Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Praise for A Season for Second Chances
- Also by Jenny Bayliss
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Discussion Guide
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
Nory wanted to tell Isaac that she’d confronted her brother, but a part of her was holding back. She didn’t want him to feel obliged to get with her simply because she’d cleared the path.
Lettuce had looked up lazily from her spot on the rug by the fire when Nory had come in, and then promptly let her head flop down again. Now she raised one ear inquisitively but decided she was too comfortable to move.
Isaac’s kitchen was a generous size, covering the whole back of the house, with a battered farmhouse table at the far end, opposite a set of French doors that led out to the back garden.
“Take a seat.” He gestured toward a tatty wingback chair tucked in beside a woodburning stove, and Nory sat down. The springs in the upholstery had well and truly sprung, but a small mountain of cushions made up for it.
“That was Dad’s favorite chair,” Isaac said. “I haven’t got the heart to get rid of it.”
“I know someone who could get it re-sprung, they’ve done a lot of work for me in the past. I brought in a load of old furniture when I opened the shop. I’d wondered why the chairs were so cheap when I bought them online and then discovered there wasn’t a working spring among them when they arrived.”
“Ah, the perils of the late-night eBay purchase.”
“Ha, yes.”
Isaac was busy at the worktop. He’d already glugged a bottle of red into a saucepan and was now busily slicing clementines, snapping cinnamon sticks, and throwing spices into the warming alcohol. Soon the kitchen was heady with the scents of orange and star anise. Nory let her eyes roam lazily around the space, feeling far too at home here with Isaac and far too relaxed to overthink it. Her gaze landed on an easel on one side of the table. She heaved herself out of the chair and wandered over.
“Did you paint this?” she asked.
It was a watercolor of the hellebore cultivar from the Winter Garden. The confident brushstrokes of color over the curves of the petals and the movement in the leaves felt familiar. The flower head and its leaves were separated, as was its stem, so that this was not so much a still life as a botanical study.
“Oh, um. Yes, I did. I wanted to document the plant as I went along. I’ve done the same with every hybrid.”
“Ever heard of a camera?”