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?
This was Nory’s old stomping ground. She knew that beyond the main gardens was the old folly, always unlocked when guests were in residence, and generously stocked with blankets, wingback armchairs, and brandy. Shaking quite vigorously now with the bitter cold, Nory hugged herself and headed through the archway in the Victorian wall, which led into the formal gardens. Here the beds were organized in smart rows, many of them almost bare, only shorn stumps to hint at what might be sleeping beneath, waiting for spring to warm the earth and reawaken them. She moved through here with the ease of someone who knows the lie of the land of old, and through another arch that led to the Winter Garden.
The Winter Garden had always been her favorite growing up, and despite the cold by now having almost completely numbed her limbs, she walked more slowly. Any plant could dazzle when the sun shone warm and the days were long, but to Nory’s mind, it took a special kind of flower to be able to bloom when the weather was freezing and the days were bleak.
The little footlights in the flower beds highlighted purple heathers, bright pink sedums—or “ice plants” as her dad had always referred to them—and winter jasmine, with its showers of yellow stars. But it was the hellebores that Nory loved the best. Their dark leaves with sharp serrated edges, so in contrast with the soft powdery bells and bonnets of its flowers; heavy blooms nodding bashfully toward the earth.
Her joy at being back in her favorite part of the castle grounds was hampered only by the notion that she might develop hypothermia. She was about to hurry toward her final destination when something at the back of a border caught her eye. It was a hellebore, but not one she’d seen before—and if any girl was going to know her hellebores, it was her. Maybe it was the dark playing tricks on her. But still . . . she bent down, as best she could in her silk sausage-skin dress, to take a look, and she could feel the thin wire that ran the perimeter of the bed cutting into her calves.
“What are you doing?”