Free The Love Season by Elin Hilderbrand Page A

mysteries revealed. How and when did a woman start resenting her mother-in-law? Right away, like this. Renata crushed the list in her palm. She couldn’t throw it away; it was her only evidence.
    Renata reached for a banana from the fruit bowl, thinking, Replace potassium , but she was so angry, so worried that her wedding might be commandeered by Suzanne Driscoll, that as soon as she picked up the banana she flung it into the cool, quiet atmosphere of the kitchen. It hit a bud vase on the windowsill that held a blossom from the precious hydrangea bushes; the bud vase fell into the porcelain farmer’s sink and shattered.
    “Shit!” Renata said. She retrieved the banana, peeled it savagely, and ate half of it in one bite, surveying the damage. She was tempted to leave it be and suggest later that Mr. Rogers had knocked the vase over, though of course Mr. Rogers was far too graceful a creature for such an accident. If something had broken while Renata was alone in the house, it would be assumed that Renata was responsible. Thus she did the only reasonable thing and cleaned up the mess—the bud vase was in three large shards and myriad slivers. She threw the shards away with the flower—maybe no one would remember it had even been there—and washed the slivers down the disposal. She had covered her tracks; now all she had to do was eat the evidence.
    “Hey.”
    Renata gasped. Her nipples tightened into hard little pellets. Miles sauntered into the kitchen with Mr. Rogers asleep against his chest. “How was the run?”
    “Fine,” Renata said, sounding very defensive to her own ears. “Hot.” She stuffed the rest of the banana into her mouth. “I’mgngupstshwrnw.”
    “Excuse me?” Miles said.
    Renata finished chewing and swallowed. Her father liked to point out that when she was angry or distracted her manners reverted to those of a barnyard animal.
    “I’m going upstairs to shower now,” she said.
    “Okay,” Miles said with a shrug. It was clear he couldn’t care less where she went or what she did.
     
    The guest bathroom’s shower—unlike the dorms at Columbia where Renata had been living all summer while she worked in the admissions office—featured unlimited hot water at a lavish pressure. It was soothing; Renata tried to calm herself. One of the traits she had inherited from her father was a propensity for flying off the handle. Daniel Knox was famous for it. The sister story to the bra-shopping story was the stolen-bike story. When Renata was nine years old, she forgot to lock up her bike in the shed. She and her father lived in Westchester County, in the town of Dobbs Ferry, which was a safe place, relatively speaking. Safer than Bronxville or Riverdale, though burglars and other derelicts did travel up from the city on the train, plus there was the school for troubled kids, and so the rule with the bike was: Lock it in the shed. The one day that Renata forgot, the one day her pink and white no-speed bike with a banana seat, a woven-plastic basket, and tassels on the handlebars was left leaninginnocently against the side of the house, it was stolen. When Daniel Knox discovered this fact the next morning, he sat down on the front steps of their house in his business suit and cried. He bawled. It was the mortifying predecessor to the crying in the department store; this was the first time Renata had seen her father, or any grown man, cry in public. She could picture him still, his hands covering his face, muffling his broken howls, his suit pants hitched up so that Renata could see his dress socks and part of his bare legs above his socks. Her father’s reaction was worse than the stolen bike; she didn’t care about her bike. At that time, because she was younger, or kinder, than she was during the bra-shopping trip, she clambered into her father’s lap and apologized and hugged his neck, trying to console him. He wiped up, of course—it was just a bike, replaceable for less than a hundred