Free The Lake House by Kate Morton Page A

Airways bag Sadie’s father had brought back from his business trip to Frankfurt the year before. “That’s everything then?”
    Sadie tightened her grip on the bag’s handles and dragged it across the concrete until it touched her thigh.
    â€œA light traveller. Mr Gardiner will be impressed.” The woman swatted at a fly by the end of her nose and Sadie thought of Peter Rabbit. Of all the things to enter her head as she left home for good, a nursery rhyme character. It would have been funny except that right then Sadie couldn’t imagine anything ever being funny again.
    She hadn’t wanted to do anything as wet as turning back to look at the house she’d lived in all her life, but as Mr Gardiner steered the great vehicle away from the kerb, her faithless gaze flickered sideways. There was no one home and there was nothing to see that hadn’t been seen a thousand times before. At the window next door, a sheer curtain twitched and then fell, an official signal that the brief rupture of Sadie’s exit had ended and the sameness of suburban life was free to continue its flow. Mr Gardiner’s car turned at the end of the street and they started west towards London, and Sadie’s own fresh start at the home of the grandparents she hardly knew, who’d agreed to take her in when she had nowhere else to go.
    * * *
    A number of soft thuds came from overhead and Sadie let go of the memory, blinking herself back into the dimly lit, whitewashed bedroom with its sloping ceiling and the dormer window overlooking the vast, dark ocean. A single picture was hanging on the wall, the same framed print Ruth had put above Sadie’s bed in London, of a storm-whipped sea and an enormous wave threatening to engulf three tiny fishing boats. “We bought it on our honeymoon,” she’d told Sadie one night. “I loved it at once, the tension of that great wave caught on the verge of its inevitable collapse. The brave, experienced fishermen, heads bowed, holding on for dear life.” Sadie had glimpsed the thread of advice; Ruth hadn’t needed to spell it out.
    Another thud. Bertie was in the attic again.
    Sadie had discerned a pattern in the week she’d been staying at Seaview Cottage. While her grandfather’s days were busy, filled with his new life and friends, his garden and endless preparations for the upcoming festival, nights were a different story. Sometime after dinner each evening, Bertie would take himself up the rickety ladder under the guise of searching for a particular saucepan/whisk/cookbook he suddenly needed. There’d be an initial series of bumps as he rummaged about in the moving boxes, and then the spaces between would lengthen and the sweet, cloying smell of pipe smoke would drift down through the gaps in the floorboards.
    She knew what he was really doing. Some of Ruth’s clothing he’d already given to Oxfam, but there was still a large number of boxes full of things he couldn’t bear to part with. They were the collections of a lifetime and he their curator. “They’ll keep for another day,” he’d said quickly when Sadie offered to help him sort through them. And then, as if regretting the sharpish tone, “They’re doing no harm. I like to think there’s so much of her here, under this roof.”
    It had been a surprise when her grandfather told her he’d sold up and was moving to Cornwall. He and Ruth had lived in the one home all their married life, a home Sadie had loved, that had been a haven for her. She had presumed he’d stay forever, loath to leave the place where happy memories moved like old projector images in the dusty corners. Then again, Sadie had never loved another person with the sort of devotion shared by Bertie and Ruth, so what would she know. It turned out the move was something they’d talked about doing together for years. A customer had put the idea in Bertie’s