Chapter 21: Read Every Page

The farmhouse was exactly where I had left it, at the end of a dirt road in the Vermont hills.

The porch needed paint.

The apple tree still leaned over the roof, and the garden gate still stuck in the wet.

Nathaniel parked the rental car behind a pickup truck and turned off the engine.

"You haven't opened your door," he said.

"I sold it in a week," I said. "To cover payroll. I signed the papers in a lawyer's office and I never drove back."

"Do you want me to wait here?"

"No. Come."

An old man was waiting on the porch.

He was seventy at least, in a flannel coat and rubber boots, with a weathered face and dirt under his nails.

He did not smile.

"Ms. Winslow," he said.

"Yes."

"You look like her," he said. "Around the mouth."

I had to look at the porch boards for a second.

"You wanted to meet me," I said.

"I wanted to see if you'd come yourself. Lawyers send other people." He glanced at Nathaniel. "Who's this?"

"Nathaniel Rhodes."

"The man who owns a hundred perfume companies?"

"Eleven," Nathaniel said. "And I drove."

The old man grunted, which was the nearest thing to approval I got.

"Come on, then."

He led us around the house to the back.

The rose garden was there.

I had expected weeds.

Instead there were forty-one bushes in neat rows, cut back for the cold, with the last pink blooms of the year still hanging on a few of them.

Tea roses.

My grandmother's, grown from her cuttings, kept alive by a stranger for seven years.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Signed the Divorce Without Reading Page Nine from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.