The Lake House

by Kate Morton

The gate, she saw when she reached it, was made of timber: sun-bleached, splintered, and hanging from its hinges with a deep sagging ennui that suggested it had been doing so for a very long time.

And to her dying day Alice would never be able to say for sure whether the room grew cold right then, a sudden breeze off the heath, or whether it was her own internal thermostat, the wash of real life, the past hitting her like a wave that had drawn back a long time ago and been waiting for the tide to turn.

Sometimes ‘feelings’ aren’t as airy-fairy as they seem. Sometimes they’re just the product of observations we haven’t realized we’ve been making.”

it happened a lot back then, after the first war. A whole generation was sunk beneath the mud in France and with them went the marriage hopes of millions of young women. Employment as a nanny by a family like the Edevanes was as close to having a child as most of them would ever come.”

It was quite a thing to spend the majority of one’s life in the same place. To acquire countless memories that layered in one’s mind so that certain geographic locations gained an identity. Place was so important to Alice’s experience of the world that she wondered sometimes how nomadic people gauged the passing of time.

she was still out there somewhere. That she hadn’t been subsumed but, rather, had turned back into a pearl and rolled away. That she was waiting somewhere for the fairies to find her and the woods to bring her back to life.

Neither of them moved. It seemed to Eleanor later they were frozen by a shared sense, an unspoken agreement, that by remaining still they might somehow stop the egg from cracking further.

Sadie had been nervous when she met Bertie and Ruth again after all those years. The circumstances of the reunion made her feel ashamed and therefore indignant.

She’d stood with her back against the wall of the shop, shy disguised as surly,

And when Bertie and Ruth came to collect her, when it was all over, she walked down that hallway with her old clothes on and her eyes on the door, as if nothing had happened and the whole episode could be left behind in that pale-green

room with its crack in the wall, shaped like the River Nile.

She used to love being outdoors, back in the time of before.

The horizon was golden as she drove east. The sea glimmered as if someone had sprinkled it with iron filings

sometimes when a case gets under your skin, it’s because there’s something that still needs your attention.