A thermos?
Picking it up, she shook it gently; it seemed empty.
Slowly, she unscrewed the lid, took a tentative breath, and sniffed the interior. Coffee? Maybe. But none was left.
Maddie squinted. Where had it come from? Or, more specifically, who had put it there?
An icy sensation rippled through her. That intuition thing again.
So she did the only thing she knew that she could do: she checked the locks on the doors and closed the windows, then crept down the hall, looked in the closets, and had to take the chance no one was hiding elsewhere. Most likely, she wouldn’t be able to crawl under the beds or into her hobbit house with her cast on. So she burrowed under the bed covers in her mother’s bedroom and hoped she was safe.
She didn’t sleep until dawn.
The next thing Maddie knew, someone was knocking on the door.
Not again, she thought.Go away!
She didn’t want to get up. Her phone informed her it was seven forty-five; whatever the intrusion was, it must be important.
At least she’d survived the night without an uninvited guest. Maybe the thermos had been there all along. Maybe Brandon left it there the other day, and she simply hadn’t noticed.
Hauling herself out of bed, she grabbed a cotton housecoat from her grandmother’s closet and sneezed twice from the dust. Then she lumbered into the hallway, praying it wasn’t Owen again. But as she rounded the corner, she saw that it wasn’t. It was her father. And he was standing in the kitchen.
“Well. I finally found you.”
* * *
“Dad?” she asked as if it could be Stephen Clarke’s long-lost twin or a doppelgänger.
“Maddie?” he asked with a touch of sarcasm.
“What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“But how . . . ?” Had Rafe told him where to find her? Why would he have done that when she’d asked him not to?
“Your former husband stopped by to see me yesterday.”
She closed her eyes. “But how did you get in?”
“Your grandmother always kept a spare key under the flowerpot at the back door in case she got locked out. It was still there.”
“Oh.” For a moment she forgot she was angry with him. He looked older, he looked tired. His hair had thinned over the past years, it was now wispy gray-white. His neck was puckery; he still was thin, and his dimples remained in place on either side of his mouth. They’d always been visible even when he wasn’t happy. Like now.
He set down his overnight bag; apparently, he intended to stay. Which didn’t please her.
She asked if he wanted coffee.
“I’m sorry I lied to you, Dad,” she said while her back was to him as he sat at the table and she fussed in the kitchen, starting the coffee, getting out mugs, and setting one of the blueberry muffins on a plate for her dad.
“I guess the attorney found you after all,” he said. “Sorry, but I opened the letter before I returned it.”
So at least she had one answer: her father hadn’t wanted her to know that her grandmother died a few weeks—not decades—ago. There was so much she could say. So much to ask. But Maddie’s brain was still clogged with sleep, and now her nerves crackled again. “How did you get here?”
“I drove to the Cape yesterday and stayed at a hotel in Woods Hole. I left the car there this morning and walked to the early boat. I took a taxi up here. At least I remembered how to do all that.” It had been a long time since he’d been to the island, too; he’d never said much about his visits before he and her mother had married. As far as Maddie knew, he hadn’t been back since then.
She put the half muffin that she hadn’t yet eaten yesterday on a plate for herself, as if this were an ordinary day, and that next they’d be reading theNew York Times—she on her laptop, he, the print version.
