She pulled off her boots, carried them to the closet, carefully hung up her coat, unwound her scarf. Though she’d lost her yen for hot chocolate, she followed the agenda.
No handy packets of Swiss Miss in the cupboards, or in the butler’s pantry. She did find a fancy canister with instructions, so she got out a pan and followed them.
No handy canister of Reddi-wip either, but a small carton of whipping cream.
She was not going that far, so she’d take her hot chocolate naked.
Feeling better, she went up to the library. For whatever reason, that room felt like hers. She sat by the fire, sipped hot chocolate.
Then pulled out her phone when it signaled a text. From Anna.
Somehow I’ve got to not work when you’re doing a big reveal. I’m flabbergasted! And I don’t flabbergast easy. The shopping pages are a kind of miracle. I know you haven’t finished, but everything looks wonderful, and it works so smoothly. The About page makes me impressed with myself. I love the way you used the photos my mother took yesterday.
Great. Now get me a video, with audio. I’m going to do a widget.
And, Sonya thought, use it to launch you on TikTok at some point—but no need to scare you off.
I don’t know what a widget is, but I’m for it. I’ll work on it. When this is all done, I’m taking you to lunch. I swear, if I wasn’t married and pregnant, I’d marry you and have your baby.
While that’s tempting, we’ll stick with lunch. I’ll get your social media up sometime within the next ten days, so watch for that heading your way.
I will. TY. Anna
A good day, Sonya thought. In spite of a stuck door, a good day.
As she put her foot on the coffee table, her tablet played Michael Bublé’s “Home.”
“Fine. Whatever.”
* * *
In the evening, she decided to spend some time with the Poole family tree, a glass of wine. Then maybe she’d start one of the new books she’d bought or switch over to another movie.
As Deuce had told her, she found the book in Collin’s office. A coffee-table style, bound in brown leather.
A caring friend, she thought as she carried it and the wine back to the library.
She read the forward where Deuce explained his interest in genealogy, and his hopes that the book would provide a connection to those who came after with those who’d come before.
It opened with the family tree, meticulously documented on a two-page spread. It started in the early 1600s.
“Holy shit, they had eleven children! Two died in infancy, another before he reached five, and another at sixteen. How do you get through that?”
She followed it down, but would look at details later. And there was her father and his twin brother. Her mother’s name and the date they’d married. The date her father died.
The woman Collin had married—that date and the date of her death the same.
And there, her name, connected to her parents.
So many on those branches, she realized. She’d never thought about it. The only child of an only child—so she’d believed—on her father’s side. One aunt and three cousins on her mother’s.
Now there were so many more.
“Dad would have loved this,” she murmured.
Engrossed, she didn’t notice when her tablet played “We Are Family.”
So many births, she mused, with twins running through them. So many deaths.
She turned the page.
Deuce had gone deep into his research, she realized after spending more than an hour reading through the ancestors in the seventeenth century. There had been lords and ladies, soldiers and farmers in her ancestry, and their share of triumphs and tragedies.
By the time she got to the next century, she decided to make tea—a rarity for her—and take that and the book into bed with her.
Tucked up, fire simmering, she worked her way through to the Arthur Poole, from Liverpool, who’d made his home in Maine and founded the family business. An adventurous man, she thought as her eyes began to blur.
Making his way across the sea at the age of seventeen. Heading to a brave new world and leaving the one he knew behind. A shipbuilder by trade, after years of apprenticeship.
And by the age of twenty-four, he’d started his business, and had married a wealthy young heiress, one Leticia Armond, and begun building what would become Lost Bride Manor.
Love for Leticia, she wondered, or money?
They’d had twin sons followed by three daughters, and had been married for nearly twenty-five years before he died.
A fall from a horse.
So his son Collin inherited the manor. Continued his father’s expansion of the original structure while he and his brother ran the business.