I really should have known better.

“This is your lake house.” I fell back on stating the obvious as I stared up at an enormous stone residence. I stepped out of Lillian’s Cayenne, and the front door to the home flew open.

“Sawyer.” Lily was smiling. Not her polite, default smile, not her pained “you can’t hurt me” smile—an honest-to-God, cheek-to-cheek grin. “You won’t believe—”

Our grandmother stepped out of the car, and Lily cut herself off midsentence. “I hope traffic wasn’t too horrible, Mim.” That sounded more like the Lily I knew, but her dark brown eyes were still dancing. She waited a beat, then turned to me. “Come on. I’ll show you our room.”

Somehow, I doubted the energy I could hear buzzing in her voice was a reflection of her excitement at the idea of the two of us sharing a bedroom.

“What’s going on?” I asked as we made our way to the front door and into the foyer.

Lily shushed me. Deciding that I didn’t want to know what had gotten into her badly enough to be shushed twice, I focused on the house instead. The staircase winding its way upstairs I’d expected. The stairs going down I had not.

“Three stories?” I asked Lily. “Or is the basement just a basement?”

“It’s just a basement.” Lily paused. “With one bedroom. And a game room.” She paused again, slightly embarrassed, because properly bred young ladies were always slightly embarrassed by the size of their vacation homes and the overall privilege to which they’d been born. “And a media room. A pool table. Ping-Pong . . .”

Deciding she’d said enough, Lily took to the stairs—the ones going up, not down. I followed, and together, we arrived at a small landing. Compared to the scale of the house, the second story was cozy: one bedroom with two twin beds, a bathroom, a closet. Aside from what I suspected was antique furniture, the room looked like it belonged in the cabin I’d imagined.

“I know it’s a little small,” Lily said softly, “but I’ve always loved it up here.”

I walked over to the window and stared out at the lake below. “Who doesn’t love a turret room?”

From this vantage point, it was obvious that the house had been built into the side of a hill. There was a steep drop-off, then the land sloped gently toward the rocky shore. The view of the water was breathtaking.

“Well?” Lily demanded.

“Well, what?” I asked, unable to tear my eyes away from the whitecapped waves as they broke and rolled slowly toward what appeared to be a private dock. Our cove was as big as I’d expected the entire lake to be, and from where I stood, I could see past the cove’s entrance to the main body of Regal Lake.