Secrets Read Free Page A

plots that the gated community, Hamilton Hundred, had set aside for gardens, and he’d begun raising heirloom vegetables. They had purple tomatoes and blue potatoes for dinner. He began replacing the landscaper-chosen shrubs around the house with gooseberry bushes and rosemary. He planted raspberries along the back fence, and there was a blackberry bush growing smack in the middle of the front lawn.
    â€œYou’ve changed us, my dear,” Thomas said as Cassie sautéed yellow squash and zucchini in a skillet.
    Cassie just smiled. She felt that they had changed her more than she them. On the day she’d left her mother’s house to go to college, she was as happy as a prisoner being released. The freedom at college had been wonderful, and she’d enjoyed every minute of it. It was after she graduated with what her mother called “a useless degree” in American history that the problems began. All during college she’d only had two boyfriends and she thought she was going to marry the last one. But when he’d proposed, she’d surprised both of them by saying no. With his pride irreparably wounded, he’d refused to so much as speak to her again. After Cassie graduated, she found herself a bit bewildered. For three years she’d thought that when she left school she was going to get married, have kids, and become a soccer mom, something that her mother hated but that Cassie thought would suit her.
    Instead, after graduation, she found herself at loose ends, not sure where to go or what to do. Her mother had sold the house Cassie had grown up in, so the only home she had was Margaret’s pristine, austere apartment on Fifth Avenue—and most anything was preferable to that .
    After a few weeks of stoically listening to her mother tell her what she should do with her life, Cassie’s love of American history led her to Williamsburg to see if she could find a job there. Williamsburg, with its gorgeous eighteenth-century buildings, seemed to call to her.
    For two years Cassie worked in various jobs about town. She answered telephones for lawyers, and for a while became a gofer for a famous photographer. Then she got a job as an assistant in a preschool. “I must say that you are wildly overqualified,” the woman who ran the school said, “but we’d be glad to have you.”
    It was at the school that Cassie met Elsbeth and her father, and when the nanny had been fired—for forgetting to pick up her charge for the third time—Cassie took the job. That had been a year ago. Since then, she’d managed to form a family out of the widower, his lovely young daughter, and his ailing father, and she’d been happier than she ever had been.
    But things had changed three months ago when Jeff announced that he’d “met someone.” Thomas, Cassie, and Elsbeth had looked at one another over the dining table as though to say, We aren’t “someone”?
    The tall, very thin, magnificently self-assured Skylar Beaumont had entered their lives, and nothing had been the same since. Skylar was the friend of the husband of a woman Cassie had met at the club at Hamilton Hundred, a woman Cassie had never liked. From the first day, Skylar entered the quiet, peaceful house as though she owned it. Laughing, she’d told Jeff how she planned to redecorate every inch of the place.
    Thomas and Cassie had stood there in stunned silence. Jeff’s beloved late wife, Lillian, had decorated the house, and therefore it was sacrosanct. Cassie knew better than to so much as move a flower vase because Lillian had put the vase there and that’s where it would stay.
    But when this woman came into their comfortable lives and began talking of changing everything, Jeff had just stood there smiling.
    Cassie hated the woman. She told herself she had no right to hate her, that she probably loved Jeff, but she still hated her. On her third visit to the house,