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wide berth.”
    Leigh smiled at the comparison. She’d always thought Spencer had a gift for words. I was taken in by them often enough in the past. “I hate to think what life would be like without Grandpa Sam.”
    “That’s odd,” he said.
    “What?”
    He hesitated, then, “Well, considering he hasn’t really been a part of your life for the past fifteen years.”
    The rebuke hurt, but Leigh knew he was right. The truck pulled into her driveway and she whispered, “Stop. I’ll get out here.” She was almost out the door when Spence spoke again.
    “Look, I didn’t mean to end things tonight on a sour note. Don’t take that comment as a judgment, please. It was just an observation.”
    Leigh looked up at him through the open passenger door. “I realize that, Spencer. Don’t worry about it. But you know, just because I haven’t seen someone for a few years doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about him. Grandpa Sam, I mean,” she clarified.
    He nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
    Leigh closed the door and stood where she was as the pickup inched back along the drive. Then it stopped again and Spence stuck his head out the window. “Maybe we can get together sometime before you go back to New York.”
    Leigh hoped dismay wasn’t obvious in her face. “Sure,” she said, and waved goodbye as the truck reversed onto the highway.
    Once inside the house, she headed straight for the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee. Then she went upstairs to change. The meeting with Spencer had left her too revved up to think about sleep and in spite of the open window and the balmy breeze, the interior of the house was hot. So she dug in her old bureau and found a pair of denim cutoffs and a tank top she hadn’t worn for years.
    She went down the hall to her parents’ bedroom. Entering it was the hardest step she’d taken since her arrival yesterday. The room was stuffy and dusty, its windows stuck shut with an accumulation of grit. But at last Leigh got them open and fresh ocean air whistled through the room. She could still see her mother hurrying about, plumping pillows and reminding anyone within earshot that guests were arriving “on the hour.”
    The Randalls had run their home as a bed-and-breakfast ever since Leigh’s father, Pete, had decided he was getting too old to brave the Atlantic in his fishing boat. Leigh had been thirteen at the time, and the change in the family’s lifestyle had been exciting at first. She’d enjoyed the various guests who’d stayed at Windswept Manor—the name she’d been allowed to choose, based on her fascination at the time for the Brontë sisters.
    But later her own responsibilities had grown and the novelty of the bed-and-breakfast diminished. By the time she was sixteen, dating Spencer McKay steadily and preparing for college, she could hardly wait to leave both Windswept Manor and Ocracoke Island.
    Poor Mom, she thought. You had a rebellious teen on your hands at the same time as your husband was showing the first signs of Alzheimer’s. Leigh’s eyes welled up.
    She sat on the floor beside the bed to go through the stack of photograph albums she’d found in the closet. Some had been passed on to her parents from their parents, and the newer ones contained photos of Leigh’s childhood. Leigh had been adopted as an infant, and her adoptive parents had always ensured that she had plenty of childhood pictures and shared their own family albums with her as if those stern faces from the past were her own ancestors.
    She flipped through one of these, turning the pages carefully but steadily, reluctant to spend too much time poring over them. Better to save that for a winter’s day back in New York, she decided. But she stopped at one particular photograph.
    She was standing with her parents on the lawn of Okracoke School after graduation. She was wearing the white Swiss-eyelet dress she’d chosen for the prom and holding the long-stemmed red roses her father had proudly placed