Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,30

a good time to be had by all.”

“Sometimes you do have to force teenagers to do things,” Wendy said. “They don’t know what’s best for them all the time. I had to get tough with you sometimes, Anna.”

“Excuse me? Are you turning this around and making it about me?”

“You were... I’m just saying you were difficult sometimes, and maybe I did something wrong...” Wendy said.

Anna felt like her mother had reached inside her and hollowed her out completely. “You think you did something wrong. You think there’s something wrong with me?”

Thomas had thought so, obviously. Why wouldn’t her mother?

“Can we please not have a giant fight?” Rachel asked. “My hands are covered in blackberry juice, my daughter is mad at me—”

“And God forbid it not be about you for a second,” Anna said, rounding on her sister. “We must remember, after all, that your pain is greatest.”

“Anna,” Rachel said. “That’s not fair.” Rachel sounded like all the breath had gone out of her and Anna regretted that. Because the blow had landed a whole lot sharper than she’d meant it to.

“I don’t need either of you to act like teenagers,” Wendy said. “One is enough.”

Well, there was the truth of it. All that tension with her mother that ran beneath the surface of her help. Of their interactions. This was what she thought of her. That she was still a teenager rebelling.

“I didn’t ask for commentary on my life. If you don’t want me to act like a teenager, then don’t treat me like one. If you want me to act like an adult, then you don’t get to intermittently school me whenever you feel like it over what you consider to be my poor life choices. I couldn’t tell you when my marriage was falling apart because I knew you would just blame me! I don’t blame Emma for not wanting to work with all of this...” Then Anna turned and walked out of the kitchen, breathing hard.

It felt good to scream it. To shout what she’d believed deep in her heart. To stop trying to make them feel better when she felt broken.

Well, maybe she would storm out of the house, too. It wasn’t every day she identified with her niece, but today she was definitely Team Emma.

If only she could find someone to be Team Anna.

9

You worry too much about rules. When you get older you’ll realize that Mom and Dad don’t know everything. And no, of course the ghost isn’t real.

—FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY SUSAN BRIGHT TO HER SISTER, JUNE 25, 1961

EMMA

Emma found that it was difficult to sulk at an empty room. But that was the decision she’d made when she’d stormed out of the Captain’s House and gone back to the Lightkeeper’s House.

There was no one here to witness her disgust, and that felt injurious.

She had given up Boston. And maybe her mom didn’t know that, but it was true, and that choice was bearing down on her, harder and harder every day, and it only got worse when she was in this house.

Staring at this oppressive sameness that was now so unalterably different.

The house was the same.

But her dad was gone.

And those pieces didn’t fit, and couldn’t.

She couldn’t even go into his room. Couldn’t go up to the lighthouse, not when it had been a special place, a special walk for the two of them. Pieces of her home, her life, had been ripped away when he’d died, and she couldn’t bear being here and being so...aware of it.

Her mom moved through the house with ease. She slept in that bedroom Emma couldn’t even go into. She’d cleaned out her dad’s medicine and all the signs he’d been here, and sick.

Emma couldn’t act like it was over. It felt like it was still happening.

If she’d gotten the diner job she could have at least had some escape. And Luke... Luke was right there and he was the symbol of her escape. Of just a few minutes to look at something beautiful and wonderful and not connected to any of...this.

Her dad had died here. And they were just still...living here.

She didn’t know how.

A lot of people had died in this house. She knew that.

And in the Captain’s House, too. It was even rumored that they had a ghost living on the first floor. As a result they were part of the Haunted Buildings Registry. Though Emma had never seen one, and she supposed that if anyone should have seen them, it was the