Page 9 of The Cottage on Blueberry Bay

He’d named her Meredith after his mother.

She could only remember that one time she’d met him at the cottage with her mom. Other than that, Jacob O’Neill could be a stranger.

She followed Gordon down the hall to the kitchen, holding the thick manila envelope in both hands.

“Hey, sugarplum,” Gordon said, rinsing a plate under the faucet.

“Hey.” She arranged the fruit in the bowl on the counter before asking, “Why did Mom have a key to Jacob’s cottage?”

It didn’t make sense.

Gordon turned off the water and sighed. He turned around and faced her. “Your mother visited him when she found out about the cancer.”

“What?” She grabbed hold of the cold granite. This was unbelievable. “She visited Jacob?”

Gordon nodded his head. “Yes.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “She visited him? The guy who couldn’t be bothered to be my father?”

Her hands started shaking, and an unexpected rage built up in her chest. “Why didn’t she tell me? I had been with her at the end for months.”

Meredith had basically moved into her parents’ house once her mother had been placed in hospice care. She’d been by her mother’s side throughout the whole sickness and until the end. Jacqueline had said nothing about Jacob.

“She had reconnected with him a few years ago, when she’d found out,” he repeated, holding out his hands. “I guess he had been in and out of a mental health treatment center for years.”

“Shouldn’t I know this kind of stuff?” What else did she not know?

Gordon made a face. “She tried talking to you about him a few times, but you didn’t want to hear anything at the time.”

She could not believe her own words would come back and bite her. She had been so angry with her mother for even bringing him up in front of the kids; she’d told her she wanted nothing to do with Jacob. She hadn’t planned to tell the kids about her real father, so why bring him up?

It just brought up a lot of pain from her childhood and confusion that lasted into her adulthood. She didn’t want to rehash it all with her kids. Besides, the real issue for Meredith was that she didn’t want Gordon to think he wasn’t enough of a father for her. She felt like she would be betraying Gordon if she went looking for her “real” dad.

“Let me go get the key.” Gordon held up his finger then walked to his office. When he came back into the kitchen, he handed over a velvet box someone would place jewelry inside, but as she opened its cover, she saw a brass key. She pulled it out by the silk ribbon tied through the key’s hole. The ribbon had tiny shells strung to a piece of driftwood the size of a cork withLe gîte en bord de Merwritten in her mother’s cursive.

“The cottage by the sea,” Gordon said, translating the French. “A lot of French Canadians around those parts.”

“What am I going to do with a cottage all the way up in Maine?” she said, shutting the box and placing it down on the table.

“If you want to sell it, I would contact a real estate agent up there,” Gordon said. “The sale of the cottage could help pay for your half of the Andover house.”

She thought about the house she and Phillip had built together when they’d first gotten married. They had agreed she’d stay home with the kids and take care of the household, while Phillip worked as an attorney in Boston. It didn’t make sense continuing her career as a pianist. She barely made enough to pay for daycare, let alone a household of five in Andover.

She loved being a stay-at-home mom, but now, at fifty, the only career choices she had were in teaching piano lessons, retail, or local fast-food places. No one else wanted to hire someone with no work experience, besides cleaning and driving kids around.

Now she had a huge house with a bigger mortgage than she could afford without a lawyer husband.

“The pool is costly,” she said. Her monthly alimony wouldn’t cover all the chemicals she would need to dump into it if the kids spent the weekend. She knew she needed to sell the house. She just… “I love that pool.”

She thought about the gardens. It took twenty years to design, dig, and grow those gardens and trails throughout the wooded lot.

The five bedroom, four bath, on a five-acre lot in Andover with a pool would sell in no time.

“It just doesn’t make sense to live in that big house with all that yard,” Gordon said and added, “By yourself.”

It didn’t. In fact, according to the divorce settlement, Phillip only had to pay the mortgage for one year, and then she had to either buy him out or sell their family home. And time was running out.

It didn’t make sense to keep it, but she didn’t know if she could let it go. She lost her mother, then her marriage, her children had all moved out, and now she was losing her family home.

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