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Aria was surprised Carmella wanted to be so open. “I noticed something was off.”
Carmella winced. “She thinks I’m digging around in family business that is better left alone.”
Aria was intrigued. “I’ve sort of been doing the same thing.”
“Yeah?” Carmella cocked her head. “Did you learn anything devastating?”
“I don’t know,” Aria admitted, thinking of her mom at Savannah College of Art and Design. “I don’t have the full story yet.”
“I do,” Carmella explained. “And Elsa refuses to accept it.”
“What is it?” Aria asked. “If you don’t mind telling.”
“I feel overwhelmed with it, actually,” Carmella said, “so it would be nice to talk about it.”
“Go ahead.”
Carmella took a deep breath, then proceeded to tell Aria her mother’s story. She told her about the affair her mother had had with Oliver Matthews, then her father’s neglect of the marriage and Oliver’s death, and about the will that had left the sea cottage to Tina so many years ago.
“I went to the cottage,” Carmella continued. “It’s still there and still gorgeous. But I couldn’t get in. The door wood is swollen and bulging into the sides.”
Aria shook her head. “It probably needs a lot of work.”
Carmella nodded. “I’m assuming so.”
Aria sat quietly, spinning with an idea that she felt slightly too terrified to say aloud. But before she could brush the thought away, Carmella caught on.
“Wait a minute. Aren’t you an architect?”
“Not yet,” Aria said with a laugh.
“Yes, but you did three years at architecture school,” Carmella pointed out.
“I did.”
Carmella brightened. “Maybe you could come with me to the house?”
Aria’s heartbeat escalated. The seaside cottage spoke to her most romantic fantasies. “I can’t promise I’ll know how to fix it.”
“To be honest with you, I need moral support to go back there,” Carmella said under her breath. “Elsa’s reaction was a bit devastating.”
“I’d be happy to go with you,” Aria affirmed, smiling. “Let’s go to your mother’s cottage and break down the door!”
Carmella laughed. “It feels like we’re breaking down the door to my mother’s past.”
Aria nodded, thinking that she, too, had recently done that on her quest to Savannah. But after her trip, the trail had fizzled out. Judah Heskew seemed unwilling to talk about her mother at all, and it remained unclear who had sent her that newspaper clipping.
Still, it would feel good to sink her teeth into another mystery from the past. This one was easier because it didn’t belong to her at all.
ChapterSixteen
The next week, Carmella picked Aria up outside her apartment building and drove her out to the stone seaside cottage along the water. Aria trampled through the weeds and between the trees to reach the gorgeous little place, then watched as Carmella slid the key into the back door and shrugged after she tried to shove it open. Aria then remembered a trick she’d learned once, wherein she used a stick as a sort of lever to pulse open the door without actually breaking it. Very quickly, they were in.
“You’re a genius,” Carmella breathed, walking through the door for the first time as Aria followed her, her heart in her throat.
Just as Carmella had said, nobody had been at the cottage since Tina’s death, when Carmella herself had been a teenager. The nearby sea had taken its toll on the old place, and a few windows had been broken, allowing various animals to find a home within the walls. Debris was cluttered throughout, alongside what was left of what Tina and Oliver had positioned with purpose: chairs, couches, and a very old television that clearly no longer worked. In the kitchen stood an old cabinet where Oliver or Tina had housed beautiful china.
“It’s like walking back through time,” Aria breathed as she walked gingerly through the clutter.
