Page 34 of Escape to Lighthouse Cove

If anything, the disappointment he felt from her scalded him all the more. He really wasn’t winning when it came to banter.

“Seriously,” Grace said quietly, and it cut across his attempts to lighten the situation like a hot knife through butter. Leaving him a melted pool of nothing.

“Seriously,” he repeated, simply to stall for time. He placed the spaghetti, can of tomatoes, mushrooms, and lettuce on the worktable. These four things did not a meal make.

“Seriously,” Grace repeated, and she sounded just as quiet as she had before. Just as sincere.

It was hard to make another lame joke when she’d used that tonetwice.

Noah sighed. He felt the evening and all of its nebulous, barely-there possibilities slipping away from him, and ithurt. Stupidly. “Seriously, no,” he stated flatly. “I don’t think so.”

“Ever?” She sounded incredulous as well as disappointed.

“I mean, yes, I’ll go off island for some things, obviously,” Noah clarified. “The aforementioned teeth cleanings and, dare I say it, I’ll need a colonoscopy when I hit forty, although that’s not for a few years.” Another joke that fell utterly flat. “But that’s not what you’re really asking, is it?” he continued. “You’re asking if I’m going to rejoin civilization, move back to New York or wherever, join the land of the living again and act like a normal person, and the answer to that is a pretty hard no.”

She stared at him for a moment, her gaze clear and wide and far too perceptive. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly.

“Thirty-six.”

“The same age as Becca.”

He stared at her in a moment’s bafflement—who was Becca?—and Grace’s fair brows snapped together.

“Becca Babcock?” she said, sounding slightly censorious. More than slightly, actually. “You do know her, don’t you? She’s lived her whole life on this island.” She shook her head, a gesture of seeming condemnation even though he hadn’t said anything. “How do you not know her and I do?”

“Well, I havenotlived my whole life on this island,” Noah replied as equably as he could. Her seeming judgment both annoyed and hurt him, which was stupid, because he shouldn’t care and also, he supposed she had a point. He probably should have remembered who Becca Babcock was, even if he’d barely spoken to herever, and not at all in the last twenty years. “And in fact, before eighteen months ago,” he continued a little peevishly, “I hadn’t been here in twenty years. And you might recall I’m trying to develop myself as a hermit. So.”

Grace folded her arms a little more tightly. “Becca Babcock’s family,” she informed him curtly, “has been fishing from this island for two hundred years.”

“Twohundred?” he repeated, pretending to sound shocked. He knew that, and he knew the Babcocks, and he remembered who Becca wasnow, but some contrary part of him refused to trip over himself to explain how it had been a momentary brain blip, not an innate moral failing that had made him forget Becca’s name. Grace had so clearly already judged him. “Wow,” he drawled. “That’s very impressive.”

Her eyes flashed. “Indeed.”

Noah sighed, his annoyance leaving him in a gust. “I know who Becca is, Grace. Her mother Margaret practically has antennae sprouting from her head for any gossip. Her dad died in a fishing accident right before we closed up this place. She has two brothers who were older than we were, and they left the island right out of high school. I didn’t place her name because I haven’t seen or even thought about her in twenty years, and while you might have preferred for us to have grown up together, and been best friends, and had sleepovers when we were kids…” He let that thought trail off before he joked, a little snarkily, “I was best man at her wedding, did I forget to tell you?” She frowned, and he found he didn’t care if he’d sounded snarky. If Grace was mad aboutthis, something he’d never even thought about, she certainly couldn’t handle any of hisactualstuff. Not, of course, that he even wanted to spill it, but still. This felt like a bad sign.

Grace stared at him for another simmering moment, like she was trying to decide whether to bereallymad, and then she deflated. “Sorry. I’m out of line, assuming all kinds of stuff. And truthfully, I don’t know why I care so much.” She shook her head slowly, her gaze turning distant. “My ex-husband never learned the name of our housekeeper. Or our building’s doorman.” She fell silent, like what she’d said should make sense, and it sort of did.

“I remind you of him?” he guessed. That seemed like averybad sign.

“No, you don’t, actually,” Grace replied. “But I keep trying to draw comparisons, and that’s on me.”

He opened the fridge again, hoping there would be something else in there besides a couple of beers and a wizened wedge of cheddar. Isaiahreallyneeded to go shopping. Or maybe he did. “If it helps, I can at least place Becca Babcock,” he said as he stared into the empty depths of the fridge. “Curly dark hair, bright green eyes?”

“Yes.” She sounded far too gratified by this admission.

He sighed and closed the door again. “I’ll be honest, when Jem and I were kids, we didn’t socialize much with the island kids, and that was as much about them as it was us. We were just really… different.” And Jem had been so shy, and there had always been visitors to entertain. As for the islander kids… there had been Becca Babcock and two brothers who had been pretty sullen, he recalled, and another family with a boy around his age who had always watched them, wide-eyed, from afar. He had a vague recollection of asking him to make up a fourth for tennis, and the boy had simply shaken his head. He supposed he couldn’t blame him, not really. But they certainly hadn’t all beenfriends.

“I’m sorry,” Grace said suddenly. “I’m being bitchy and judgmental.” She shook her head, her eyes darkening to the color of a storm cloud heavy with rain. “I don’t know anything about the history here, or why things were the way they were.” She paused. “I know there was a boating accident and a girl died…”

Noah tensed. He’d never talked to her about that, but he supposed Becca must have said something. “Yes,” he said, a little shortly. “It was really sad.”

“What… happened?”

He pressed his lips together. “No one knows exactly. She couldn’t really sail, and she took a boat out on her own. Had an accident and hit her head. It was terrible… her family wanted to press charges or something,” he told Grace, “and my parents were devastated by that as well as the girl’s death—she was my mother’s goddaughter, she and her mother were friends from their debutante days. I hadn’t known her well, but… anyway.” He shook his head. “It got kind of ugly, and then my parents decided to close up this place, and we never came back again. My mother lost touch with her friend. No one ever spoke about it.”

“That all sounds so sad,” Grace said quietly. “One tragedy after another. And then this place forgotten for so long… but Isaiah stayed?”

“Yes, he’s an islander born and bred. He got a scholarship to a boarding school in Massachusetts when he was young and then went to college and ended up working for my family, traveling around the world with us, but I think his heart was always here. When my parents realized they needed someone to manage the property, he offered to stay.”