Page 44 of Love Conquers All

“But? I can feel a but coming.” Sylvie walked over to the office wall, leaning against it with her arms crossed.

“There’s no ‘but,’” he said, putting a smile on his face. Sylvie didn’t really believe him.

Sylvie wondered if he was bothered by the old boarding school application. Maybe he was encountering old sorrows and feelings of abandonment.

“Hey,” Sylvie said, “I was reading about this new property for the Next Generation Nantucket Designers. They’re going to break ground soon, right? We need to do something.”

Graham sighed. “I talked to Hilary about it. She’s still digging around, trying to figure out if she has dirt on these guys.”

“Why don’t we try going after them the old-fashioned way?” Sylvie suggested.

Graham laughed nervously.

“I know. You were just arrested,” Sylvie said. “But you shouldn’t have had to do that alone.”

Graham got up. He looked exhausted. “Let’s think about it, okay?”

Sylvie watched him walk into the hallway. “Where are you going?”

“We have dinner with my mom, remember?”

Sylvie had forgotten. Her blood pressure spiked.

He’s over it,she thought, remembering now what it had been like to date in her twenties and thirties.He’s bored of me. He wishes he never would have come to the funeral. He wishes he hadn’t agreed to manage the inn.

“Graham?” Sylvie chased him to the living room, where he pulled a backpack over his shoulders and adjusted his baseball hat. “Graham, I don’t think I can go to dinner with Val. Not tonight.”

Graham looked deflated. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Are you?” Sylvie asked.

Graham sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I’m just tired.”

Sylvie felt her heart cracking. Because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, she offered, “We really should fight those Next Generation Nantucket Designers. Tomorrow, we should make a plan. We could make posters. We could write articles. We…”

But Graham was shaking his head. “Maybe the old ways don’t work anymore.”

Sylvie was surprised. Her mouth hung open.

Graham was quick to apologize. He reached for her hand and squeezed it. The silence was tense between them.

Sylvie longed to tell him not to go.

“I’ll see you later?” Graham offered.

Sylvie wanted to ask when.

But she didn’t want to seem needy, so she just nodded. “Give my love to Val.”

Chapter Twenty

Sylvie had asked her father how he’d met her mother exactly once. This was all the experience she’d needed to know never to ask again. At the time, she’d been eleven, best friends with Caitlin, mostly happy, and eager to understand the world around her. Caitlin had said that her parents had met on a scuba diving expedition in Costa Rica, that they’d fallen in love under a palm tree, drinking bright blue cocktails and gazing into each other’s eyes. Sylvie had realized that she didn’t have any such image of her own parents. She’d thought that she needed to understand how they loved each other. She’d thought that would make her feel whole.

(How sad it was that she hadn’t felt whole at eleven. Maybe no kid really did.)

One night after school, James returned from the inn to eat a frozen pizza in front of the television. Sylvie had crept down the stairs to find him in the bright blue glow, chewing slowly. In the shadows, he looked far older than he was, and Sylvie grew frightened, thinking how awful it would be if her father died, too. An orphan. She shivered.

“What are you doing?” her father demanded. “Why are you creeping around?”

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