“Good heavens,” she murmured. Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined it was that old. Everyone in Virginia assumed it was built shortly before 1705 when the Tuckers first bought the place. Her mysterious letter said that Helga sailed for Virginia in 1672, and by then the Roost had been here for eleven years. A world of possibilities had just opened up.
“Oh, Brandon, no wonder I haven’t been able to find much on who built the Roost. I was looking in the wrong decade.”
This finding was a lifeline. It would take some unconventional methods to research what went on in this area in the 1660s because most of the records had been destroyed in the 1698 fire, but now at least she knew where to focus her search.
Chapter Twelve
Alice longed to bury her head in the sand to hide from the biggest humiliation of her life, but she needed to warn her parents of the scandal before they heard it from anyone else.
Maude and Grayson Chadwick were supposed to be retired, but their illustrious lives remained packed with prestigious engagements and commitments, leaving them no time for unscheduled phone calls—even from their own children. Alice sent a text message requesting an appointment at their earliest convenience. Her mother replied they would clear space in their calendar at two o’clock.
Alice sighed at the brief reprieve, as if the Sword of Damocles had been lifted from her neck. Her parents were demanding,accomplished, and hyper-competitive. Her father had been the secretary of state for two presidents, and now gave high-priced lectures at symposia around the world. Her mother was a retired economics professor but had spent the past year teaching at Harvard. Each of them had reached the pinnacle of their respective careers, and demanded their children strive for the same.
Growing up, Alice and her brothers had followed her father’s itinerate career in the foreign service all over the world, which meant she never went to a traditional school but got to study literature with scholars at Oxford. She spent a semester in Paris to learn French and studied art at the Vatican Museum. Ballerinas from the Bolshoi ballet taught her dance.
In the summers Alice returned to the family estate on the Potomac River, where her father insisted his children develop their physical stamina. Each morning he loaded Alice and her brothers into the motorboat and drove them a mile upstream, then dropped them into the river and required they swim home.
She hated that daily swim. She was the only girl and her brothers always left her far behind while Grayson punted along in the motorboat beside her, barking orders at her to swim faster. After their morning swim, the rest of her days were filled with sailing and tennis classes. Then lessons in French and German. To this day, her parents insisted on speaking a foreign language at dinner so their skills didn’t fall into disuse.
Alice used to dream about having a mother like Marmee fromLittle Women, whose gentle voice could ease any heartache, or Caroline Ingalls, who could soothe a child’s fevered brow with the touch of her soft, cool hand. Alice would gladly live in a little house on the prairie if she could have a mother to whom she could run with every small victory or disappointment.
But no. Her mother was Maude Chadwick, who co-authored a paper on the economic benefits of parental discipline.
At one minute before two o’clock, Alice initiated a face-to-face call with her parents. It was summer, so they were both back at the River House, working from the spacious home library. Her thumbs trembled as she entered the numbers on her cell phone, then began pacing as the connection was made.
Her call was accepted, and her father’s face took up most of the screen on the other end of the FaceTime call. With his chiseled features and piercing eyes that could freeze a room with a single glance, he looked like a scarier version of Charlton Heston. Her mother was in the background, still typing on a laptop.
“Alice, what do you need?” her father asked. No greeting. No warm and cuddly inquiry about how her life was going.
“Hey, Dad. Mom, those pearls look amazing.”
Maude looked up from her laptop to touch her necklace. “They belonged to your grandmother. What do you need, Alice?”
She swallowed hard and dove in. “Did Adam ever tell you about why he visited me in London back in April?”
“No,” Grayson said. “I didn’t realize he’d been gone.”
“So you don’t know anything about the bit of trouble I had on theEmmaset?”
Grayson frowned. “Get to the point, Alice.”
Her tongue froze and mortification crept up her spine, freezing her carefully-thought-out ways of softening the blow … but really, was there any way to put a good spin on this? Maude and Grayson would weather the blow.
“Just Google my name,” she finally said. By now, the story had leaked beyond social media to pollute websites all over the world. Clicking from her mother’s laptop sounded like a hail of distant machine-gun fire. Her father rotated in his chair to look over Maude’s shoulder. There was no change in his expression as he leaned forward to scrutinize the screen, but Maude’s face iced over like she’d experienced a blast from Antarctica.
Grayson flicked his eyes back to Alice. “Explain yourself.”
He didn’t sound angry, or supportive, or curious. His poker-faced command had all the passion of a robot.
Alice drew a shuddering breath and told him everything: her misjudgment of Sebastian, the restraining order, and how Adam dropped everything when he flew to London and helped her navigate the avalanche of legal charges.
“Adam was so helpful,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done without him.”
“Grow a spine, Buttercup,” her father growled. “You don’t need a man to defend yourself. And you’re better off without that Sebastian cad. Your misguided pursuit of that man has done nothing but knock you off course for over a year.”
She sighed. “Is it so wrong to fall in love? To want a partner in life?”
“Alice,” her mother reproached, “we didn’t raise you to mope and lunge for a fainting couch over a broken heart. What is this going to do to your tenure case?”
