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hardly stay inside herself. It was as if she were too small to hold so much beauty, as if she were washed through with light.
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    Rose, who had risen not much earlier, was seated on a huge flat rock in the cottage garden. The sun poured onto her skin. The sea before her lay asleep, hardly stirring and yet somehow breathing, alive. You could see for miles, all the way out to the Atlantic. Across the narrow bay the mountains—each one a different color—were materializing from the mist, and at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the cottage arose she saw a great horse chestnut tree, cutting through the deep blues and the heather of the mountains with its canopy of brilliant green.
    Her gaze turned to the garden. She had no idea what most of these flowers were called. I’ll learn the names of the flowers here! she thought. Black-eyed Susans she knew. And hydrangeas and roses, of course. She recognized spruce trees, or maybe pine trees, but there were so many kinds just in this one spot, this huge old box of a cottage she would call home for one whole month. When Rose had awakened, she had been elated with the view from her room—tall grass, geraniums, a winding path down to what she hoped would be a rocky beach—but she and Lottie were down on the ground floor, and Rose wanted to see more. Usually her first impulse would be to explore the house, but the outdoors called to her.
    Just stepping out onto the warm wet grass with her bare feet changed her outlook on everything that had happened last night. Of course it was hard to get here, she thought. It should be hard to get here. And thank God it rained all last night—it made every leaf greener, every branch darker, every fragrant flower more brilliant.
    â€œRose!” Lottie called to her. Rose turned and saw her haloed by the rising light. Even she could see that Lottie—whom she had only seen burdened by bags, jackets, stroller—was now something different. She was aglow. Rose smiled at her as she ran down the path in her bare feet. “Oh, Rose, can you believe it? Can you stand it?” She was wearing just an oversize T-shirt and her hair was twice its usual volume. She looked like she belonged here. Rose wondered if the place could already have had the same effect on her.
    â€œIt’s like a dream,” said Lottie. “Like a dream, but so . . . solid.”
    â€œI know!” Rose said. “These flowers. They just
grow
!” She bent down and covered her face in something shocking pink, a flower she would have thought was fake in Brooklyn. Here it looked almost humble compared to all the brightness surrounding it.
    â€œIt’s so odd to say it,” said Lottie, “but I can’t wait till Caroline Dester gets here. She is going to be blown away. And Beverly Fisher too. It’s heaven here, Rose, isn’t it? And nobody doesn’t like heaven.”
    â€œIt’s heaven,” said Rose. “It’s heaven outside. And it’s so sweet inside.”
    â€œSweet and sort of huge. I can’t believe they call this a cottage.”
    â€œWe need to explore,” said Rose. “The big bedrooms are upstairs. I bet you can see all the way across the Atlantic from the top floor.”
    Lottie had turned her face up to catch the sun’s morning light. “I don’t even think I packed sunscreen,” she said. “I thought there’d be so much fog!”
    â€œI did,” said Rose. “Come on. We’ll check out the rest of the house. We should decide which tower we want before the others come.” She paused. The sun, the warmth, the color, the light were working on her. “Maybe we should even give the best rooms to Caroline and poor color-blind Beverly. They might need them more than we do.”
    â€œMaybe we should!”
    Rose’s tender feet smarted as they walked along the stone path back to the