Love Anthony Read Free

address, but the postmark is stamped from Nantucket. She doesn’t recognize the handwriting. The penmanship is neat and loopy, a woman’s. Another woman’s.
    Holding the envelope in one hand and the card in the other, she looks up at the fireplace mantel, at her perfectly centered wedding picture, and swallows. Her mouth has gone dry.
    She gets up and walks to the fireplace. She slides the iron screen aside. She tosses the Victoria’s Secret catalog onto the fire and watches the edges curl and blacken as it burns and turns to gray ash. Gone. Her hands are shaking. She clenches the envelope and card. If she burns them now, she can pretend she never saw them. This never existed.
    A swirl of unexpected emotion courses through her. She feels fear and fury, panic and humiliation. She feels nauseous, like she’s going to be sick. But what she doesn’t feel is surprised.
    She closes the gate. With the card and envelope squeezed in her fist, she marches up the stairs, emphasizing each loud step as she heads toward Jimmy’s snoring.

CHAPTER 2

    O livia strips down to her underwear and changes into sweatpants, socks, and her oldest, favorite Boston College sweatshirt. Drier but still freezing, she hurries downstairs to the living room and presses the button on the remote to the fireplace. She stands in front of the instant blaze and waits and waits, but it doesn’t throw off any noticeable heat. She touches the glass with the palm of her hand. It’s barely warm. It was David’s idea to convert the fireplace to gas. Better for the tenants. More convenient and less messy.
    Although they’ve owned the cottage for eleven years, she and David have never actually lived here. They bought it as an investment just before the housing market boomed and prices skyrocketed. David, a business major who reluctantly stepped into his family’s real estate business after college, is always keeping his eye on properties with potential. He’s all about location, location, location. He looks for a fixer-upper in the right neighborhood, buys it, hires contractors to renovate the kitchen and baths and to paint the interior and the exterior, then he sells it. The goal is always to flip it fast, a SOLD sign on the front lawn and a tidy profit sitting fat and pretty in his pocket.
    But Nantucket was different for David. With almost 50 percent of the island designated as conservation and “forever wild,” leaving only half of the almost fifty square miles buildable, David wasn’t interested in flipping this house. He assured Olivia that the property value would never dip below what they paid for it. The house is nothing special, a modest three-bedroom cottage with little remarkable about any of the rooms or layout. But situated less than a mile from Fat Ladies Beach, it’s a highly desirable vacation property, and David correctly guessed that they would always more than cover their annual mortgage payments with summer rentals.
    It’s a smart investment for our future, he’d said, back when they could so blissfully imagine a future.
    They stayed in the house for a week or two each year in the shoulder seasons, usually in October, but stopped coming altogether after Anthony turned three. Pretty much everything stopped after Anthony turned three.
    A violent gust of wind screams in the distance, sounding to Olivia like a small child crying out in pain. The windows rattle, and a cold breeze dances along the skin of her bare neck. She shivers. Nantucket in winter. This is going to take some getting used to.
    She rubs the palms of her hands together, trying to create some friction to warm them. Dissatisfied, she wonders where she might find a blanket. She’s only been here nine days, and she’s still learning where everything is, still feeling like a guest in someone else’s home. A stranger at the inn. She searches the linen closet, finds a gray, woolen blanket she vaguely remembers buying, wraps it around her shoulders, and snuggles into the