Sarah padded down the hallway, hurrying along on her big, bare feet, feeling the guilt dissipate like smoke. She couldn’t wait to get down to the kitchen, couldn’t wait to open up her laptop and fall back into the world of her story and find out what happened next.

Elise Crooks could not believe what she was hearing. “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Jenkins repeated, “but we’ve got a tenant, and she’s very particular. She can’t be disturbed. There can’t be anyone on the property.” She lowered her voice. “She’s a writer.”

Elise rolled her eyes. Like the Island wasn’t crawling with writers, of fiction and nonfiction, published and aspiring (she’d learned, after receiving a stinging rebuke from one of her clients, that you never, ever said unpublished, which implied failure, you said aspiring, which implied hope, even if the aspirer in question was on the wrong side of forty).

“I don’t want to disturb your tenant, but I won’t be in the house,” Elise said, in case Mrs. Jenkins had forgotten where her roses were located. “I’ll be out by the pool, and I’ll be in and out in under an hour. I promise, she won’t even know I’m there.”

Mrs. Jenkins had sounded truly regretful. “I wish I could say yes,” she’d said. “But this woman—well, her agent—was very explicit. Nobody goes in the house, nobody goes near the house. He made me promise.”

“I understand,” said Elise, who didn’t. Casually, she asked, “Is this writer anyone I would have heard of?”

“I’d never heard of her,” said Mrs. Jenkins. “Her name is Sarah Vernon, and her agent seems to feel she’s got a breakout book inside of her, and that’s what she’s writing at our place!” Brightening, she said, “I wonder if she’ll thank us in the acknowledgments.”

Elise forced herself to press her lips together, not to scream at the silly woman on the other end of the phone. Elise was seventy-four years old, and she’d tended gardens on Elder Island since she’d opened her business more than fifty years ago. She was the best of the three gardeners on the island. In the annual Elder Island Garden Competition, her gardens had taken the top prizes for almost each of the last twenty years. Her espaliered roses were especially coveted. Elise had a special technique, honed over the years, a way of coaxing and training that got the flowers to bloom against a brick wall in sweet-scented, stunning profusion, all summer long. Off-season maintenance was the secret to her success… and if she couldn’t prune the Jenkinses’ roses, years of her hard work would be undone.

“Mrs. Jenkins, I hear what you’re saying. But I want to be clear: If I don’t cut those roses back, you’re not going to be happy at all when you come in the spring.”

Mrs. Jenkins sighed. “I know it’s a sacrifice. But we agreed to this woman’s terms.”