Page 34 of Love Conquers All

Graham’s face was pale.

“I’d better get back inside,” Sylvie said. Embarrassment made her heart skip. She turned and hurried for the door, hoping Graham would drop into his electric vehicle and drive out of sight. But when she reached the porch, she dared a glance around to find he’d followed her. He was about ten feet away.

He said, “I missed you, too. But I never knew why you went away, why you dropped out of school and left me like that.” His Adam’s apple jumped as he swallowed.

Sylvie found it difficult to breathe. She loved the way the moonlight played across his face, the way his eyes widened when he grew serious, the way he looked so in love with her (even though she knew he wasn’t, that he couldn’t be, they weren’t kids anymore).

“It was all so long ago,” Sylvie said, turning the knob. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

Before he could answer, she slipped inside and secured the door behind her.

Get a hold of yourself,she thought as she scurried up the steps and into the bedroom Hilary had gifted her.Your life is already a mess. Don’t make it worse.

Chapter Fifteen

Graham couldn’t sleep that night. Alone in bed, he twisted in the sheets with an image of Sylvie in his mind’s eye. She was in the doorway, gazing at him, and then at once, she transformed, and she was sixteen again. Her hair was pink, and they were running down the beach with poster boards and hearts on their sleeves. They wanted so much from the world. They wanted so much from each other.

In the weeks after Sylvie’s spontaneous departure from the island, Graham had spent a lot of time thinking about where she was, imagining what had happened to her. He’d initially suspected she’d joined one of the environmental groups in Boston, but when he’d called around to their few contacts, they’d apologized and said they hadn’t heard from her. He was terrified to leave the house because he was so sure that Sylvie would call and tell him where she was, and he didn’t want to miss it. Maybe she only had enough money to make one call. Perhaps wherever she was, she only had one pay phone…

But where could that be?

Sylvie was seventeen years old when she left. To Graham, this crystallized the fact that they’d been playing a sort of game. They’d been playing the part of environmental revolutionists,but they’d always had somewhere to sleep at night, they’d had food to eat, and they’d had neighbors and contacts. They’d always had Valerie. But with Sylvie out in the wide world with no money and nowhere to be, Graham worried that something really bad would happen to her.

That worry had destroyed his senior year. He’d become soft-spoken, distracted, and nervous. He’d failed a class that he’d had to make up the following summer—economics. He’d known how much Sylvie would have hated it, and he wanted to take a stand against it. In taking that stand, he’d punished himself. Toward the end of his senior year, a girl named Fern told him she had a crush on him, and he couldn’t believe it because he hardly existed to him. How could anyone notice him enough to have a crush on him? But he agreed to go on a date and found himself at a diner, drinking a milkshake and kissing Fern Dennis. Her lips tasted strange. They dated for the entirety of that summer—another welcome distraction—and then they broke up before Graham left for college. Where was Fern now?Don’t think about Fern,Graham scolded himself.You have enough on your plate.

Graham was bleary-eyed when he got to the inn the following morning. It was eight thirty, and all the doors and windows were thrown open to take in the bright May light. As he crept into the foyer, his ears filled with the sounds of someone tearing things apart. When he found Sylvie in the kitchen, she was surrounded by things: skillets and plates and appliances, all of them removed from their “places” so that she could deep clean. She was bug-eyed but happy, and she tiptoed around the stuff to hug him hello and say, “I made a ton of coffee! Let’s go outside.”

Sylvie and Graham took their mugs of coffee to the porch to watch the little district come to life and make lists of what to clean, what to rip apart, what to save for staff, and how to fix the inn’s online presence. “Obviously, if we’re going to work under the terms of my father’s will, we’re going to need reservations forthe summer,” Sylvie said, biting her lip. “It looks like we have a few couples booked for the end of June and early July, but that isn’t enough to sustain us.”

Graham laughed. “I don’t know the first thing about hospitality.”

“We probably shouldn’t tackle all this ourselves,” Sylvie said. “But there isn’t enough money to hire someone new right now.”

Graham waved his hand. “I like the challenge.”

Sylvie let her shoulders droop. Graham tried to read her face but found himself too struck with her beauty to fully understand her.

After pouring a second cup of coffee, Graham and Sylvie separated, with Graham on the second floor and Sylvie still in the kitchen. Graham listened to a podcast as he went through the rooms, dusting, vacuuming, and making sense of some of the decor, some of which needed to be updated. There was a clear mark where Hilary’s fiancé had updated things and where he’d stopped after James’s diagnosis. Graham made notes to himself, grateful to have something to think about.

It was around noon that he found the trapdoor that led to the attic.

Not thinking twice about it, he tugged the string that pulled the staircase all the way down to the ground, then wrapped his hands around the rungs and pulled himself up. To his surprise, the attic was more like a little room than storage. It was painted baby blue and had a beautiful window that was high enough on the colonial-style building so as to show a view of the Nantucket Sound. It glinted turquoise in the beautiful early afternoon.

Near the window was a dusty desk. It looked as though it had once been well-cared for, and it still held a beautiful vintage lamp decorated with flowers, stacks of books and journals, plus a photograph. Graham got closer and realized that the photograph was of a little girl. He recognized it was of Sylvie as a younggirl, maybe three or four. In the photograph, she was in a little white dress, playing in the sand by the ocean, her hair decorated with little white flowers. Graham was suddenly slick with sweat. Reaching with a shaking hand, he opened the first page of the red journal next to the stack of books. He read,This is the journal of Sarah Bruckson.Sarah Bruckson was Sylvie’s mother.

Graham’s heart jumped into his throat. He let the journal close and crossed his arms over his chest. After a long moment, he opened the other journals and diaries to find that each one belonged to Sarah Bruckson. It seemed that she’d used this beautiful attic as a sort of getaway, a thinking-and-writing area for herself.

Graham knew that this was a treasure trove of information for Sylvie. When they’d been teenagers, Sylvie had speculated about her mother, guessing that she was far more similar to her mother than her father, thinking that if only her mother was around, she would understand Graham and Sylvie’s mission. She would have protected Sylvie from her father. Sylvie had been sure of it.

Graham went back down the ladder and closed the trapdoor to the attic. Slowly, as though in a dream, he returned to the kitchen to find it miraculously glistening. Sylvie beamed at him, hands on her hips, and said, “I forgot how nourishing it is to clean!”

Graham didn’t want to sour her good mood just yet. “Should we celebrate with lunch?”

“That’s a perfect idea,” Sylvie said. “Maybe you can help me go over my questions for my trip to Alabama? They’re all twisted up in my head.”

Graham couldn’t believe his luck.

Twenty minutes later, they were seated at a beachside restaurant with big glasses of ice water and the sun on theirfaces. Sylvie had her tablet propped up on the table and was discussing the bizarre interviews she had coming up, one with an alligator farmer and another with a man who gave tours of the Alabama bayou. “The ecosystem is changing rapidly, obviously,” she said, speaking a language Graham knew well, “but the people who understand that the best are these sorts of people. They need to tell me how serious it is.”

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