Free Wish I Might by Coleen Murtagh Paratore Page B

good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere.”
    I read for hours, listening to the sounds of guests coming in for the night downstairs, voices talking, laughing, faucets running, toilets flushing.
    There’s a knock on my door.
    Mom and Sam. Stopping to say good night. Sam has his arm around my mother in the doorway, their happy faces lit by the hallway sconce.
    “Love you, Willa,” Mom says.
    “Love you,” Sam says.
    “Love you, too,” I say. “Good night.”
    What if my birthfather, Mother’s first husband, is really still alive? What if that destroys their happiness? Breaks up our perfect family? I think about how they had a miscarriage earlier this summer. I remember howhappy I was to think that maybe, after being an only child my whole life, I might finally have a little sister or brother.
    I write in my journal and mull and worry.
Willa the Warrior,
I remind myself. Tomorrow I will talk to Mother. I owe her that. Surely by now Tina and Ruby have told their parents. This town is so small. Mother deserves to hear such shocking news from me, her daughter, not that blabbermouth pooch-queen Sherry Sivler.
    There, I feel better now. I have a plan. Action, not worry, that’s the key.
    I reopen Steinbeck’s
The Pearl
and dive back in, reading, reading, reading until the Bramblebriar Inn is hushed for the night. Only the crickets still cricketing outside.
    When I reach the last line, I sigh and smile.
    “
And the music of the pearl drifted to a whisper and disappeared.
”
    I close the cover and savor the moment.
    Savoring, savoring … oh, to write a book like that.

CHAPTER 16
The Labyrinth
    Here’s flowers for you;
Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram;
The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun
And with him rises weeping: these are the flowers
Of middle summer….
    — Shakespeare
    When I seek out my mother the next morning, Darryl, who’s managing the front desk today, says she’s over at Bramble United Community with a couple from upstate New York who are having their reception here on Saturday.
    “After that, she’s off-Cape for the afternoon,” Darryl says. “Meeting with a bride-to-be in Boston, I think. She did say she’d be back in time for dinner.”
    Dinner, that reminds me. I need to find Sam and make sure it’s okay that I invited Mum’s nephew, Rob, for dinner.
    Sam is filling bird feeders out by the Labyrinth. The Labyrinth is a walking circle Sam designed when he first took over the estate. You enter between two spruce shrubs and follow a narrow path bordered by perennial flowers and bushes, walking in toward the center, then back out toward the border, circling in and away, in and away, until you reach the stone bench in the middle. If you stay on the path, you can’t get lost. A good metaphor for life, I think.
    Sam’s flowers are full-bloom beautiful in every color of the rainbow: red, yellow, pink, blue, purple, orange, and white. The smell of lavender is everywhere. A fat blue jay lands in one of the birdbaths, splashing water everywhere.
    I tell Sam about Rob.
    “Oh, that’s wonderful,” Sam says. “Of course he’s welcome. Good timing, too. Rosie’s handling the kitchen tonight. It’s my night off. Your mother and I were looking forward to having dinner with you. We’ve all been so busy this summer, we haven’t had much time to really talk.”
    “Talk about what?” I ask.
    “Nothing special,” Sam says.
    When he turns back to pour seeds in another feeder, I see him smile.
    “What, Dad? Tell me.”
    Sam laughs. “Later, Willa. Nothing that can’t wait.”
    After my shift in the kitchen, I head up to my room to check my messages.
    None from JFK, but there’s this chatty little voice mail from a girl named “Lorna” who wants to know, “What’s Joey’s favorite kind of birthday cake?”
    What?
    She’s throwing him a surprise party for his birthday Friday night at the country club their grandparents all