On the Street Where you Live Read Free

because you have money now only proves what I always thought about him.”
    Remembering her grandmother’s words, Emily smiled involuntarily as she drove slowly through the darkened streets. She glanced at the gauge on the dashboard. The outside temperature was a chilly thirty-eight degrees. The streets were wet—here the storm had produced only rain—and the windshield was becoming misted. The movement of the tree branches indicated sharp gusts of wind coming in from the ocean.
    But the houses, the majority of them restored Victorians,looked secure and serene. As of tomorrow I’ll officially own a home here, Emily mused. March 21st. The equinox. Light and night equally divided. The world in balance.
    It was a comforting thought. She had experienced enough turbulence of late to both want and need a period of complete and total peace. She’d had stunning good luck, but also frightening problems that had crashed like meteors into each other. But as the old saying went, everything that rises must converge, and God only knows she was living proof of that.
    She considered, then rejected, the impulse to drive by the house. There was still something unreal about the knowledge that in only a matter of hours, it would be hers. Even before she saw the house for the first time three months ago, it had been a vivid presence in her childhood imaginings—half real, half blended with fairy tales. Then, when she stepped into it that first time, she had known immediately that for her the place held a feeling of coming home. The real estate agent had mentioned that it was still called the Shapley house.
    Enough driving for now, she decided. It’s been a long, long day. Concord Reliable Movers in Albany were supposed to have arrived at eight. Most of the furniture she wanted to keep was already in her new Manhattan apartment, but when her grandmother downsized she had given her some fine antique pieces, so there was still a lot to move.
    â€œFirst pickup, guaranteed,” the Concord scheduler had vehemently promised. “Count on me.”
    The van had not made its appearance until noon.As a result she got a much later start than she’d expected, and it was now almost ten-thirty.
    Check into the inn, she decided. A hot shower, she thought longingly. Watch the eleven o’clock news. Then, as Samuel Pepys wrote, “And so to bed.”
    When she’d first come to Spring Lake, and impulsively put a deposit down on the house, she had stayed at the Candlelight Inn for a few days, to be absolutely sure she’d made the right decision. She and the inn’s owner, Carrie Roberts, a septuagenarian, had immediately hit it off. On the drive down today, she’d phoned to say she’d be late, but Carrie had assured her that was no problem.
    Turn right on Ocean Avenue, then four more blocks. A few moments later, with a grateful sigh, Emily turned off the ignition and reached in the backseat for the one suitcase she’d need overnight.
    Carrie’s greeting was warm and brief. “You look exhausted, Emily. The bed’s turned down. You said you’d stopped for dinner, so there’s a thermos of hot cocoa with a couple of biscuits on the night table. I’ll see you in the morning.”
    The hot shower. A nightshirt and her favorite old bathrobe. Sipping the cocoa, Emily watched the news and felt the stiffness in her muscles from the long drive begin to fade.
    As she snapped off the television, her cell phone rang. Guessing who it was, she picked it up.
    â€œHi, Emily.”
    She smiled as she heard the worried-sounding voice of Eric Bailey, the shy genius who was the reason she was in Spring Lake now.
    As she reassured him that she’d had a safe, relatively easy trip, she thought of the day she first met him, when he moved into the closet-sized office next to hers. The same age, their birthdays only a week apart, they’d become friendly, and she recognized that underneath