“I was the opposite,” he said. “She finally gave in and let me take lessons in town. And Dad bought me the keyboard.”

“Play something else?” I asked.

“I will, but I’m starving,” he said. “Did you have lunch yet?”

I shook my head.

We went to the kitchen and, without discussing it, made lunch together. Just sandwiches with sliced apples on the side, but standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him, working in quiet, intimate silence, made me almost breathless.

I took my plate and started for the breakfast room, but he said, “Let me show you something,” and headed back through the kitchen into a dim, plain hallway. Near the end was a door leading to a set of stairs in an almost pitch-dark stairwell. We took them up and then went out the door at the top into the light of the afternoon.

It was a cloudy day, but the light was still comparatively blinding. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust, and then I looked around.

We were on the roof of the house, but it wasn’t a normal part of the roof. It was fancy, with black-and-white-tile flooring and old patio furniture strewn about, shoved into irregular pairings.

“There used to be a stairway over there,” Barrett said, indicating a place where the waist-high ledge looked patched. “But I think they took it out before Mom was born. Now the service entrance is the only way up here.”

One of the enormous trees that grew next to the house shaded a small corner of the deck, so we pulled a couple of incredibly heavy chairs under there and sat down to eat. You could see the whole property from here—except the graveyard, well hidden behind its walls and overgrown hedge.

The wind blew softly, and I tried to eat like a normal person, which was hard because my body seemed to want to devote all my attention to Barrett. A musician. He’d been hiding this secret part of himself like a person hunched over to conceal the soft, brilliant light of a candle.

“I think it’s so amazing,” I couldn’t help saying. I felt at this point like I was costing myself all of my cool points, but I wasn’t too afraid that Barrett would care. After all, he’d seen me all dressed up in the garden, and he’d watched me meekly follow his mother’s every order.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

I looked over at him, thinking he was complimenting himself.

“I do love this property,” he said. “But I just like it so much more if I . . . if I know I’m leaving soon.”

Leaving soon. I forced myself to ignore that part for now. “But you may inherit the whole thing,” I said. “You might live here one day.”

“No,” he said, his face stony-serious. “Never.”

I couldn’t hide my surprise.