year. So Zack and Ruby spent all holidays with Ruby’s family. They had left the two babies with the baby nurse at home.
Alex went out to the kitchen to carve the turkey, and he took a long time coming back. Eleanor went in to see if he needed help, and she came out a minute later looking sheet white. Zack rushed to the kitchen to see what had happened, with Ruby right behind him. Her grandfather was slumped over in his wheelchair. He must have died in an instant. When Zack checked, he had no pulse. He looked as though he had just gone to sleep. His heart had stopped. He was eighty-seven years old and Eleanor was seventy-three. They had loved each other for fifty-five years. All three of them stood crying as they looked at him. They called 911 and the paramedics came, but there was nothing anyone could do. It was over. And despite his reversals and injuries during the war, Alex had lived a good life.
Eleanor held his funeral the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the church was full, with people he had known in his youth, people he had worked with, clients from the shop, and someone he had served in the army with, whom Eleanor didn’t even know. Eleanor looked like she was in shock. Ruby stayed close to her every minute, and suggested she stay with them afterward, but Eleanor wanted to be at home. She closed the shop for a week, and then opened it again, but her heart wasn’t in it once Alex was gone.
She made the decision to close the shop in the spring. It had lost its meaning for her. They didn’t need the money anymore, and they’d had a good run. They had had it and enjoyed it for forty years. That seemed long enough. In the summer, she decided to rent out the building in the city, and move to Lake Tahoe. She wanted to live in the cottage and work in her garden. The British owner had hired a new overseer by then, shortly after Alex died. The original earl had died last year too, and the earl’s son had inherited the estate, although he’d never been there. He was putting off making any decisions about it, until he saw the property himself, and had no plans to come over for the moment. He wasn’t well himself.
Ruby worried about her grandmother being in Tahoe alone once she moved there, but she seemed happy. She spent most of her time outdoors, in her gardens. She had a greenhouse built and grew orchids. It suited her. She wasn’t interested in their city life alone. She had kept a few of her decorating clients, but eventually gave them up too. That chapter of her life was closed.
Ruby came up to visit her whenever she could, and brought the children to see her. Things seemed to be back on track with Zack again. It had taken a year after her discovery of the girl on his desk, but Ruby had finally forgiven him, and the atmosphere between them had warmed up at last.
A year after Eleanor had moved to Tahoe, Zack suggested they take her with them on their boat in July. It was a beautiful boat and they didn’t use it often enough. It was dangerous for toddlers running loose on the boat, so they never took them, and Ruby hated to leave her children, but she agreed with Zack that it would be good for her grandmother.
Ruby convinced her to go with them in July. Alex had been gone for a year and a half by then, and they were delighted when Eleanor accepted the invitation. They were going to meet the boat in Monaco, and travel into Italy, possibly as far as Sardinia, and spend two weeks on the boat. Eleanor wanted to do some traveling on her own after that, and Zack and Ruby were going to Saint Tropez to meet friends. They were planning to be gone for three weeks in all, and were leaving Kendall and Nick at home. Nick was two and Kendall was three, and it was still too dangerous for them on the boat. They could easily have fallen overboard or gotten hurt. It would be the longest span of time Ruby had ever been away from them.
Ruby was going to fly from San Francisco with her grandmother, and Zack was planning to arrive a day later, after a