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  Melanie was quiet for a few seconds. “Well, that sucks, but it’s hardly a deal breaker, right? I’m sure a lot of old lake homes have atrocious basements and water damage. But if a buyer loved the house, they could just fix that before moving in, right? No big deal.”

  Kelsey nodded, reassured that she and her sister had shared the same faulty line of reasoning. “Not quite, I guess. According to Charlene, most lakefront-property buyers are going to be really put off by that amount of work, no matter how much they adore the place. Or they’ll write us a really lowball offer, factoring in the costs. Either way, she says it would never pass inspection because it’s a health risk. So we’d probably be ordered to do the repairs, regardless.”

  Again, Melanie was quiet, and Kelsey thought she could hear her sister’s husband, Ben, talking in the background. “I’m on the phone,” Melanie hissed, her hand not quite blocking out the speaker. “Yes. My sister. No.” She sounded short-tempered and cross, which was not how Kelsey was used to hearing lovebirds Melanie and Ben speak to one another. Melanie uncovered the mouthpiece. “So how much are the repairs?”

  “Charlene wasn’t sure. She recommended a guy who could come out and do an estimate for us. But she implied it would be a lot of money.”

  At another long pause, a breathy one, Kelsey wondered if her older sister was crying. But that was a stupid thought. Crying about mold and a basement renovation? Their dad had called her Melanie the General, joking that at the first sign of the apocalypse, he wanted his older daughter in his camp.

  “If we’re smart about this sale, we can recoup our initial investment, I’m sure,” Melanie said without a hint of breathiness or tears, and Kelsey felt reassured. The problem of the basement had seemed so formidable, so out of her depth, that transferring it to Melanie’s shoulders made Kelsey instantly feel ten pounds lighter. “We just need to factor in Charlene’s commission and the other fees and hope we get our asking price. So have you called Charlene’s guy? When can he come out?”

  Kelsey stood up from the couch and stretched her lower back. “I haven’t called him yet,” she admitted.

  “You could probably still catch him tonight. These contractor types tend to answer their cell phones at all hours. Maybe he still has an opening for tomorrow.”

  “I work tomorrow, Melanie.”

  “All day?”

  “All day.” Sometimes Kelsey got the sense that her sister thought her job was no more than a glorified dog-walker position for a couple of hours a day, or whenever she felt like it, perhaps.

  “Well, Saturday, then.”

  “I work Saturday too.”

  “But you can still pick me up from the airport, right? My flight’s supposed to land at three forty-five.”

  “Yes, of course.” Kelsey tried to sound indignant, but she had completely forgotten Melanie’s flight was coming in Saturday afternoon. She would have to ask to leave a few hours early again and maybe see if Josh could cover for her. If she kept that up, Beth was bound to get annoyed. The approaching summer, with families going away on vacation, was their busiest time of year, and everyone needed to pitch in. “Delta, right?”

  “American Airlines, actually,” Melanie corrected her. “They were the only ones with a direct flight from Cleveland. Well, I would call him, anyway, and see if you can set something up for Monday. I’ll meet him then. We need to get the ball rolling here. It’s almost the end of May already, and the sooner we can get this house on the market, the better. I doubt a lot of buyers are looking for a lake house in the fall.”

  “Fine. I’ll call him.” Kelsey hated how defensive she sounded. She had gone out of her way to meet with the realtor, and it still wasn’t enough for Melanie. She made Kelsey feel like a juvenile delinquent shirking her duties or a track runner who could never quite gain the lead.

  “Great. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She wanted to get off the phone so she could order a pizza or some other takeout for dinner. Her stomach was audibly growling. Sprocket cocked his head at the sound. Then she’d have to try to get ahold of that stupid mold mitigation guy. Kelsey didn’t even know what she was supposed to say to him. She didn’t want to come across like a dumb blonde who didn’t know the first thing about fixing the aftermath of a basement flood—even though she was a blonde who didn’t know the first thing about fixing the aftermath of a basement flood.

  “You know I’m really looking forward to seeing you,” Melanie said. “Spending some quality time together.” Her voice had taken on that hopeful, maternal quality that Kelsey sometimes found comforting and sweet and other times downright patronizing.

  “Me too,” she lied, bending down to rest her forehead against the back of the sofa. Her sister was still in a different time zone, and Kelsey already had a headache.

  Chapter Two

  Though Melanie had flown over three hundred miles with the express purpose of escaping what she had lost and what she now knew she would never have, it already seemed like her plan had been in vain. On the plane, a young mother with a six-month-old and a toddler had been seated behind her, and when Melanie had asked to be moved, the stewardess looked at her like she was a monster. But the elderly woman she’d been situated next to instead had wanted nothing more than to pass the hour-long flight by showing Melanie photos of her three beautiful grandkids, ages five, two and a half, and eight months.

  And even while waiting in arrivals for Kelsey—who was late, as Melanie had known she would be—she found herself sitting across from a pregnant woman. The woman wore a stretchy orange dress pulled so taut across her hugely round belly that it resembled a ripe peach. She had to be at least thirty-three or thirty-four weeks along, close to that turning point when doctors recommended no longer using air travel. Melanie couldn’t help sneaking peeks at her even though every glimpse felt like a stab to her chest and belly. When the woman’s husband approached with their luggage, an adoring grin on his face, Melanie forced herself to look away—it simply hurt too much.

  She trained her eyes on her issue of Scientific American, willing herself to focus. She’d optimistically brought it along with several scholarly journals she’d been meaning to catch up on. When Ben had seen her packing them, he’d laughed as he browsed through the stack. “Want me to pick up People and Us Weekly before you go?” On their honeymoon, he’d been delighted to discover her habit of “using decoy magazines,” as he called it. While lying on the beaches of Grenada, he’d read paperback thrillers, and she’d perused celebrity magazines tucked artfully inside the pages of The Journal of Biology. She wished she’d said yes and allowed him to buy her the silly magazines, anything to hold her interest and distract her from the thought of Ben and his sadness, his hurt looks, and his confusion about her desire to go away on her own for a few weeks.

  The happy parents-to-be walked away, and suddenly it seemed easier to breathe. Melanie rolled her neck back and forth a few times then returned Scientific American to her bag. She glanced at her cell phone—still no text updates from Kelsey even though it was four o’clock—and pulled out Midwest Living instead. It was the issue her friend Rose had given her a couple of weeks ago with a particular page dog-eared—“This is the lake you grew up on, right?” The humble glossy magazine had somehow reached her in the blackness of her despair.

  She flipped to the dog-eared page. Lake Indigo, Wisconsin: Small-Town Charm Combined with Dazzling Beauty, the heading read. The accompanying photo didn’t do the lake justice. It was taken from the south end, where the water was notoriously deeper and rockier and didn’t reflect the sky as well. Still, the image conjured a flood of memories, some as dazzling as the magazine promised, some as dark as the south end of the lake, but all of them having to do with her mom, who had passed away four years ago. Melanie missed her. Her mom had been more of a practical, private person than a touchy-feely type, but she had always supported Melanie, and she had always seemed to know just what to say. What now, Mom? Melanie sometimes wanted to ask her. What do
you have to say about all of this?

  Their house on Lake Indigo had been standing empty since Ned and Lucinda Holloway had decided not to renew their lease last January. Apparently, the two-story Victorian and Wisconsin winters were getting to be too much for them in their old age, and they wanted to retire closer to their kids and grandkids in North Carolina. Melanie’s dad, who was a lawyer, living in Arizona with his second wife and stepchildren, had told her he hadn’t been able to find a new tenant for the place, living so far away, and he suspected it would need some maintenance and a local landlord if they wanted to continue renting it. He had advised that selling might be the more practical thing to do, but he wouldn’t have time to make the trip to Wisconsin for quite a while because of his busy law practice. Besides, the decision was up to Melanie and Kelsey, he reasoned, since the lake house was part of their inheritance.

  Melanie had realized that it was the perfect project for her when Rose gave her that fateful issue of Midwest Living. It was something that would temporarily take her away from Ohio and the dreary prospect of facing the long summer ahead with no teaching at Kinsley College to preoccupy her thoughts. It would also grant her a reprieve from too-considerate Ben and his offers of romantic weekend getaways and his constant stream of unhelpful suggestions: culinary classes, dinner parties with friends, bike trips, and learning to reupholster chairs. He had recently taken up training for the Philadelphia Marathon with a zeal she once would have mocked but now found downright heartbreaking.

  Preparing the lake house for the market was also something challenging that she could throw herself into, really drawing on her strong organization and financial skills. It was something that could be broken down into easily completed steps and, best of all, a concrete end goal that she felt sure, unlike that other hopeless goal of her heart, she could actually accomplish. Though it would be bittersweet to sell the house, which had been in the Montclare family for almost a century, Melanie couldn’t help feeling like it would set her mom free, in a way. It would give both her and Kelsey closure that, years later, Melanie still hadn’t been able to achieve.

  Of course, seeing her little sister, working side by side on the house together, and strengthening their bond was an added bonus. Melanie hadn’t seen Kelsey since last Christmas, when they’d flown to Tucson to celebrate with their dad and his new family. But Melanie had been so obsessed with ovulation tests at the time that she hadn’t spent much of the week trimming the tree or baking cookies with Kelsey and their significantly younger stepsiblings. They spoke on the phone about once a month, but Kelsey was often the one to end the call, usually because of some dog-related excuse. Sometimes Melanie got the feeling her sister found her tedious.

  Her cell phone chirped and lit up with a new text message.

  Just getting off highway. Be there in five.

  Arrivals, American Airlines, Melanie typed back. I’ll meet you outside. By the way, you really shouldn’t be texting and driving.

  She slipped her magazine and cell phone back into her carry-on bag and hoisted it over her shoulder. After popping up the handle on her suitcase, she started rolling it toward the exit. As promised, five minutes later—though it was a full thirty minutes later than the time Melanie had told Kelsey to pick her up, and truly forty minutes later since Melanie’s flight had landed early, though Melanie wouldn’t hold her accountable for that—Kelsey’s light-blue little beater of a car pulled up in front of the loading area.

  Kelsey hopped out of the front seat, slammed the door, and dashed around the car to embrace Melanie. They were the same exact height, five foot five, so Melanie’s face was buried in Kelsey’s wild blond mane, which smelled faintly of oatmeal. It would be easy to hate a girl for that kind of hair, which was long, wavy, and naturally the color of ash wood—mermaid hair, Melanie had always thought of it as—if Kelsey had been the least bit vain about it. But as it was, she hardly bothered to run a brush through it or have it trimmed regularly, and she treated it as though it were a friendly but often troublesome pet that couldn’t be tamed instead of the spectacular, head-turning hair it truly was.

  “Welcome home,” Kelsey said. “Oh crap! I hope I didn’t just lock my keys in the car with it running.” She stepped backward out of their hug and widened her eyes in panic.

  “Don’t worry. The windows are rolled down,” Melanie pointed out. “Should I put my bags in the trunk?”

  “We’d better. The back seat is Sprocket’s territory, and I’m sorry to say I haven’t had a chance to vacuum it out in a while.” She took the suitcase from Melanie and wheeled it over to the car. “Standard schnauzers aren’t supposed to shed much, but Sprocket sheds like a fiend, so I guess it’s the ‘other’ in his bloodline that makes him lose so much of his fur year-round. I try to clip him every other month, but he’s so scared of the clippers that it just hardly seems worth it sometimes...” She drifted off suddenly then looked up with a bright smile. “Hey. How was your flight?”

  “It was fine,” Melanie said, settling into the passenger seat. The gray fabric roof lining was drooping down, brushing the crown of her head and making her feel a little claustrophobic. She ordered herself not to say anything about it. Doesn’t the lining need to be intact to properly house all the side and curtain airbags? But she doubted the old car had airbags in the steering wheel and dashboard, much less side and curtain airbags. She was lucky it had functional seat belts. She held her arm protectively against her abdomen for a second before remembering there was no longer anything there to protect.

  “It was nothing like that miserable ten-hour, two-stop flight to Tucson,” she abruptly added. “Maybe we can persuade Dad to let you host Christmas this year. Do you think he and Laila would come? It’s kind of a nice midpoint between Arizona and Ohio, and I don’t know about you, but to me, Christmas just isn’t Christmas without the snow.”

  “Ummm...” Kelsey struggled to shift the car into gear. She jerked back into the flow of traffic without signaling or even looking over her shoulder. “My apartment is kind of small to host five people. Seven with you and Ben.”

  “I’m sure they’d insist on staying in a hotel. Something to think about, anyway.” Melanie watched the airport getting smaller in the distance, the planes taking off and landing, all the cars driving away to their separate, chosen destinations. “How far is it to the lake house from here?”

  “Two hours, at least. But it’s only an hour to my place in Bartlett.”

  Melanie gave her a puzzled look. “But we’re going to the lake house, right? I’m dying to see it after all these years. And I really want to check out the basement situation and maybe get started cleaning and sorting through stuff right away.”

  “Melanie...” Kelsey said, her voice strained. “It’s almost four thirty already”—Believe me, I know, Melanie thought—“and by the time we get out to Lake Indigo, it will be close to six thirty, and we won’t be able to stay for very long, anyway, because I’ll need to get home to feed and walk Sprocket. Why don’t we just go there tomorrow? I have the whole day off, and we can leave bright and early. I promise. That way, tonight we can just grab some dinner and catch up, and you can just relax.”

  Relaxing was the absolute last thing she wanted to do. If Ben or her doctor told her to “just relax” one more time, she thought she might scream. She wanted to dig into the soil and plant purple-and-white annuals like her mom had shown her. She wanted to paint a room or dust baseboards or just do something, anything useful toward reaching her goal.

  “Oh, I think you misunderstood,” she said. “While I’m here, I really want to stay at the lake house. Like the old days.”

  Kelsey nodded. “That’s fine, but just not for tonight. Believe me—everything is covered by at least an inch of dust, there’s no food, and God knows what shape the plumbing is in after the basement problems. Besides, you won’t have a car, so if you need to go somewhere for any reason, you’ll be stranded until I come back.”

  “I’ll be okay.” Melanie forc
ed herself to chuckle. “I’ve gone camping hundreds of times. How different can it be? And if I need to go to town to pick anything up, I can just walk or row there like we did as kids.”

  Kelsey turned to gape at her. Her blue eyes were spaced a little too far apart, and her nose was a little too beaky, like their father’s, which tempered the effect of those gorgeous locks, but still, Melanie thought her little sister was far prettier than she knew—even in her standard uniform of jeans and a T-shirt and with a light dusting of dog hair all over her. She had a straightforwardness about her, a kind of purity.

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Kelsey said. “Not until we’re sure everything’s totally livable and safe. There’s not even good cell phone reception out there if you had an emergency. What would Ben think about it?”

  “Whoa. You’re starting to sound like me,” Melanie teased. She was touched by her sister’s concern, but the more reasons Kelsey listed off as to why she shouldn’t stay in Lake Indigo that night, the more determined Melanie became. She couldn’t explain it, but she felt like the house was calling to her, drawing her into the past and the years when her family had been a solid four-person unit instead of the limping creature it had become. Standing in the lake house’s foyer felt like a physical craving at that point. “Tomorrow, you can help me pick up a rental car, okay? Then I won’t be such a stranded damsel in distress.”

  Kelsey rolled up the windows and turned on the windshield wipers as a light drizzle started to fall. “Are you sure you don’t want to just spend the night with me? I made up the guest bed and everything. And you’ve never even met Sprocket.”

  “Aw, thanks, Kels-Bels. I would love that. But maybe next weekend once we’ve made some progress on the house? You know me. I’m just too anxious to enjoy myself until I’ve at least gotten my feet wet.” She ducked her head under the feathery weight of the saggy ceiling lining and thought, Almost there now.