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unlit store to pick up her bag where she’d left it, then turned on the switch for the light at the top of the stairs to the second floor. As Lis climbed she tested herself to see if she could remember which steps squeaked and which had been safe to tread on when coming in late back in the day. She was pleased when she’d made her way to the top without one squeal or groan from the floorboards, as if her feet remembered where the squeaky boards were placed.
    The room at the end of the hall had been hers for as long as she could recall. The door was open and a small lamp cast shadows on the pale green walls. The furniture stood where it had always been, the poster bed in the center of the left wall, the painted dresser next to the door. The same old chair, its slipcover unchanged from the blue and white stripe of Lis’s youth, still curled into the corner next to the window, the same old faded carpet covered the floorboards. The familiarity of it was comforting. There was nowhere on earth she felt as at home as she did beneath this roof, in this room. She’d moved in when she was seventeen, when her newly widowed mother decided that life on the island held no promise for her and decided to move to Arizona.
    Having one year of high school left, Lis had refused to go. Gigi had sided with Lis and had convinced her granddaughter to allow Lis to remain there at least until she graduated. Lis had joined her mother for the following summer in Arizona, but that had been enough to convince Lis that the Southwest was not for her. She’d returned to the Eastern Shore briefly before leaving for art college in Philadelphia, and from there, she’d moved to New York, to an apartment where she had three roommates, which had proven to be three too many. Realizing she couldn’t work with an audience and that peace and quiet were much more conducive to creativity than constant conversation at night and talk radio from dawn to midnight, Lis moved to a New Jersey suburb where rents were more reasonable and she wasn’t subjected to the habits and lifestyles of others. Her work flourished, and deep inside, she knew it was only a matter of time before her work would hang inside the galleries whose showings she had attended so many times.
    It was ironic, she’d once told her ex-fiancé, that it was only after she left the city that her paintings of cityscapes began to come to life.
    Lis had gotten lucky when she met the owner of a trendy Manhattan gallery who offered to exhibit several of her paintings. Her reputation was made when the star of a popular TV talk show stopped by one afternoon and loved Lis’s work so much that she not only bought all the paintings in the gallery but asked to see more. In the end, she purchased six paintings and showed them off on her show onemorning before having them hung in her home. Lis enjoyed a quick uptick in visibility as an artist and a huge bump in her sales, appearing on that same talk show several times and having several newspaper and magazine articles cover her work. The eventual result of all the publicity was an invitation to exhibit some of her paintings in a showing of local artists’ works in the new St. Dennis art center. The temptation to come back a rousing success on every level was more than she could resist. Besides, it had been six months since she’d been home—since the day after Christmas, and then she’d only stayed for an overnight—and it was well past time that she checked in on Ruby.
    Lis took a quick shower in the bathroom across the hall, swinging her legs over the high side of the old tub, thinking it was no wonder that Gigi had fallen while trying to get out. Thank God she had a nice, new walk-in shower downstairs.
    Thinking about the new bath made Lis think of Alec Jansen. What magic had he employed to talk her great-grandmother into a total renovation of the first floor?
    He always was a sweet talker.
    But Lis knew that