The minute Max told Marcy about buying Mr. Bartok’s business, the temperature around them seemed to plummet, and she went visibly stiff. He might as well have just told her he’d spent the last fifteen years abandoning kittens in dumpsters. And she was so nervous. She’d been nervous since he’d looked up at her and made eye contact. Why was she so nervous? He was supposed to be the one who felt on edge and uncertain, standing in the presence of such luminosity and perfection as he was. He was supposed to be the one not sure how to answer her questions. But Marcy had evaded every effort he’d made to get caught up with her, had just glided over what sounded like major life experiences as if they were nothing.
Just what exactly was going on with her?
He reminded himself that they’d never exactly been best friends or anything, so he shouldn’t be surprised she hadn’t run up and embraced him and started gushing. As nice as that would have been. But she’d always been nice to him when they were kids, and she’d never seemed nervous around him. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been smiling at him and waving. Then again, he hadn’t heard a word out of her since the day she left Endicott. Not in person, anyway. They’d stayed friends for a while on social media, but in the middle of her sophomore year at Barnard, she’d suddenly closed her accounts on every platform.
Over the years, Max had tried googling her from time to time, to see what she was up to now, but the only hits had been for other Marcy Hanlons or from the years before she left town. An article about Endicott High School’s girls’ JV volleyball team going to the state finals. A photo of her and her family when her father cut the ribbon on a new office building he’d built in New Albany. Her taking fourth place in some riding competition in Indianapolis when she was fourteen. There had been nothing about her as an adult.
Which was weird, he couldn’t help thinking now. Pretty much everybody landed somewhere on the internet in some capacity, no matter who they were. And the Hanlons had always been such a high-profile family when they’d lived here. Why wouldn’t the same be true of them wherever they went afterward? Fifteen years ago, that would have been San Francisco, where, sure, they would have been much smaller fish in a much bigger pond. They still wouldn’t have been financial slouches. Their lifestyle should have barely changed. Certainly there should have been some trace of Marcy and her family somewhere since then.
He wanted to ask her if she had time to grab a coffee or something, to catch up on old times, but she suddenly took a step to her right and gestured toward the bookstore exit.
“It’s been great seeing you, Max,” she said a little breathlessly, “but I really need to bounce. I have to, um...” She paused long enough to let him know that whatever she said next would almost certainly be untrue.
Sure enough, she hurried on. “I have to, ah... I have an appointment with, um, the historical society. Yeah, that’s it. To talk about the house.”
Right. The massive Hanlon estate that had sat on the hill outside of town with a For Sale sign for years after the family moved away. No one in town had been in the market for such a gargantuan spread. No one in town could have afforded it, other than the Hanlons. And what reason was there for anyone that wealthy to move to Endicott? The only reason the Hanlons had been there was because they’d been there for generations.
But because of the house’s historical significance—it had been standing for nearly two centuries—and because it eventually must have become clear to Mr. Hanlon that no one would ever buy it for market value, the Endicott Historical Society had scraped together enough money to buy it for half that amount and turn it into a reasonably successful attraction as a historic home and inn. It was a regular stop for school field trips, both here and in neighboring counties, and it was a popular spot for couples to hold their weddings and receptions, then spend their wedding night, before heading off on their honeymoons.
And, to this day, Max still tended the grounds and gardens. Only now, it truly was a labor of love, because the society gave him carte blanche as to what to plant in exchange for the donation of his time to do it. Max ensured everything growing there was local and would have been around in the days when the house had been built. The garden was a lot less showy now, but it was authentic and still quietly beautiful.
He wondered what Mr. Hanlon would have thought about his former home being such a public place now, full of the wretched refuse touring around, gawking at his study and bedroom. He’d never allowed anyone to cross the threshold unless they came from a very specific background. A background few people in Endicott could claim. Max would bet no person of color had ever been in the place during the old man’s time. Probably not before then, either. Except, of course, for the ones that had been owned by the family once upon a time.
“My parents still try to stay involved with the place,” Marcy continued as she inched away from Max, “even though they don’t own it anymore. I promised my mother I’d check in on everything while I was here.”
Max didn’t doubt that. Of course the Hanlons would want to keep their grip on something that once belonged to them, even if that thing was no longer theirs. What he doubted at the moment was that Marcy really did have an appointment then to do that.
But he didn’t push it. Much. “Maybe we can get together while you’re here,” he said in spite of her withdrawal. “Catch up on old times and everything.”
Which was actually the last thing Max should want to do. Old times between him and Marcy were a soup of both hope and fear, of both interest and confusion, of both good and bad. What he really wanted to do with Marcy was move forward. The way she was acting now, however, that wasn’t looking likely.
“Sure,” she said as she continued to make her way toward the exit. “That’d be fun. I’ll see you around.”
And then, before he could say anything else, Marcy was fairly diving through the door and hurrying past the front window, as if she couldn’t escape him fast enough. It happened so quickly, Max could almost feel the breeze on his face as she fled. And it wasn’t exactly a warm one.
That evening, at his home—a mostly renovated farmhouse a few miles outside of town—Max cleaned up after dinner and went upstairs to his home office. His speckled mixed-breed rescue mutt, Sodo, named after the town where his mother grew up in Ethiopia, loped along behind him. She took her usual spot, lying atop his feet as he sat down at his desk, her mottled gray fur soft against his ankles. He’d intended to work on next month’s schedule for the handful of people who worked for him year-round. Instead, he pulled up his favorite search engine.
It had occurred to him as he spoke with Marcy earlier that, although he’d googled her from time to time over the years, he’d never bothered to look for info about any other members of her family. Mostly because he’d never cared much about any other members of her family. Tonight, though, he was suddenly curious. Maybe learning about the other Hanlons would give him some insight into where Marcy had been over the years. He hovered the cursor over the search box, then began to type her father’s name. Lionel Remington Hanlon...and, what the hell... IV. Not that there could be more than one of them, he was sure. Much to his surprise, though, there wasn’t a single mention of Marcy’s father in any of the hits that came up. Max tried putting the name in quotes.
No results found.
Okay, that was superweird. He tried different variations of the name within quotes. But there was nothing with Marcy’s father anywhere on the internet. Not even a mention of the office building in New Albany that had come up a few years ago when Max searched for Marcy. She had mentioned her parents in the present tense today, so the guy must still be around. And even if he wasn’t, there would have been an obituary somewhere. A pretty lengthy one, at that. Max tried searching for info about Marcy’s mother, LuEllen Hanlon. A handful of hits came up about her being on a fundraising committee for a children’s hospital in San Francisco. But there was nothing more recent than a decade ago.
Maybe the elder Hanlons had retired and dropped off the grid, Max thought, to hide out with their filthy lucre on some secluded island somewhere. So he tried a different tack. He typed in Marcy’s oldest brother’s name and found Remy easily enough. He was running an investment firm in Providence, Rhode Island. Her other brothers popped up immediately, too. Percy was an architect in Miami, and Mads was the executive vice president of a bank in Seattle. None of their professional bios mentioned a word about having any other family members, though. No wives. No kids. No nothing.
Maybe that was just a thing in the big-business community, Max thought. Maybe it was considered unprofessional to mention you had a life outside of your job. Maybe. But digging a little deeper—mostly in the hope of finding some reference to Marcy—Max learned that Mads did indeed have a wife. She was a member of the board of directors at some tony private school. And Percy and his wife had paid more than two million dollars for a painting at some auction, while Remy was involved in competitive yachting with his teenage son. But not a word about any of the brothers in relation to Marcy or their parents. Or each other, for that matter.
Again, superweird. But then, the Hanlons had never seemed like a close-knit bunch. To put it mildly.
He tried searching Marcy again. Nothing. Clearly the only way he was going to be able to find out, in detail, what she’d been doing for the last ten or fifteen years was to ask her in person again. And hope she didn’t go all cool and indifferent, as she had today, and then run off as if he was a stranger she wanted nothing to do with.
Then again, he was pretty much a stranger to her these days. And she was a stranger to him, in spite of the fantasy life he’d built for the two of them when he was a teenager and continued to revisit from time to time to this day. The one where they got married straight out of high school, and he opened his own landscaping business, and she wrote the Great American Novel, the way she’d always said she was going to do someday, and he joined her on her book tours around the world, where they also visited all the best botanical gardens. With their kids. All four of them. Who were totally doted on by their grandparents on both sides of the family.
Hey, he’d said it was a fantasy, all right? No way would Marcy’s parents have wanted anything to do with any offspring that might spring off him, even if they were half-Hanlon. Hell, especially if they were half-Hanlon. All the Hanlons that had come before them would have been spinning in their graves if they knew one of their descendants was anything but Plymouth-Rock white.
Max rose from his desk slowly, so as not to disturb Sodo, who was now snoring softly in a chair near the open window. Then he launched himself into a full-body stretch—he’d been sitting for a lot longer than he realized. When he checked the time on his phone, he was surprised to discover it was approaching midnight. He never stayed up this late. His days at the nursery generally started before dawn and ended at dusk, meaning he’d be lucky to get three or four hours of sleep tonight, especially now that his brain was swimming with questions about the Hanlon family. Or, at least, one member of the Hanlon family. He still didn’t understand why Marcy had been so cool toward him that afternoon. Maybe she’d smiled a time or two, but they hadn’t been like the smiles she used to throw his way. He was surprised how much he had missed Marcy’s smile, even after all these years.
He couldn’t wait to try to rouse one again.
Marcy was having trouble sleeping, despite having been exhausted when she finally fell into bed in her room at the Hanlon House Historic Home and Inn. In spite of her ambivalent feelings about her former home’s fate, she hadn’t been able to resist making a reservation when booking her return to town—though she hadn’t exactly anticipated winding up in the room that used to belong to her brother Percy. And sleeping wasn’t the only thing she was having trouble with. She was also having trouble with dreaming. Because she’d just awoken from one about Max that she would just as soon not have had, thankyouverymuch, mostly involving her efforts to find out more about the tattoo under his shirt sleeve...and then find out even more about other things under his other garments.
She rolled restlessly onto her side and punched up the pillow, trying to focus on the September breeze drifting through the open window. Outside, a great horned owl hooted in a nearby tree, a sound she remembered well from her childhood. Nothing else about the house was familiar, however. Although the historical society had furnished it with period pieces similar to what she recalled from when her family lived here, they were different period pieces. The rooms had been painted paler colors, more appropriate for the time the house had been built, and the rugs on the hardwood floors were cotton American-folk style, not the rich, jewel-toned wool Persians from her memories. The bowling alley and movie theater in the basement had been returned to being the root cellar and coal storage they once were. The tennis courts were gone, and the pool had been filled in and sodded over to make the place more authentic.
When this was Percy’s room, it had been filled with models and LEGO creations, not milk glass and local pottery. There had been posters on the wall for Linkin Park and Muse, not oil paintings of hunt scenes and ornate gold mirrors. Percy would be appalled if she told him. Not that that was going to happen, since none of the Hanlon siblings had spoken a word to each other in more than ten years. That was what happened when the family patriarch, who had ruled them all with an iron fist, dropped such a bomb on them when Marcy was still in college—that he was headed for a seven-year stay in a federal penitentiary for stealing millions of dollars from his clients and business partners. And that virtually every cent he had to his name would be lost because he had to pay them all back.
It was a crime he’d never committed, he assured them, but he had no way to prove his innocence. The reason for that was the documents that would have cleared him had been stored in a portable safe that was stolen from their home in Endicott a few years earlier. Her father had kept their most important belongings in something that could be easily grabbed and taken to the basement with them whenever there was a tornado warning, which happened with some regularity in southern Indiana. What he hadn’t considered was what an easy target it would be for a thief.
Also stored in that safe, he was sorry to tell Marcy, was all the heirloom jewelry that had been passed down to the Hanlon women over generations. To make matters worse, the thief who put them all in this spot was the fifteen-year-old boy they’d entrusted to care for part of their home—Max Travers. They had him on security video roaming around the house one day when he’d snuck in unobserved and uninvited. A few days later, when Marcy’s father went to remove something from the safe, the whole thing was gone.
Clearly, Max had stolen it, he further charged, since no one other than family had been in the house recently. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any video of him actually stealing the safe or carrying it around, which was why they never reported the theft to the police—a reluctance on their part that Marcy still wasn’t sure she understood, since they’d been so certain of Max’s guilt. But it had to be Max, her father concluded. No other explanation made any sense. And now he—and by extension, the rest of the family—would be ruined.
Her brother Remy had done his best to ensure that that last one, at least, didn’t happen, however. He’d been the only one of the children who had enough money to pay a service to scrub every reference of Lionel Remington Hanlon IV from the internet and anywhere else his name might show up. But Remy had done that, she was certain, more for himself than for their father or the family. He shared a name with the elder Hanlon, after all. He didn’t want there to be any reason why someone would think Remy was the perpetrator, even if their father was entirely innocent.
Marcy turned to her other side and punched her pillow again, harder this time. The owl hooted once more, and she tried to focus on the soothing sound instead of the unsettling thoughts tumbling through her brain. Instead, she found herself wondering what her old bedroom looked like now that it was bereft of her Harry Potter Funko Pops and Build-a-Bear plush toys. Nothing about her childhood home was reminiscent of the half of her life she had spent there. Which maybe, in a way, was kind of fitting.
She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Nothing much in Endicott was reminiscent of her childhood, really. Sure, some of the shops on Water Street that she remembered were still there. But Barton’s Bookstore had rearranged its shelves and done away with its music section entirely, and there was a coffee bar at the back that hadn’t been there before. The ice-cream shop next door to it had newer, trendier flavors. The waitresses at the diner wore jeans and Deb’s Downtown Diner T-shirts now instead of the retro waitress livery they used to wear. None of those places was the way she remembered them. None of them was the same.
But she wasn’t the same, either. And neither was Max. Marcy may have come home again, but this wasn’t her home anymore. Nor was Côtes de Provence. Or Manhattan, where she’d lived when she was in college, and where she’d been couch-surfing with what few friends she still had there since leaving France a year ago. And San Francisco seemed so long ago now. But it had never felt like home. She’d been too raw during the time she spent there, still missing the place where she grew up and all the friends and familiarity she’d left behind in Indiana.
She shook her head. Marcella Robillard would be ashamed of Marcy Hanlon preferring small-town Indiana over the thrill of a buzzing metropolis or European countryside. So Marcy told her to please just be quiet and let a girl get some sleep.
Marcy was still a little dream-hungover and haunted by visions of Max when she went downstairs for breakfast in the room her mother had always referred to as “the salon.” Back then, it was a room she’d only seen used when her parents were hosting parties, or on Christmas morning, when the loot from Santa for the four Hanlon children had been enough to satisfy the population of a small sovereign nation. Now it was dotted with tables covered in white linen and filled with strangers enjoying the generous continental breakfast buffet. Her mother would be horrified. But Marcy had to admit the croissants looked delicious.
She filled a plate and was lucky enough to sidle up to a table just as its occupants were leaving. A busboy quickly cleared the used dishes, and after a quick thank-you, Marcy set her phone on the table next to her plate to read the morning headlines. But it was only a moment before a pair of heavy work boots poking out from under faded blue jeans entered her line of vision beneath the table. Presumably, they belonged to someone who expected her to share because it was a four-seater she was hogging to herself. Fine. She’d share the table with a stranger in a room where she’d once had free rein to do whatever she wanted.
When she looked up, however, it wasn’t a stranger who had approached the table. Well, not a literal one. It was Max, who had also filled a plate with pastries and fruit and held a steaming mug of coffee. In addition to the boots and jeans, he was wearing a sage-green T-shirt bearing the logo for Travers Landscaping and Design. It was just light enough in color, and just snug enough in fit, that she could make out luscious bumps of muscle beneath. It was all she could do to keep herself from reaching out to strum her fingers along every one of them.
She suddenly felt overdressed in her sky-blue tunic and striped palazzo pants. Though, admittedly, that wasn’t really the reason she was thinking about taking them off. In a word, Ahem.
“Mind if I sit down?” he asked a little sheepishly.
He did the one-shoulder-shrug thing again, an action she could recall now from their youth. His shirt sleeves today were too long for her to make out even a tiny bit of the tattoo she knew lingered beneath one of them. But that wasn’t the reason she was thinking about taking his clothes off, either. Ahem.
“Place is pretty crowded,” he pointed out unnecessarily. “Not many places to sit.”
“Of course,” Marcy said, gesturing toward the chair across from her. “I didn’t realize you were a guest here?” she added when she realized the significance of his appearance. “Are you not living in Endicott anymore?”
It seemed a ridiculous question in light of the fact that he had a business here, but maybe someone else managed it for him, and he lived somewhere else now and was only in town periodically. She’d simply assumed he was still a resident. She couldn’t imagine Endicott without him.
“Oh, I still live here,” he said as he settled into his seat. “I bought the old Lambert place out on Route Forty-two a few years ago and have been fixing it up.”
Marcy knew the farm well. Everyone in Endicott did. The whole Lambert family had been regular fixtures at the Saturday farmers’ market when she was a kid. And, during peach season, she’d often gone to the farm with her mother for fresh peaches. She recalled that the house had been pretty run-down back then, but there had been a lot of land surrounding it. The property couldn’t have come cheaply. Just another example of Max profiting off the things he’d stolen from her family.
She bit back her anger and strove for a lightheartedness she was nowhere close to feeling. “I remember the Lambert farm. Are the orchards still there?”
He nodded as he speared a strawberry with his fork. “Peaches and apples, both.”
“Must be a lot of work trying to run a business and a farm.”
“Oh, I don’t farm the land,” he told her. “Nothing’s been planted since Mr. and Mrs. Lambert retired and moved to Arizona to be closer to their daughter. I’m rewilding the place.”
“Rewilding?” she asked. “What’s that?”
“It’s letting the forces of nature return the land to its natural state over time. I just leave it alone and let it do its own thing, including the orchards. And they’re still thriving pretty well all by themselves.”
“What happens to all the fruit? Does it just rot?”
He looked at her as if she’d just sprouted a third eye. “Of course not. I wouldn’t let all that deliciousness go to waste. Everybody in town knows they can come out and pick whatever they want when there’s fruit on the trees.” Now he smiled, igniting little fires deep in Marcy’s midsection. “That’s a perfectly natural way to manage the land.”
“You just give all the fruit away?” she asked incredulously. Maybe he couldn’t get rich off a few dozen trees, but there was still money to be made with them.
He seemed confused by her response. “Sure. I can’t eat all that. The gate’s always open for whoever wants to come out.”
Well, that wasn’t very greedy or horrible of him. And he had to be greedy and horrible, considering what he’d done to her family.
She forced her mind back to the matter at hand. “Then what are you doing here eating breakfast?”
“I always have breakfast here before I go to work here. Perk of the contract I signed with the historical society.”
It took her a moment to understand. “You still take care of the grounds.”
He nodded. Then he smiled again. Marcy tried not to spontaneously combust. Then, softly, he said, “I still take care of your garden, Marcy.”
Heat bubbled inside her. But all she said was “It was never my garden. It belonged to my father.”
“I don’t know,” Max said. “You sure seemed to spend a lot of time in it. I still think about you sometimes when I’m there. And I’ve planted more of the flowers you liked best.”
How did he even know what kind of flowers she liked? She’d never even given them much thought.
“There are more lobelias than there used to be,” he continued, “because the Gibraltar azaleas your dad insisted on having near them aren’t great to grow here. The soil’s too acidic. And the ash trees can’t survive here anymore with the emerald ash borer, so I replaced them with more pink dogwoods. All the exotic plants are gone, in fact. The historical society wanted the garden to have plants that were indigenous to the area and time when the house was built, and I was totally on board with that. I planted more sweet william, too.”
The more he spoke, the more Marcy’s mouth dropped open. He was right, she recalled now. Her father may have been superstrict about how the garden looked and was laid out, but he’d never forbidden any of them from going in there, as long as they didn’t run wild and make a mess of it. Marcy remembered now how much she’d liked to read there. On a bench near the lobelias. Or in the shade of the pink dogwood. Both of which she had always loved. And the sweet william? She’d been charmed by their colors and always picked one to tuck behind her ear whenever she was near them, being careful to remove it before she went back inside so her father wouldn’t know of her transgression.
How could Max have remembered all that when she hadn’t even remembered it herself until he reminded her of it?
As if reading her mind, he said, “I remember a lot of things, Marcy. And every time I come here to work, they all come tumbling back.”
She shook her head slowly. The way he was looking at her now, over the rim of his coffee cup, his smoky gray-blue eyes full of...something... Something she told herself she shouldn’t try to figure out, because the way he was looking at her now...
He sipped his coffee slowly, savored it, then lowered the cup back to the table. And never once did his gaze leave hers. A tsunami of feelings began churning inside her, spinning faster and faster until she began to feel light-headed. Thankfully, he finally looked down at his plate to stab a chunk of pineapple with his fork, and the moment was gone.
“So what brings you back to town?” he asked as he lifted the pineapple toward his mouth. “Is it just the comet festival? Or is there another reason?”
And why did he seem to have an ulterior motive with that last question? And if he did, then just what, exactly, was that motive?
Oh, what the hell, Marcy thought. She might as well just go ahead and tell him why she was back in town. Not the real reason, of course. Not the part about unmasking his thievery and making him pay. And not the part about needing the wish she’d made when she was fifteen to come true. She’d just tell him the pretense she’d created, the one she planned to tell everyone in town who asked about her return so that no one would question her true motives. The one that she was kind of halfway thinking she might actually do.
“I’m writing a book,” she told Max. “About Comet Bob’s regular visits to Endicott and the wishes he’s granted over the years. And I’m hoping it sells like hotcakes.”