Page 39 of A Novel Love Story

Junie opened the gate of the white picket fence, and I followed her up the delicate stone walkway to the front porch.

“Welcome home,” she said, opening the door, and my heart skipped in my chest as I stepped into the foyer and took a slow turn. It felt a little like coming to a place I’d been a hundred times before. The air was thick with memories. The house had belonged to a couple who’d moved here to escape the city. They threw lavish parties and filled the pool in the back with champagne, and celebrated New Year’s for two weeks straight. Then the husband had a heart attack and the woman died of a broken heart—or that’s how the story went.

Then Junie had stumbled into town, and she’d fallen in love with the wooden design of a daffodil in the foyer floor, and the glass mosaic windows that threw colors across the hardwood floors, and the delicate molding along the walls. And, most importantly, she’d fallen in love with the man at the front desk, the grandson of the woman who’d died of a broken heart.

I took a slow and deliberate pivot. “Wow,” I whispered.

I wished the book club could see this. I wished Pru was here.

God, they’d have a field day.

“Sorry the inn’s a bit of a mess. We’re still trying to finish up,” she said, waving her hand flippantly toward the basement door, and the haunted toilet in question.

“It’s beautiful, though. The daffodil motifs. The bright colors … it feels warm. Homey.”

Her expression softened, and she patted the railing knob at the bottom of the stairs. “She’s a good old girl. You should see the wallpaper in the third guest room upstairs. Want a tour?” she added, her eyes glittering.

How could I say no?

She took me through the parlors and the kitchen, and I marveled at the beautiful ceiling molding, the wooden banisters up to the second floor, the crystalline chandelier in the dining room. The furniture was tasteful and sparse, plastic over the fainting couches and coffee tables and wingback chairs, so that as they stood in stasis they wouldn’t collect dust.

The second floor was just as gorgeous, the rooms all themed in different flowers. The yellow daffodil room was my favorite. The wall with the headboard had an entire mural of huge daffodils blooming across it. Junie’s handiwork, I was sure. Just like the mural on the side of Frank’s Auto Shop,and the logo for the Grumpy Possum, and even Gail’s bar scene. She showed me all the different rooms, each with a different flower theme and a different focal color—lavender and coral and sage. They evensmelledlike the colors of the rooms. The pink one—roses—matched Junie’s pastel hair. After she showed me the last room—sunflowers—she said to me, “And that’s it. That’s the Daffodil. You know, even with all the hang-ups we’ve come across, what with the roach infestation, the leaky floorboards, the dry-rotted eaves, the century-old love letters hidden in the attic, I still love this place.”

The love letters were part of the fourth book’s plot, where Beatrice went on a road trip with the recipient’s grandson (a man she allegedly hated who was, as it turned out, Ruby’s little brother) to return the letters to his grandfather’s lost love from forty years ago. It was Rachel’s saddest book by far, sadder still with the tragedy of the author’s passing herself, because at the end Beatrice left Eloraton. Bea was the only one of the heroines who ever did. So many heroines had come to find a home in Eloraton instead. Junie wandered in looking for a safe haven. Ruby found shelter in Jake. Gemma found acceptance in a small honey shop owned by the town’s eccentric self-proclaimed witch. But Beatrice? It was the wild blue yonder that filled her with wonder.

Junie ran her fingers along the banister on the second floor—looking so lovestruck with the life she’d found.

And a feeling so visceral struck me then and there—Iwantedthat.

I wanted tofindthat.

The feeling was so strange, and so heavy, it felt like a fishhook tethered to my toes, pulling upward. It was a yearning so deep, it went all the way into the parts of me I hadn’t even discovered yet. I felt it as Junie dragged me into the kitchen to make brownies,because the wine had given her a sweet tooth and Will loved her brownies even when she burnt them, and I felt it as we drank lemonade on the front porch and rocked in the rocking chairs, and she told me about things I already knew—about how she and Will met, and her life before Eloraton, feeling unmoored from her job and her passions. She talked about it all with the sort of distance of someone who had figured out where to drop anchor, and build a life. And too soon, it was midnight and she was showing me how to unlatch the windows in my room, and where the spare blankets were if I got cold in the middle of June, but my mind was five hundred miles away, thinking about my lonely apartment and my cluttered office in the English department and the syllabi I still needed to submit for next semester, and the sinking feeling in my gut.

“Elsy?” she asked, and I realized that she’d been talking to me.

I pushed the feeling away. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I asked if you needed anything. Will and I are in the main bedroom downstairs—closer to the haunted toilet, don’t worry. The toilet down across from the main hall is the only one working right now … you know, the plumbing issue. So we all share that one. And if you want a shower in the morning, you can take one in the main bedroom, if that’s all right? And I think that’s it?”

“This is perfect,” I replied, dumping my duffel bag on the foot of the bed.

“Even with the awkward plumbing?”

“It’s better than sleeping with bears.”

Her eyebrows scrunched together. “I … would hope so?”

“Thank you, really. If there’s anything I can do to repay you—”

She waved her hand. “Please, don’t mention it.” Then she grabbed the doorknob and paused just before she shut it, a thought occurring to her. “Also … if you hear something in the middle of the night, don’t mention that, either.”

I schooled my face to keep myself from looking too sly. At least, unlike Ruby and Jake, Junie and Will seemed to be getting on—and gettingiton—perfectly well. “Mention what?”

“Exactly! Well then—good night. Oh, we usually get up around eight, but feel free to stay in bed as long as you want,” she added, and with one last awkward wave, she closed the door behind her. The floorboards creaked as she retreated to the stairs, and then down to the first floor. I waited until I heard the door close in the main bedroom, and then I fell onto the creaky bed in the yellow daffodil room, and smiled to myself.

This was so much better than any stuffy old loft.

I CHANGED INTO MY PAJAMAS AND SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS, JUSTabout to push up the windows and crawl into bed—there wasn’t any central AC in most older New York houses—when movement in the garden behind the Daffodil Inn caught my eye. At first I thought it was a trick of the rain, but then the streetlight caught on the spoke of an umbrella. There was someone letting themselves in through the gate, and heading toward the pergola in the back of the garden. I couldn’t see a face, but his knife-pleated trousers and spit-shined shoes gave him away.

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