It could have got nasty, but Daff chose not to go down that road. They went to mediation and wrote their own agreement, Richard paying child support and a small amount of alimony. Not enough for Daff to survive on, something she had been frightened of since the beginning, when she had sat down and made a list of her options, but Richard, always the stronger of the two, refused to pay more, and at the time Daff didn’t have the strength to fight and, naively, didn’t realize quite how much she would need in order to live.
She’d known as soon as Richard left that she would need to get a job. Real estate was the most tempting and seemed the obvious choice for her. The market wasn’t great, but Daff had always had a way with people, was liked by everyone; also the upside was so great, and the rewards so much larger than for any of the salaried jobs she was contemplating.
Within a few months of separating, she had her license, and her first sale was a small cape in a neighborhood close to her own.
She feels, in many ways, that she has the perfect job. She doesn’t earn as much as she would like, but her hours are her own and she is able to be there for Jessica. She just wishes Jessica didn’t so clearly want her to go away.
Jessica blames her mother for the marriage breaking up. She knows nothing of the affair—Richard and Daff agreed never to let her know—but Richard has made it quite clear to Jess that he would never have left his family, that living in a small apartment on the other side of town is not his choice, and so Jessica blames Daff, and her anger is so great, she can barely bring herself to look at her.
Chapter Four
"How was the lobster?” Sarah shouts through to the kitchen as she walks in, stopping to put the grocery bags of cleaning products away in the pantry.
“Delicious, as always. Oh I wish you had been here five minutes earlier. You would have met Andrew Moseley. Such a nice man.”
“So your lunch was fun?” Sarah walks into the kitchen.
Nan reaches over for a cigarette and takes her time lighting it, before shrugging. “I’m not sure I would have called it fun. Lovely to have the company, but apparently the money thing is a disaster and he thinks I ought to sell the house.”
“What?” Sarah’s mouth drops open in shock. “Which house? This house?”
“There are no other houses anymore.” Nan gives a rueful smile.
“But, Nan! That’s terrible!” Sarah sinks down onto a chair opposite Nan at the kitchen table.
“Oh sweetie. Nothing is terrible.”
“But what do you mean, the money thing is a disaster?” Once upon a time, when Sarah first started here as a weekly cleaner, she would never have dared ask this of Nan. Nan seemed so grand, so imperious, Sarah would scuttle around with her bucket of cleaning equipment, trying to keep out of her way.
That was almost fifteen years ago. Sarah was seventeen, trying to fund her studies, cleaning houses on the island for families she had known since she was a baby, families her own mother had worked for, her grandmother.
Now Sarah is part of the family. She still cleans for Nan, and cooks, and runs errands, but she is, effectively, Nan’s daughter, the only difference being that her recompense is more clearly defined.
Sarah has always thought of Windermere as her second home—it is, after all, the place where she considers herself to have grown up, her twenties being a difficult, unstable time, the only stability seeming to come from Nan.
And now Nan is talking about selling the house? Sarah couldn’t live without this house, without Nan, and the two are intermingled in her mind—there could not be one without the other— and the prospect of losing them is terrifying.
Sarah may now have a husband and a home of her own, but Windermere is the place where she came to understand what “home” meant: that anyone can live in a house, but homes are created with patience, time and love. And Windermere has always felt more of a home to her than anywhere else. More, even, than the home she is now starting to build with her husband.
“You know me and money.” Nan smiles. “Andrew started talking about hedge funds and high risk and large returns, and it seems the hedge fund had put all their money with something they