Page 52 of Love Conquers All

Sylvie lowered her voice. “You need to tell me everything sinister you know about that company. Knowledge is the ultimate weapon.”

Graham smiled. He loved this woman.

He couldn’t believe he had her back.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Sylvie and Graham stayed up till two in the morning discussing the best possible strategy to take down Next Generation Nantucket Designers. “We can attack from the inside!” Sylvie cried again and again, making notes, imagining the gala in a different light. It was extra exhilarating to realize that the gala would be the first to bring her and Graham together as a team again. They’d continue to fight as long as they could.

She felt sure that was why they’d been put on this earth in the first place—to save it.

She didn’t want to waste her time.

When Graham and Sarah realized how bleary-eyed and fatigued they were, they stretched brand-new silk sheets over the biggest California King the inn had to offer, sleeping like kings and queens in the “honeymoon” suite of The House on Nantucket. As Sylvie drifted off, she thought about how sad it would be when the inn was filled with strangers, when it wasn’t just Graham and Sylvie in this big place by themselves. It felt like they were playing house.

When Sylvie woke up the following morning, she heard the birds twittering and smelled the salty air and the particular musk of Graham, and she felt elevated, sure. She was in love.

But when she got up and padded downstairs to make coffee, she remembered her mother’s diaries.

Did she want to know how it all had ended?

I’ll deal with it later,she told herself. She felt her mother waiting for her in the attic. She felt it like a nag.

Graham came downstairs a second later and caught her by the coffee maker. He kissed her and wrapped his arms around her. He whispered, “That was the best sleep I’ve had in ages.”

They poured coffee. They sat on the porch and felt the sun on their faces.

There was so much to look forward to.

With a plan in place for the upcoming gala, Sylvie and Graham threw themselves into continued preparations for The House on Nantucket. They worked diligently, finding solace and peace in daily tasks, and welcomed a full-fledged and warm spring to the island. By May twentieth, it felt like summer, and plenty of tourists were already milling about, eating ice cream cones and kissing on the boardwalk. Sometimes Sylvie and Graham joined them, pretending to be tourists on the island where they’d been born and raised.

Sylvie wondered if her mother and father had ever kissed like this.

It troubled her endlessly to know that her father hadn’t ever really had love. Sylvie thought the love he had with his first love wasn’t a shared love. He only ever had love for my mother, who couldn’t love him back.

It felt like a tragedy.

One evening, sitting on the front porch of the inn with light beers, Sylvie asked Graham, “What do you think my father thought of us when we were teenagers?”

Graham sniffed. “Based on everything you learned in the diaries? I have to think our relationship reminded him of Sarah and Wally’s.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Sylvie said. “Like Wally and Sarah were meant to be. James was always jealous of that. But when he tried to recreate it, everything fell apart.”

“I can’t help but feel bad for your father,” Graham admitted.

Sarah bowed her head. “I wish he would have told me.”

“I think he’s trying to tell you now,” Graham offered. “He didn’t know how to tell you in life. But he left the journals and diaries right where they were for a reason. And he demanded that you work at the inn.”

“He wanted me to find them,” Sylvie agreed. “He wanted to be understood. Everyone does.”

They fell into a silence that was interrupted a few minutes later by a phone call from Hilary Salt inviting Sylvie out to her place for a spontaneous Salt Sisters wine-and-cheese party.

“I don’t know if we have time,” Sylvie told Graham.

But Graham waved his hands. “We’ve been working ourselves to death. The trip’s already in a few days. Go say hi to your girlfriends. Tell them what’s been going on.”

“I have to tell them I’m head over heels for my high school sweetheart?” she teased, pressing a kiss onto his forehead.

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