The Cottage at Glass Beach Read Online Free Page B

only everything were so simple.
    She heard a splash near the dock as she opened the kitchen door. A seal, most likely, what type, she couldn’t tell. She could have sworn she saw a flash of silver. There hadn’t been silver seals in the waters surrounding the island for as long as she could remember, though people spoke of them, sometimes, with awe. But then it was nearly midsummer, and in midsummer along that coast, anything was possible.
    Midsummer, the season of her sister’s disappearance.
    N ora looked like her. Maeve. With perhaps less of the flirt factor, which Maeve had in spades, even after she married. She couldn’t help herself. It was an essential part of her personality, that irrepressible spirit. She couldn’t resist charming any man in the room. It was as if Maeve cast a spell, the village women said, wishing she’d leave some for the rest of them, wishing they knew her secret.
    All three had the McGann curly hair, Nora’s dark, like Maeve’s, the girls’ lighter, like their father’s, perhaps. A sprinkling of freckles across their noses. The high cheekbones, the eyes tilted downward, ever so slightly, at the corners.
    â€œAunt Maire?” Nora took her hands, her expression warm yet searching, her two daughters beside her not so different from Maire and Maeve when they were young, Maeve taller, bolder. Nora’s older one too. A feisty thing. Oh, you could see it in her eyes, flint-dark and sparking. She seemed ready to bolt any minute, held only by the force of her mother’s will. And yet the other one had something of Maeve in her too, with her liveliness, her charm.
    Her niece and grandnieces regarded her with curiosity and a palpable mixture of anticipation and uncertainty. She had summoned them, after all. She had started it, opened the wound. She’d imagined this moment for so long, and now that it was here, she didn’t quite know what to do or say.
    â€œNora.” She opened her arms, pulled this girl—no, she corrected herself, this woman—close.
    Nora gave Maire an extra hug before introducing her daughters. Her eyes flitted around the room. Did she recall being there? Did she remember sleeping in Maeve’s old room, upstairs, when her parents needed a night to themselves? When her father was reeling after Maeve vanished?
    â€œCome in by the fire,” Maire said. “I made muffins and tea. I was going to leave them on the doorstep of the cottage, but you beat me to it.”
    Come in by the fire. The same words she’d uttered when she found Nora wandering the beach as a child. Many days she was alone, barefoot, shivering. Did she remember? Maeve diving into the ocean, gallivanting across the island, near or far, Patrick searching for her by boat or car, too many steps behind. Bewildered at first, then angry, and, she supposed, in the end bereft, as Maire herself was after he and Nora went away.
    â€œI can’t believe we’re here,” Nora said, as her daughters fell on the muffins. She took in the sitting room, the pictures of her ancestors on the mantel, the jars of sea glass, the shells and rocks in a bowl on the coffee table, its top a spiraled mosaic of smooth beach stones.
    â€œIt’s been too long,” Maire agreed. She adjusted a fold of her madras shirt, crisp, rolled to the elbows. Her jeans were cuffed to the ankle, and she’d retied her Keds with twine, because it was handiest when the laces broke.
    â€œI thought you were gone. That everyone was gone.” Nora’s eyes shone with tears, swiftly blinked away with an apologetic smile.
    â€œThey are. Except me.”
    â€œMy father said—”
    â€œI know. I wrote, but he—”
    â€œYes.”
    There was danger in the half-completed thought. The way the two women could fill in the blanks, sense what was left unsaid.
    â€œYou must find things very changed,” Maire said. “The cottage wasn’t in such