Free Home Sweet Home by Bella Riley Page B

her again now.
    And lord knew, after losing the previous day to Lake Yarns, she had a ton of work to tackle today. Especially, she thought with a frown as she toweled off, given Nate’s enormous objections to her project.
    Andi was reaching for a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt when she realized that dressing down in the middle of a workday was exactly what she shouldn’t do. She wasn’t here for a vacation—she was here on a business trip.
    She selected a navy-blue dress from her garment bag, and by the time she had her earrings in, her hair done, and heels on, Andi felt a little better, like she was wearing the proper armor.
    Downstairs the kitchen was quiet, and she guessed that her mother was already at Lake Yarns, opening it up for the day. As always, Andi was drawn to the leather chair by the fireplace where her father used to read his stacks of newspapers. She ran her hand over the high back remembering how, when she was a little girl and he would be gone for weeks at a time in Washington, D.C., she used to curl up in his chair with a blanket and fall asleep because it was the closest thing to being in his arms. And when he was there, she’d spent hours sitting beside his chair while he was on the phone, wanting to be with him but knowing she had to be quiet and not disturb his work.
    Uncomfortable with the memory, she headed for the screened porch at the front of the house. As she opened a door, the high-pitched squeak that echoed into the front hall made Andi suddenly realize just how lonely it must be for her mother to live in the large house by herself.
    Still despite its huge scope—the whitewashed, two-story home was one of the oldest and biggest in town—Carol was good at making each room homey. The screened porch with its whitewashed wooden planks and the bright reds and yellows and blues on the furniture’s upholstery was a bright retreat even on rainy days. And of course, there was the basket of knitting in the corner by the couch and a similar basket in every room. Knitters, she knew from a childhood of being surrounded by them, loved to start projects but loved finishing them a whole lot less. Thus, the piles of works in progress near every comfortable chair in every room.
    Every time she came home for a visit, Andi was struck by how different her childhood home was from her city loft. Much like her father’s apartment in Washington, D.C., she’d always tended toward minimal color, mostly blacks and whites, whereas this house was stamped with her mother’s eye for design and color. Fabrics that would have been out of control in anyone else’s hands looked just right together the way Carol had arranged them.
    Andi felt simultaneously comforted—and completely out of her element.
    She hadn’t come home for more than a night or two in ten years, but as she turned around to look out at the rising sun sparkling over the blue water, memories rushed over her.
    Waking up to go meet Nate out on the beach to pick blueberries for her mother’s blueberry pancakes. Warm summer nights in front of a bonfire, roasting marshmallows with Nate, digging deep sand tunnels and laughing when adults who walked by in the dark fell into them. Saturday afternoon sailing races in her Sunfish on perfectly still days where she and Nate practically had to paddle their way around the buoys. Sitting out on the end of the dock on Adirondack chairs, watching the sun fall behind the mountains, making up stories about the images they saw in the clouds.
    She’d expected her father’s memory to assault her at every turn. But amazingly, apart from the leather chair in the living room, she saw Nate in the house around her more than she saw her father.
    Nate was the one who she had always gone to after her father left again.
    Nate was the one who had comforted her, soothed her.
    Her heart squeezing, she exited the porch and headed around to the back of the house, across the lawn that led to her grandmother’s cottage