. Great, now she had Sebastian to worry about as well as James.

Isaac poked her. “Mom? Are you asleep?”

“Miles away. Sorry.” She resumed stroking Isaac’s hair. “It was a beautiful Saturday in June.” Fourteen years ago last week, another notch on the totem pole of survival. Isaac wriggled into her, as if trying to crawl back into her womb. “I had run away from London and escaped to Bramwell Chase for the weekend. Grammy was off with the historical society, and Grandpa was due back from Northampton for lunch. We had the whole afternoon planned: work on the roses, then hike across the estate. I was propping open the gates for him when—” She didn’t want to remember this, not tonight. Tonight she just wanted oblivion.

“When you heard this funny noise because Daddy didn’t know how to drive a stick, and he’d borrowed some old banger.” Isaac over-enunciated the last two words using a perfect English accent. Tilly swaddled him into her.

“This MG lurched up the High Street, gears crashing. Your father said that was the summer he discovered his two great loves: MGBs and me. Of course, that was before you were born and became more precious than anything.” Isaac made a soft noise, like a kitten’s mew. “Daddy bought his MGB after he got home. The 1972 Roadster that will be yours one day.” If it survives being shrouded under a tarpaulin in the garage.

Her heart contracted at the memory of dark ringlets framing David’s face and his chestnut eyes sparked with ambition. She’d wanted to lose herself in those eyes, and she had. Watching David, as he enchanted a lecture hall or entertained a room of friends, could leave her paralyzed with love. And yet however large his audience, however far away Tilly sat or stood, his eyes always found her. She pushed the heel of her hand into her heart, but the pain tightened. How had she navigated three years without him, without his adoration, without his need to share every joy and every disappointment with her?

She took a shallow breath. “The car stopped, and the most gorgeous man I had ever seen stuck his head out of the window and said, ‘Hey there. Can you help me?’ And I thought, I’ll help you with anything you like.”

Isaac’s giggle dissolved into a yawn. “Daddy was on his way to a conference, but he got lost ’cos he didn’t believe in reading maps.”

“Only your father could take off across a foreign country and assume he’d end up where he wanted to be. When he explained he was looking for the Open University, I laughed so hard I couldn’t tell him anything, and Daddy started laughing—”

“And Grandpa turned up. And he liked Daddy straightaway.”

“Absolutely.” How could anyone not? David always had the right words, the right smile, the right inclination of his head. Only Tilly saw the fragile ego that pecked away underneath.

“And Grandpa invited Daddy in to look at maps. And he never made it to the conference ’cos he stayed with you instead.” Isaac’s voice was tinged with sleep. “And when Daddy left he asked you to marry him. And you said yes.”

“I never could say no to your father. Although at the time, I thought he was joking. But when your father saw something he wanted, nothing stood in his way.” Tilly shivered as her thoughts bounced back, briefly, to James.

Isaac was silent for a moment. “That’s not always good, Mom. Is it?”

“No.” She kissed the top of his head. “But it was that day.”

Isaac gave a shadow of a smile and, as if someone had switched him off, conked out. He looked younger in sleep. She could trace the face of the baby with the rosebud mouth suckling at her breast, the toddler with his father’s luscious lips, the little boy who whistled through the gap before his front teeth descended. David had never seen those front teeth, had never seen Isaac read a chapter book, had never seen him whiz through math homework declaring, “This is so easy!” If she had learned to say no to David, would things have been different? Would he be here with them now?

* * *

The engines droned as the plane flew closer to England and Tilly struggled to keep her mind from Sebastian. But Bramwell Chase was a village. She could bump into him walking down the High Street or cutting through Badger Way. Even an imaginary meeting left her giddy.

Should she slug him and say, “Naff off, asshole?” No, that smacked of amateur dramatics. She could give him a curt “Do I know you?” Nope, that was petty. If only she could snap out a Rowena-comment, a one-liner that shriveled up your desire to exist.

What was his wife’s name? And the kids—a boy called Archie and a girl? Archie and Isaac were the same age. They could even become friends. Tilly clutched at her throat. What if Sebastian turned up on the doorstep all smiles and “Remember me?” Her breathing eased. No, that was one scenario she didn’t need to prepare for. Sebastian was a successful personal banker for a reason. He never dabbled in spontaneity, never took risks, not even for her. When Tilly told him she was engaged, Sebastian had said, “I’ll catch you the second time around,” and walked away.

Would she recognize him after ten years? Would he recognize her? Since they last met she’d hacked off her hair and donated every piece of clothing that didn’t fit the jeans and T-shirt category to the thrift store. And now Sebastian was turning forty. He’d probably sprouted a beer gut and tufty, falling-out hair. Yes, a balding banker grown slack on the high life. That was the image to work with, especially the balding part. Sebastian had always obsessed over his receding hairline, unlike David, who’d had enough hair for two. But as her eyelids fluttered, and her head drooped against the plastic wings of the headrest, it wasn’t David who visited her dreams. She was cornered in sleep by the sixteen-year-old with the puckish grin, the boy she had once craved as if he were a drug.

Chapter 8

Tilly spotted him the moment the electronic doors jolted open. At least she thought she did. It could also be a mirage, brought on by lack of sleep and cheap gin—the airline had cut the Bombay Sapphire. It couldn’t be Sebastian—one foot resting on the pillar behind him, head rolled back, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his white jeans, suede jacket slung through one arm. Not at 8:00 a.m. in the arrivals area of Heathrow. Except that the redhead jumping up and down next to him screeching, “Haddy! Over here, you twit!” was Rowena.

With a dang and a thud, Tilly’s luggage cart rear-ended a chrome bollard. How did that happen? One moment she was gripping the metal bar so tightly she thought she might cut off circulation to her fingers, the next all she could think about was escape. She turned, but the door to the customs hall had closed behind her.

“Haddy!” Rowena waved and the bangles and beads on her wrists chinked against each other like gypsy bells. “Haddy!”

Isaac ducked under the barricade and hurtled toward Rowena. “Hey, Rosy-Posy,” he giggled, then launched himself into her arms.

Sebastian lowered his head, but appeared to have no interest in locating his ex-lover. He looked more dazed than intrigued, his expression that of a person who had just woken from a nightmare and was struggling to cobble together his surroundings.

Tilly experienced a sudden plummeting in her gut. Still beautiful, then. Maybe more so. But she hadn’t really expected him to be fat, bald and ruddy. She had always known he would gain substance with age.

“My little man,” Rowena squealed as she twirled Isaac. “I’ve missed you so much! I forbid you from leaving me ever again.”

Isaac disappeared into a kaleidoscope of laughter and color, wrapped in Rowena’s ankle-length skirt and clasped to the turquoise sweater that nipped in at her tiny waist and stretched over her perfect breasts. The sleeves were forced above her elbows in an effort, no doubt, to hide the holes. Secondhand cashmere sweaters—they’re recycled, Haddy!—were Ro’s standard uniform and she was loyal to the last thread. Even on toasty summer days she complained of being fucking freezing. But then Rowena, a landowner infamous for serving marijuana with her shooting lunches, had always lived outside the lines. Being with Rowena was like jettisoning yourself through a bubble wand and not knowing when you would burst back into reality.

Being with Sebastian, however, was to stay firmly on the ground, to do one’s duty. Tilly’s stomach lurched as if she were still on the plane and riding out a patch of turbulence. He certainly had the air of someone who crafted his appearance with care. The cuffs of his pale blue shirt—linen, had to be, since it crumpled in all the right places—were folded back to reveal a heavy metal watch worn, as the battered Timex had been, with the face on the inside of his wrist so that he alone could read it.

“Haddy!” The familiarity of Rowena engulfed Tilly: the smell of satsuma soap, the softness of cashmere, the thick curtain of coarse hair. “It seems like only yesterday I was waving you off at Christmas and crying buckets.” Rowena drew back. “But you look horribly pale. Are you eating properly? Sleeping? And why don’t you answer my emails, you lazy old cow? I’ve been worried sick.”

“Missed you, too,” Tilly said. “Now tell me what he’s doing here.” She nodded backward.

“Be nice,” Rowena whispered. “Sebastian’s had a rough week.”

“But—”

“Poppet! How you’ve grown since Christmas.” Rowena ran a hand from the top of Isaac’s head to below her collarbone. “You’re only a head shorter than me now.”

Tilly inhaled sharply and spun around, glaring at Sebastian. You first.

Gradually, his face transformed into his lopsided smile. He pushed off the pillar and sauntered over, hands still buried in his pockets.

An announcement drifted through the Tannoy system. Rowena teased Isaac as she foraged in her carpetbag, and Isaac spoke in his knock-knock joke voice. But Tilly couldn’t decipher words. All she heard was noise, distorted by the thumping of her heart. Thump. Sebastian took another step—thump—and another step. Thump.

Finally, he stopped in front of her. Was his heart running a marathon, too? He hesitated—oh crap, was he thinking about a kiss?—and his grin spread. Bugger, he knows what I look like naked. A plastic bag rustled and Isaac shrieked with glee, but Tilly didn’t turn. If hell were tailored to fit, she was roasting in it, cooked to a mush before the man she had never wanted to see again.

“Hello,” Sebastian said.

“Hey,” Tilly replied with a deep breath.

He smelled of privilege, of dinner parties with port, cognac and cigars. Did he used to wear aftershave? She couldn’t remember. In ten years Sebastian had navigated a life she knew nothing of and returned a stranger. Did he like a cocktail before dinner? She had no clue. Could he still lose a Saturday to watching cricket on the television, curtains drawn against the sun? How would she know? A decade of silence lay between them, and in an instant he became blank.

“Awesome! The new Dr. X! Look, Mom. Look what Ro gave me!” Isaac tugged on her cardigan. “You can turn him upside down and all the green stuff in his tummy sloshes around. Thanks, Ro! You’re the best! Now I can have a huge battle with Action Man and—” Isaac dropped his voice “—the evil Dr. X. We did pack Action Man, right, Mom?”

“Right.” Tilly swallowed. “Isaac, I’d like you to meet someone. This is Sebastian, an old friend of mine.” Ex-friend.

“How come I’ve never met you?” Isaac zoomed Dr. X through the air.

Way to go, Angel Bug. You tell him.

“Your mother and I lost touch a while ago.” Sebastian’s smile wavered. “My fault, I suspect.”

Was he goading her? Tilly yanked down on her rumpled T-shirt.

“I see you’re a fan of Action Man,” Sebastian continued. “So’s Archie, my son. I think he has the largest collection of Action Man in the world, including the museum pieces I used to play with. Would you like to come over one weekend and meet him?”

“Yes, please!” Isaac’s face glowed with ecstasy. “Does he live in Bramwell Chase?”

“Sort of,” Sebastian said. His eyes narrowed slightly, not so anyone would notice, but Tilly had always gauged his mood from his eyes. So not a stranger, which should put her at ease, right? Wrong. She felt like a lump of leftover pudding, unsure of where to put her hands, her eyes, and—sod it. Her stomach churned again.

Rowena locked her arm through Sebastian’s and gave him a supportive nod, a we’re-in-this-together gesture. Wait…when did they become friends? Tilly had always been the fulcrum of their threesome. It was fact, as undeniable as chrysanthemums blooming in fall. Rowena and Sebastian had tolerated each other through high school, vying for Tilly’s attention until she coerced them into a truce, but that was it. And now Rowena was renting Manor Farm to Sebastian. Had they become buddies when Tilly wasn’t looking? And if so, why hadn’t her oldest, dearest, best-est friend told her?

“Archie’s at boarding school,” Rowena was talking to Isaac. “Where they lock you up and throw away the key.” She affected an evil laugh. “But he has an exeat coming up. That means he gets to escape for the weekend. And we’re not far off the summer hols now.”

Isaac’s eyes grew wide. “Sleep-away school? Jeez-um. He must be tons older than me.”

Sebastian disentangled his arm from Rowena’s. “I think you’re the same age. Am I correct?” he asked no one in particular.

“Exactly the same age.” Tilly arched her back. Slam-dunk, tosspot.

Sebastian plucked at the back of his gold signet ring. Yup, she could still push his buttons. More flip-flopping in her stomach. Why couldn’t he have stayed a stranger?

“I’ve never seen your hair so short.” Sebastian spoke to Tilly as if he were making an accusation. “I didn’t recognize you at first.”

Yes, but I recognized you. Tilly crossed her arms. I’d recognize you anywhere.

“It’s fab, isn’t it?” Rowena glanced from Tilly to Sebastian and back again. “You look like a cross between Joan of Arc and a woodland sprite.” She clapped her hands together. “Oh, we have so much to catch up on. Just like old times. And Isaac, I’m depending on you to help out tons with the pheasant poults.”

Tilly ignored Rowena and spoke to Sebastian. “My hair got in the way when I gardened. So I hacked it off with the kitchen scissors.”

“Kitchen scissors?” His tone was light, but his face gave nothing away. “Makes you look younger.” And how would he know? He hadn’t seen her in ten years. He grasped the metal bar of the cart, pushed forward with his flat stomach, and walked off with her luggage. Ever the gentleman. Still, he could have asked first. Then she could have said no.

Rowena and Isaac skipped after Sebastian, swinging their clasped hands, gabbing away as if they hadn’t seen each other in six years, not six months. Rowena stopped to smack a kiss on Isaac’s cheek, and they both erupted into laughter.

Tilly watched her little band with a sigh. Who was she kidding? Hating was such hard work, and she didn’t hate Sebastian. Well, maybe only a smidgen. And yes, she could fault his radio silence, but history stood in Sebastian’s favor. He had loved her, protected her, desired her when she had believed no one could, and she had thrown the relationship away not once, but three times. Technically, two and a half. Seemed he had every right to deny her his friendship. But if he and Rowena had palled up, Tilly would have to let him back into her life. The question, though, was how much.

She watched the back of Sebastian’s head as he walked away. His hair, darkened to dirty-blond, was cut close to his scalp and gelled into non-rebellious spikes. It was a banker’s haircut: sculpted, immaculate, expensive. And, unfortunately, it suited him, too.

* * *

Tilly and Isaac were trapped in Rowena’s Discovery on a seat spackled with dried mud and imbued with the stench of wet Labrador. Bob Marley blasted into the back of the car as they hurtled around the M25, a loop of a racetrack with few signs and no billboards. A highway that skirted a capital city yet advertised nothing; a highway that didn’t distract you with the lure of shopping or the promise of a fun family getaway. A highway that aimed to get you from point A to point B at warp speed. At least, that seemed to be Rowena’s interpretation.

If David had been in Sebastian’s seat, he would have insisted Rowena pull over so they could swap. But Sebastian appeared as unruffled by Rowena’s high-speed lane weaving as he was by his reunion with a girl he’d sweet-talked out of her virginity. When the speedometer passed ninety, he turned away and stared out of the window.

“For gawd’s sake, what does the plonker think he’s doing?” Rowena accelerated up to the bumper of a French truck and blasted the horn. “Get out of the fucking lane, wanker!”

“Ro—” Tilly jerked forward and kicked the back of the driver’s seat.

“Fuck. Sorry,” Rowena said. Tilly kicked the seat again.

“Mom, what does fuc—”

“It’s an outlaw word,” Tilly raised her voice. “You are never to use it. Understand?”

Isaac shriveled into the seat. Tilly, you loathsome toad of a parent. She never turned to Isaac in anger, never, and being trapped in this sweltering car with Sebastian, shackled in her own private hell, was no excuse for nipping at her son like a snapping turtle.

“It’s a bad word, Angel Bug.” Tilly grabbed Isaac’s hand and squeezed. “Or rather a word people see as bad. Which means that most people find it offensive. Which is why you shouldn’t use it. Right, Ro?”

“Absolutely, dear heart. Ab-so-lutely. Always listen to Mummy. Never bad, foul-mouthed Aunty Ro.” Rowena gave her right hand a playful slap.

“But—” Isaac glanced at Sebastian, as if checking for his reaction. “What does it mean?”

“This I’ve got to hear,” Rowena muttered, and turned down Bob Marley.

“It’s an ugly word for sex.” Tilly’s cheeks flamed, which was ridiculous. She and Rowena had spent half of their childhoods scouring National Geographic for pictures of naked tribesmen, the other half searching Lady Roxton’s romance novels for sex scenes. And Sebastian had known Tilly’s teenage body better than she had. So why did she feel as if she were swirling down a whirlpool instead of bobbing along in the slipstream of her past?

Isaac curled up his lips. “Are we going to have another conversation about your sperm, Mom?”

Rowena brayed with laughter that sounded like whooping cough shot through the nose, and the Discovery swerved.

“Let’s make this a private conversation,” Tilly said.

Isaac grinned; he loved mother-son secrets.

Then Sebastian giggled. How could she hear that giggle and not let her attitude toward him thaw? She imagined the expression that accompanied the giggle: eyes sunk into creases of laughter, nose puckered up, lips stretched back to reveal the sexy gap between his front teeth. This was the Sebastian she’d fallen in love with—the boy who chased kites across the moors, or sat cross-legged on Tilly’s window seat holding his cigarette out of her bedroom window and laughing at who knew what. But that was before his father left and Sebastian prepared for a life of responsibility, before he grew old with worry for his mother, for his grandmother, even for Tilly. And that was the beginning of the end, because the more Sebastian coddled her, the farther she ran.

Tilly gave a fake cough. “My mother tells me you’re living in Bramwell Chase, Sebastian?”

Sebastian stopped giggling. “I’m renting Manor Farm.”

“Yes,” Tilly said slowly. “My mother told me that, too.”

“I didn’t tell you first?” Rowena stretched against the steering wheel. “Sure I had. But since you don’t answer my emails, I have no idea what you know.”

Tilly bit her lip. Challenging Rowena was not an exercise for the jet-lagged.

“Anyway. It’s a brilliant story, so I’m happy to repeat it.” Rowena tailgated a BMW and flashed her lights, while Tilly sank lower in her seat. “I was in town for a meeting at the bank. No offense, Sebastian, but ruddy bankers. It’s always something. I walked in and there he was. Well, I about died.” She smacked the steering wheel and the baubles around her wrist tinkled. “Can you imagine?”

Yes, Tilly could. Rowena would have shrieked and people would have gawked. Sebastian would have been embarrassed, but would have concealed it and kissed both her cheeks. He certainly wouldn’t have stood and stared as he had done with Tilly. She yanked a tissue from her pocket and shredded it.

“I had absolutely no idea he was back from Hong Kong not that he’s ever handled the Roxton account have you Sebastian but we went to dinner—” jeez, was she going to pause for breath? “—and Sebastian told me he needed somewhere to stay and I thought the Farm with all that fresh air for the children and here we are.”

Tilly glared at Rowena’s headrest. Rowena’s recent emails had been full of chatter about finding her gamekeeper passed out with an empty bottle of whiskey, and about Sunday lunch at Woodend with roast lamb and the first new potatoes of the season. But no mention of Sebastian. And Rowena didn’t keep secrets. She didn’t know how.

Rowena twiddled with the heat controls, and Tilly breathed through a surge of nausea. Was no one else suffocating in this car? If she threw up that would be interesting: Sebastian was vomit-phobic.

Tilly shrugged off her cardigan. “Back for good, Sebastian?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were in Hong Kong for the long haul. What changed your mind?”

“Who, not what. Fiona.”

Tilly sat up and watched the silver belly of an airliner soar above them. “She’d had enough of Hong Kong?” Was the plane full of holidaymakers, businessmen and women? People fleeing?

“She’d had enough of me.” The front passenger seat groaned as Sebastian swung around. “Mind if I smoke? In front of Isaac?”

He never managed to quit, then. And yes, she did mind him exposing Isaac to secondhand smoke. But she hadn’t studied Sebastian’s face until now, hadn’t looked beyond the grooming to notice the purple welts under his eyes. She shook her head and prayed she had misunderstood, because Sebastian single plus Tilly single equaled a complex math problem. And she hated all things math. Sebastian cracked open his window. Cellophane crinkled, a lighter flipped open and she heard him breathe.

Tilly rubbed at a crust of strawberry jam on her jeans. “Fiona left you?”

“Yes.” Sebastian dragged on his cigarette.

“I’m sorry.” So, she didn’t plan to forgive him, and she didn’t want to hate him. Could she settle on indifference with a soupçon of pity? She could feel that for a squished squirrel on Creeping Cedars, and squirrels were public enemy number one.

A counterpane of fields ripped past, retreating from the invasive ground cover of London. What a different view this was to the one from I-40, where wide banks disappeared into acres of forest. Her body tingled with something that felt strangely like longing. But before Tilly could muse further, a sense of unease prickled, and she turned from the window.

Sebastian had angled the rearview mirror toward himself and appeared to be rubbing his eye. But it was a ruse; he was watching her. His eyes delved deeper—with curiosity, lust, wistfulness? Or was it need? Did he need her the way she had needed him after David died? If she were closer, she could concentrate on Sebastian’s eyes. Were they gray, the color stated on his passport, or murky green, the color of ocean reflecting storm clouds? Before she could decide, he looked away.

Terrific, she’d have to forgive him after all.

* * *

She wanted to stay asleep, but hushed voices intruded, waking her before she was ready. Where was she? Oh, right, still ensnared in the Discovery. Rowena whispered, “Want me to tell her?” and Sebastian replied, “No, I’ll take care of it.” And Tilly decided to play possum.

“Doing all right?” Rowena asked. “Sorry. Bloody stupid question.”

“Yeah.” A lighter flicked. “Bloody stupid question, darlin’.”

Darlin’? Said in jest and the dropped g made all the difference, but a term of endearment passing between Ro and Sebastian? Tilly held her breath, hoping that for once Sebastian would spill his emotions, not conserve them. But he remained silent, curled in on his thoughts like a turtle marooned in the middle of the road. And Tilly had to move; her buttocks were numb.

“Aha,” Rowena said. “Sleeping Beauty and my little prince stir. Did we nap well, my darlings?”

“Not especially.” Tilly’s neck cricked and she tugged on it.

“We’re here, Mom! Look!” Isaac grabbed at her. “We’re here!”

The road dipped under an arc of overhanging beech trees. Ivy-covered banks rose on either side of the car, and they were thrown into a leafy tunnel of silvery shade. Tilly wanted to scream her happiness, to rush from the car and kiss the ground. Who gives a monkey’s about anything! She was home, back in the place where life waited for her, unchanged. She lowered her window and inhaled cool air and the smell of fresh-cut grass. No heat, no humidity, no cicada buzz, nothing but the bleating of sheep.

They emerged into brilliant sunshine as the bank slipped into a hedgerow of hawthorn, bindweed and elder knotted with blackberry brambles. A blue tit churred, and Tilly’s heart answered with a symphony of joy. Isaac’s first English summer! He was in for such a treat.

A woman clopped by on a piebald horse and touched her velvet helmet in greeting, but Rowena, ever the sun-slut, was oblivious. “The sun!” She pointed and bounced like a child tied up with excitement on Christmas morning. “Oh, the sun!”

Rowena continued to pay more attention to the sky than the road, but thankfully, drove below the speed limit. Not that she would ever speed through a village.

“Now, poppet. What shall we do for this trip’s outing?” Rowena said. “Isaac and I always have a day out,” she explained to Sebastian. “Of course, being here in the summer has so many more possibilities. Tilly and Isaac normally come back for Christmas. Well, not to celebrate Christmas, since they don’t.”

“You gave up on Christmas?” Sebastian held his cigarette to the window, but turned briefly.

“My husband was a practicing Jew.” Tilly watched a streak of smoke leak out through the open window. “And since we have a liberal rabbi, Isaac’s been raised in the Jewish faith. He thinks Jesus lives at the North Pole with twelve reindeer, don’t you, Angel Bug?”

Isaac rolled his eyes. “Mom! I haven’t believed that since I was young.”

“I converted after David died. It made sense for Isaac.” Which was true. A five-year-old could hardly go to synagogue alone. At the time she had told herself she was giving David a final gift, and maybe, back then, she’d believed it. But today she saw her conversion for what it was: an act of atonement. No. She shoved the thought aside, but there it was again, coiling in her gut: guilt, the universal motivator for every major decision she had made in the past three years.

They crawled around the curve of the church wall and passed the yew trees that marked the mass graves of medieval plague victims. Beyond, fields dotted with chestnut trees and grazing sheep tumbled over the horizon. Tilly held her breath and waited. Nothing must taint this happiness percolating in her heart, because any minute…yes! She exhaled as they emerged on a small rise. Waves of pink and red valerian poked out from the foundations of the ironstone cottages hugging the High Street, their thatched roofs spilling toward strips of garden stuffed with lupines, delphiniums, fading roses and gangly sweet peas. Tilly’s eyes scooted over every plant. How she had missed the gardens of Bramwell Chase, with untamed perennials rambling into each other and lawns dotted with daisies and clover. These were real gardens, not the landscaped yards of Creeping Cedars with squares of chemically enhanced grass, rows of shrubs lined up like marines awaiting inspection, and the gag-inducing smell of hardwood mulch.

“Now, dear heart,” Rowena said to Isaac. “Name your outing. But not Legoland again. That gift shop bankrupted me last time. What about the Tower of London? You can see where they chopped off heads. And the crown jewels are good for a quick look-see.”

“How about Woburn Safari Park?” Sebastian gave a shrug. “Archie and Sophie—” aha, that was his daughter’s name “—love it. Monkeys climb on your car, parrots take nectar from your hand.” Isaac sat still, mouth open. “And the gift shops are terrific.” Sebastian gave Rowena that smile, the one that was more of a twitch at the right corner of his mouth. Tilly twisted her legs around each other.

“Fab idea. I—” A mechanical rendition of “Rule Britannia” chimed from Rowena’s lap. “Bugger. Phone.” Rowena rootled around in the folds of her skirt. “Sebastian? Take the wheel.”

Cigarette dangling from his mouth, Sebastian shook his head in disapproval, but reached across and grabbed the steering wheel while Rowena chattered into her cell phone. Sebastian had grown up fawned over by women—his grandmother who had lived with the family, his mother, his two older sisters—and yet he’d always been oblivious to sexual cues, incredulous when confronted by lust. His effortless movements, however, suggested that he was finally comfortable with his sexuality. Which was good for Sebastian—Tilly gulped—bad for her. Life was so much easier when she had thought of him as dead. God, she needed out of this car.

“Cool,” Isaac said. “Rowena can drive without any hands.”

“Not cool.” Tilly raised her voice. “Dangerous and illegal.”

“That was Daddy. Thanks, Sebastian.” Rowena snapped her phone shut and reclaimed the steering wheel. “Sends oodles of love. He and Mother are scheming to open a rest home for aging ex-pats. Think we should invest, Haddy? You could wheel me around in my bath chair while I find us a couple of geriatric Adonises. So many men, so little time.”

Flashes of Rowena’s ex-lovers whizzed through Tilly’s mind. Poor Ro, she could never find enough love, whereas Tilly had had more than her share.

“But Isaac’s my main squeeze.” Rowena fired off a string of air-kissses. “Aren’t you, poppet?”

“Yes. I. Am.” Isaac thrust out his chest with eight-year-old machismo.

Tilly stretched and yawned.

“Feeling icky?” Rowena asked.

“Bit tatty round the edges.”

“Rats. So you won’t want to join us for lunch. Well I did say—didn’t I, Sebastian—that you’d be too tired. We’ve a table for two booked for noon at The Flying Duck. I could easily make it four. But I can see you’re both pooped.”

Isaac sprang up and down silently as if to contradict her.

Tilly rubbed her temples. A table for two?

“Nope, much better plan!” Rowena thumped the center of the steering wheel, and the horn sounded. Tilly and Isaac jumped. “Come to Sunday lunch at the Hall! Tilly, bring your mother. Sebastian, bring the children. Isaac? It’s time Aunty Ro taught you croquet. Croquet? What am I saying? Ever played cricket?”

“No. But isn’t it the same as baseball? I’m good at that.”

Sebastian doubled over and appeared to be choking.

“Poppet, we need to educate you in the ways of cultural diversity. And it just so happens that this man sitting next to me, the one who’s about ready to pop his clogs—” Rowena smacked Sebastian between the shoulder blades. “Which, by the way, is an excellent reason for never taking up smoking, filthy habit.” Rowena grabbed Sebastian’s cigarette and sucked on it. “This man was the youngest pupil in the history of Rugby School to make the first X1, which is V.I.S.”

“Very Important Stuff!” Rowena and Isaac squealed in unison.

Tilly didn’t join in the laughter. She was chewing on her thumbnail, wondering why she had forgotten about Sebastian and the first X1, and why Rowena had remembered.

Chapter 9

Tilly watched the Discovery tear out of the driveway and tried not to feel like the duped heroine in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Ro and Sebastian were locked in some conspiracy, and her mother? They hugged, and Tilly’s fingers touched bone. Her mother had lost more than weight since Christmas. She had shrunk in on herself; she had aged.

“You look washed out,” her mother said.

“And you look tired. The life of leisure too much for you?”

“You know me. I rarely sit. Having this much time—” Her mother cleared her throat. “Makes me feel old and dependent.”

The shrill cry of magpies accompanied by a throaty cuckoo-cuckoo sneaked up from the paddock. As a child, nothing delighted Tilly more than the first cuckoo of the season. And everything in Tilly’s favorite garden was as it should be. The cherry tree was wrapped in stockings to keep birds from the fruit, the herbaceous border was a mass of pinks, blues and lavender, and clusters of white rambling rector blooms smothered the stone wall. Her father had planted that rose. How he loved his roses! How her mother interfered when he tried to tend them. But today, Woodend was a flat canvas; it didn’t soothe.

In Tilly’s mind, her mother was always forty years old, plowing through the black waves off the coast of Cornwall with her neck rigid and her hair dry. This morning, however, Mrs. Haddington looked less like a woman defying the Atlantic Ocean and more like an old dear who hadn’t noticed that the left side of her silk blouse hung over the waistband of her skirt.

“I was so bored yesterday, I attempted to knit a tea cozy for the church bazaar.” Her mother tucked in her blouse, then puffed up her thick, white bob. “Which is utterly ridiculous, given this.” She waved her bandaged hand. “How was it, seeing Sebastian again?”

“Mum.” Tilly issued a warning.

Her mother nipped a leaf from the Lady Hillingdon rose that snaked around the back door. “Black spot.” She tutted. “You’ll have to spray. Marigold says it’s a nasty separation. Between Sebastian and Fanny.”

“Fiona.” Tilly watched a pair of sparrows frolic in the stone birdbath. “And Marigold knows this how?”

“She heard it from Sylvia, who heard it from Beryl, who has the same woman-that-does as Sebastian—Mabel Dillington. There’s more.”

Tilly had always wanted eyes like her mother’s. Eyes you couldn’t ignore. Eyes that were the bright blue of a Carolina sky. Tilly’s eyes were pale and translucent, the color of porcelain brushed with a robin’s-egg wash. They made her look ethereal, when she yearned to be an Amazon.

“There’s evidence of a relationship.” Her mother had yet to blink.

Tilly scuffed her Doc Martens boot through round, evenly sized pebbles in coordinating sand tones. Unlike Tilly’s gravel, which was made up of lumps of quartz and splinters of gray rock, her mother’s driveway was perfect. “I’d forgotten how rumors fly in this place. Shame on you for listening.”

“Hardly rumor. And there’s no need to be sanctimonious. Mabel saw the Discovery parked outside Manor Farm yesterday at 6:00 a.m. Now. Where did Isaac and Monty disappear to?” Her mother hobbled up the stone step and through the back door.

Tilly raised her face into the damp, morning air. The sun had vanished, replaced by a fine Scotch mist. So they’re having sex. Big whoop. I just need to figure out how to avoid them for six weeks.

An empty truck rattled along the High Street. Empty trucks—when did she stop calling them lorries?—sounded different from heavily loaded ones. It had to do with the way they hit the dip on the corner. She gazed through the gateway, the place where she had met David. And then she stared back at the house, the place she had longed to run to after he died. After he died because of her. She’d grown used to the guilt, but it was always lurking. And when she was tired, as she was now, it thudded inside her skull like a migraine.

“Tilly! Phone!” her mother called from the kitchen. “A James Nealy?”

* * *

“Good flight?” James grabbed the rail on the treadmill, let go and repeated. Six times. Would she shriek? Accuse him of being a two-bit stalker? But despite what the voice had told him yesterday—over and over—he wasn’t a stalker. Although he had memorized the state harassment laws just to make sure.

“Are you an insomniac?” Tilly said. “It can’t be much later than 5:00 a.m. your time.”

He had prepared for incredulity or hostility, nothing else. And yet she’d asked about his sleep habits. What did that mean?

The treadmill whirred beneath him. “I exercise every morning from four-thirty to six-thirty.” That was probably more information than she needed.

“You get up at four-thirty? Are you crackers?”

What the hell did crackers mean? Who knew, but it didn’t sound good. So yes, clearly he had given her too much information. She was probably freaking out at this very moment, dialing 911 on her cell phone to report him for infringing the state harassment law that included: To telephone another repeatedly, whether or not conversation ensues, for the purpose of abusing, annoying, threatening, terrifying, harassing or embarrassing any person at the called number. Was he annoying her?

“Have you made a decision?” He spoke quickly, a preemptive strike in case she was considering hanging up.

“James.” Her voice dragged with exhaustion. He should’ve waited another hour at least, given her a chance to unpack. But it had taken all his restraint to not call her at 4:30 a.m. “I promised you an answer in September.”

“Can’t wait that long.”

“You’re worse than a child. Isaac was never this demanding, even at three.”

His pulse slowed as her accent, soft and warm, soothed him. He actually thought about crawling into bed and going back to sleep. After he’d showered, of course. “Do you talk to all your clients this way, or just me?”

“I have wholesale customers, not clients, for this very reason. And no, I haven’t given your project one iota of a thought. I just walked in the door after twelve hours of traveling, and all I care about is where I packed my toothbrush and whether there’s a pair of clean knickers nearby.”

“Is that so?” An image assaulted him, of Tilly wearing nothing but a scarlet thong and gardening gloves. He shook back his hair and upped the speed on the treadmill.

“How did you track me down?” Tilly asked.

Sari ratted you out. Once he discovered her sons were fans, he had all the leverage he needed.

“You can find anything,” he said, “if you’re determined.” That wasn’t a lie, even though the voice told him it was.

“I’m trying to be patient. Really. But I’m dangerously close to telling you to jump off a pier. Only with a few choice expletives thrown in.” She paused. “How’re the silent hiccups?”

“You really want to know?” His voice was almost a whisper.

“Sadly, yes. I do.”

“Worse.” The treadmill creaked an indignant rhythm as he upped the speed a second time. He’d never taken it this high.

“So you’re going to keep calling me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Time for a deal, Mr. Nealy. You get an answer in one week—if, and only if, you agree to abide by my decision. And no calling in the interim.”

Was that a yes? Or a no? Or a nothing? He hated nothings. But it could turn into a yes, right? “Agreed.”

“And—”

“Addendums?” He panted. “Already?”

“I’d like the adult explanation of your hiccups.”

“Will it…affect your…decision?” He was running hard now. Racing against the voice, which was stuck doing a circuit of: If you tell her, she’ll think you’re a fucking weirdo. James tried to drown out the thought with the lyrics of “Psycho Killer,” but he couldn’t get past the line that basically said, leave me the hell alone because I’m a live wire.

“Labels are merely a way of lumping people together like plants on a stall,” Tilly said. “I don’t much care what yours is.” She was smiling. He could hear it in the pitch of her voice. “Okay, gloves-off honesty. I’m curious.”

“What’s…your…label?” His sneakers pounded the treadmill belt.

“I thought we were talking about you.”

“I’m not…all that…interesting.” Once you edit out the crazy bits.

“Okay, fine. I’m game for a little transatlantic show-and-tell.” She gave a huge sigh. “I’m a guilt-ridden widow. No, that’s too strong. I’m not drowning in guilt. It’s just there, in the background.”

James blew out a couple of breaths and slowed down to a fast walk. “You have to be careful with guilt.” So, Tilly understood the horror of a damaged mind, which couldn’t be good either for her, or for Isaac. “Guilt can become an intrusive thought. And that’s my world. Thoughts that drag you back and under. Thoughts that never let go. Obsessive thoughts that lead to compulsive actions. Look up OCD on Wikipedia and read about cognitive-behavioral therapy. It’s a way of redirecting unwanted thoughts. You might find it helpful.” He shut the treadmill. At 5:16 a.m. the day was already too long. “I’ll call one week from today. Same time.”

James hung up and crumpled across the front of the treadmill. He had told her! Told her he was crippled by an anxiety disorder that popular culture equated with people to ridicule or fear: a television detective incapable of navigating life without a wipes-carrying assistant; a monster driven to murder by odd numbers; a billionaire recluse who couldn’t touch doorknobs and died in squalor. James banged the heels of his hands into his temples. Bang, bang. Bang, bang. Bang, bang.

He never told anyone he had OCD—not family, not lovers, not close friends. His buddy Sam guessed years ago, but it was understood, not discussed, which was what James wanted. It was no one’s business but his own, because to say those words out loud was to brand himself. Tilly was right—OCD was a label, and with labels came stigma, and weakness, and pity. Everything that James detested, everything that reminded him how it felt to be ten years old, standing by his mother’s grave, scared of the future, terrified of the thoughts unraveling in his brain, and desperate not to be the object of people’s stares. Desperate to blend in and disappear, to be the person you never quite remembered, when he was more likely to be the person you wished you could forget.

She hates you, she’s scared of you, she thinks you’re a kook.

No, no. James pressed down with his palms. He was done with doubt. It would not pull him under again. He would not revert to the person he had been before he had decided to sell the business, the apartment, the farm. Before he had decided to save himself.

Besides, Tilly? Scared of anyone? He didn’t think so. And yes, he was weird. He was weird! So what? He should be able to shout to the world that he was obsessive-compulsive, to do so without dreading other people’s reactions. Maybe opening up to Tilly was the first step, and no different from his dad attending an A.A. meeting just so he could announce, “I’m a drunk.”

That was a good theory and one James desperately wanted to believe. Acknowledging weakness gave you strength, but he’d slipped up, released personal information without having intended to, and that was out of character. Other people said things they shouldn’t; he didn’t.

But when he’d hinted at the truth that day at the farm, hadn’t a small part of him dared to trust, dared to believe that he had met someone, finally, who might understand? How would Tilly treat him now that she knew? Would she look at him and see the OCD, not James? Was it even possible to separate the two?

His psychologist always said, “It’s the OCD, not you,” but the lines weren’t distinct for James. OCD may have twisted up his mind, but it had crafted him, made him James, pushed him to succeed and bequeathed the only gift that mattered: the ability to perceive pain in others. He didn’t always act on that knowledge, didn’t always want to, but he was drawn to people in dark corners, could empathize with them. So now he was being altruistic. Truthfully, you enjoy living alongside people who are more fucked-up than you. That wasn’t true of most of his friends, but it had been his M.O. in love.

His thoughts circled him back to Tilly. She would take him on. She would. But once they started working together, once they had regular contact, he would have to be more careful. Because if she saw behind the label, if he revealed the biggest truth of all, she would never understand. The end. The end.

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