and what he thought of as an afternoon nap sofa. More of her art—petal pink peonies spilling out of a cobalt vase, mists rising over windswept dunes.
And the view, of course, spread out like a banquet for a hungry soul.
He moved into the room, to the desk, and pulled the sticky note off the monitor.
Hester says:
Write here, and why aren’t you already?
Relayed by Abra.
He frowned at the note a moment, not sure he appreciated his grandmother’s using her neighbor to relay her orders. Then, the note still in his hand, he looked around the room, the windows, even into the little bathroom, the closet that now held office supplies as well as linens, blankets and pillows. Which meant, he concluded, the sofa was a pullout.
Practical again. The house held a dozen bedrooms or more—he couldn’t remember—but why waste space when you could multipurpose?
He shook his head at the glass-fronted mini-fridge stocked with bottled water and his own guilty favorite since college, Mountain Dew.
Write here.
It was a good space, he thought, and the idea of writing held a lot more appeal than unpacking.
“Okay,” he said. “All right.”
He went to his room, retrieved his laptop case. He slid the keyboard and monitor to the far left, gave himself room for his own tool. And since it was there, what the hell, got a cold bottle of the Dew. He booted up, plugged in his thumb drive.
“Okay,” he said again. “Where were we?”
He opened the bottle, chugged as he brought up his work, did a quick review. And with one last glance at the view, dived in.
He escaped.
Since college, he’d written as a hobby—an interest he’d enjoyed indulging. And it had given him some pride when he’d sold a handful of short stories.
In the past year and a half—when his life began to shake into the dumpster—he’d found writing offered him better therapy, a calmer mind than a fifty-minute hour with a shrink.
He could go away into a world he created, he—to some extent, anyway—controlled. And oddly felt more himself than he did outside that world.
He wrote—again, to some extent—what he knew. Crafting legal thrillers—first in short stories, and now this terrifying and seductive attempt at a novel—gave him an opportunity to play with the law, to use it, misuse it, depending on the character. He could create dilemmas, solutions, tightrope along the thin and slippery line, always shifting between the law and justice.
He’d become a lawyer because the law, with all of its flaws, all of its intricacies and interpretations, fascinated him. And because the family business, the industry of Landon Whiskey, just wasn’t a fit for him as it was for his father, his sister, even his brother-in-law.
He’d wanted criminal law, and had pursued that goal single-mindedly through law school, while clerking for Judge Reingold, a man he admired and respected, and into Brown, Kinsale, Schubert and Associates.
Now that the law had failed him in a very real sense, he wrote to feel alive, to remind himself there were times truth held out against lies, and justice found a way.
By the time he surfaced, the light had changed, gone gloomy, softening the tones in the water. With some surprise he noted it was after three; he’d written solidly for nearly four hours.
“Hester scores again,” he murmured.
He backed up the work, switched to e-mail. Plenty of spam, he noted—and deleted. Not much else, and nothing he felt obliged, right then, to read.
Instead he composed a post to his parents, and another to his sister with nearly the same text. No problems on the drive, house looks great, good to be back, settling in. Nothing about recurring dreams, sneaking depression or talkative neighbors who fixed omelets.
Then he composed another to his grandmother.
I’m writing here, as ordered. Thank you. The water’s gone to rippling steel with fast white horses. It’s going to snow; you can taste it. The house looks good, and feels even better. I’d forgotten how it always made me feel. I’m sorry—don’t tell me not to apologize again—I’m sorry, Gran, I stopped coming. But I’m sorry now almost as much for me as for you.
Maybe if I’d come to you, to Bluff House, I’d have seen things more clearly, accepted things, changed things. If I had, would it have all gone so horribly wrong?
I’ll never know, and there’s no point in the what-ifs.
What I’m sure of is it’s good to be here, and I’ll take care of the house until you come home. I’m going to take a walk on the