Free The Wishing Tide by Barbara Davis Page A

twenty-seven-year-old yoga instructor had been both exhausting and mind-numbing, a manic whirl of health lectures and vegan cooking classes, all ironically lubricated with far too much chardonnay. He should have known better. In fact, he had. But she’d been someone—something—to fill the void, to distract him from the growing realization that the life he was living belonged to someone else, someone who wasn’t even real.
    Drifting back to the shelves, he slid the weathered volume of
Great Expectations
free and ran his palm over the front cover, cool and vaguely waxy. It had been beautiful once, moss green leather, embossed lettering, richly marbled endpapers. Now the lettering was gone, the leather badly scarred after God only knew how many readings. Not surprising, though. Boys didn’t take care of their own things, let alone books that belonged to someone else.
    He opened the volume tentatively, savoring the musty scent of old book: dust and ink and slowly decaying paper. After coffee, it was his favorite scent in the world. Flipping to chapter twenty-seven, he scanned the pages until he found the passage he sought. It was one he knew by heart.
    In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.
    Yes, he’d been abrupt with his hostess, and less than truthful about the reason he disliked
Great Expectations
, but what was he supposed to do? Spill his guts to a virtual stranger? Explain that as a boy the story had torn him apart, giving him nightmares that left him drenched and weeping in his narrow bed? That even now thoughts of the tragic Miss Havisham filled him with revulsion? Lane would never understand. How could she? His hostess saw
Great Expectations
as a literary classic. He would always see it as something else.

Chapter 11
    Lane
    L ane stepped out onto the deck and sucked in a lungful of air. It was breezy and cold, even for November, but she didn’t care. Today would be her first walk since Penny had blown through, and after her recent conversations with Michael she needed to walk off a little steam, though she wasn’t as angry with him as she was with herself. It was becoming clear that letting him stay had been a mistake. She had allowed a silly light in an empty house to get under her skin, and now she was stuck with an unwanted guest who was growing more irritating by the minute.
    Sure, he was brilliant and good-looking, and probably very well-heeled, but he was also moody and opinionated—and secretive. No, not secretive exactly, but definitely reclusive, and in a mysterious and brooding way she didn’t have time for. She couldn’t deny that he’d been a big help, boarding up the shed window and doing his best to flatten out the mangled roof, tacking it down to prevent further damage until Sam could get by to replace it. He’d even cut up the fallen tree in the driveway with a rusty handsaw he found in the shed and hauled it all out to the street.
    She had to admit he’d surprised her. In his professor clothes he didn’t look as if he’d know which end of a nail was pointy, let alonepossess the talent to perform all the tasks he had. Lucky for her he was handy, since it didn’t look as though Sam was going to be able to get by for several weeks. The Cloister might have sustained only minor damage, but houses farther up the beach, many of them little more than cottages, had taken a much harder hit. Several had been reported a total loss.
    Zipping her jacket higher, she headed for the narrow boardwalk, prepared to set out, when she spotted the old woman moving purposefully past the back gate toward her customary spot on the dunes. The sight sent something like relief tingling through Lane’s limbs. She was safe. Even more surprising, she was back.
    Where had she come from? Did she have family on Starry Point? It seemed unlikely. Based on the white hair and stooped shoulders, she had to be