A Letter from Nana Rose

by Kristin Harper

Genres: Women's Fiction; Clean & Wholesome Romance; Siblings

Synopsis

"My darling girls. You were once so happy in this house. Now I'm gone, all I ask is that you spend one last summer here together on Dune Island. And please forgive me, your Nana, for the secret I'm about to tell you..."Arriving at the honeysuckle-covered beach house inherited from her beloved grandmother, recently heartbroken Jill hopes to convince her two feuding sisters not to sell a place so full of happy childhood memories. But the envelope waiting on the driftwood table changes everything. In her elegant handwriting, Nana Rose promises a new letter will arrive each day of the summer revealing a family secret she took to her grave.Shaken, Jill anxiously awaits each letter filled with Nana's bittersweet memories of her own sister who she loved more than anyone—and lost far too young. But why did Nana never speak of this tragic loss to her grandchildren?Watching the sunset each night and wondering how well they really knew Nana Rose, Jill feels her family is closer than they've been in years. And after a chance encounter with blue-eyed tree surgeon Alex, she wonders if Nana believed being back on Dune Island would help Jill find love, too?But when Nana's final letter arrives, the revelation about how her sister died is more shocking than Jill ever imagined. Suddenly, despite the chance of happiness with Alex, selling the house seems the only way forward. Will Jill find a way to forge new bonds of sisterhood and save their inheritance, or will Nana Rose's secret tear them all apart?An absolutely gorgeous, gripping and heartbreaking read about the importance of family, and how even our loved ones can keep shattering secrets. Perfect for fans of Carolyn Brown, Debbie Macomber and Mary Alice Munroe.Read what everyone's saying about A Letter from Nana Rose:"WOW! Double up that WOW! This book was AMAZING!... perfect... I fell in love with the main character... Run, don't walk to pick up this book... An unforgettable story." Goodreads reviewer"Wow... the secrets were BIG ONES! I loved this book and found myself glued to the pages." Goodreads reviewer"As I flipped over the last page, I felt as though I'd been sitting on the Adirondack chairs on the deck... a deeply evocative and emotional read... absolutely love." Goodreads reviewer.Previous title Aunt Ivy's Cottage reached the Top 100 on the Kindle UK chartFor fans of Elin Hilderbrand, Debbie Macomber and Mary Alice Monroe-

Release date: October 25, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

“First things first,” Jill Sampson announced to herself after she got out of the car in front of Nana Rose’s house on Sea Breeze Lane.

That was what her grandmother used to say when Jill and her two older sisters, Rachel and Brooke, arrived at her Hope Haven residence on Dune Island when they were girls. They’d scramble out of the back seat, nearly suffocate her with embraces, and then one of them would urge the others, “Let’s go down to the beach!”

“Not until we unload the trunk,” their father invariably objected.

“First things first,” their grandmother always countered. “They’ve got their priorities straight, Jimmy—they’ve said hello to me and now they’ve got to go say hello to the bay. You were the same way when you were a boy. You’d race off and I wouldn’t see you again until suppertime. The unpacking can wait.”

By the time they’d get back, their father would have already emptied the trunk and taken their suitcases to their rooms for them. He was as happy as Nana was that we were so excited to see the beach again, Jill realized, overcome with loneliness.

It had been nine years since she’d lost her mother. Her father had died from a heart attack six years ago now. And Nana had passed away in March.

Because Jill’s sisters hadn’t arrived on the island yet, there was no one there for her to embrace. No one there to embrace her.

She couldn’t face going into Nana’s empty home by herself, so she trekked up the driveway and followed the crushed-shell path around the house.

In contrast to the flat, neat rectangle of tree-shaded lawn in the front yard, the sandy back yard was a wild composition of beach grass and beach plum, bayberry and bearberry, sea lavender and seaside goldenrod. In the right-hand corner, an ever-spreading thicket of wild roses filled the air with its sweet fragrance.

Jill surveyed it all, but she didn’t stop walking until she’d reached the upper platform of the wooden staircase leading down a steep dune to a private beach where the water nearly lapped the dunes at high tide and receded at least a quarter mile at low. Right now, it was coming in. The sweep of royal blue water was crinkled by a gentle breeze and fringed in white along its edges. Some ten yards to the south, a dense patch of seagrass swayed with the nearly imperceptible motion of the tide, but the surface was otherwise unbroken from here to the horizon, and beyond.

“I’m back,” she whispered to the seascape, a tradition she’d practiced ever since she was a young girl. “I’ve really missed you.”

It felt like forever since she and her sisters had returned to Nana’s place, even though it had only been three years. Prior to this lapse, they’d always spent at least two weeks together there every summer. Often they stayed longer, depending on their individual schedules. But three years ago Nana had fallen and broken her hip. Afterward, she’d had to move out of her off-island duplex, so she could move into an assisted living facility. It was so costly, she’d had to lease out her summer place on Sea Breeze Lane to year-round tenants. Even then, she’d barely been able to cover her expenses, but she was more concerned that her granddaughters had to cancel their annual vacation to the island.

“I feel terrible about this,” she’d cried. “You girls love getting together at my place in the summer and so do your families. And I loved having all of you there with me.”

Jill’s heart cracked a little at the memory of her elderly relative, only thinking of her family, grandchildren and great-grandchildren even when she’d gone through so much pain and upheaval.

Jill, at thirty-nine, was single. Or, as some people annoyingly put it, she was still single—as if she needed a reminder that she was behind schedule.

Forty-one-year-old Brooke and forty-three-year-old Rachel were both married, with teenage children. And their husbands and kids enjoyed going to Hope Haven as much as Rachel and Brooke did. But the three women insisted the most important priority was that their grandmother’s health-care needs were being met.

“Renting out your home year-round is a necessity, Nana. There’s nothing to feel bad about on our account,” Rachel had told her during one of their four-way video chats.

“Rachel’s right. We love vacationing together at Sea Breeze Lane and we’ll miss going there, but we want you to do whatever it takes to recover,” Jill had agreed. “And we’ll still all come to visit you in Worcester.”

“It’s only for a year or two. Once your health has improved and you’re caught up financially, we’ll have a big celebration on Dune Island with you, Nana.” Brooke’s sense of optimism had always bordered on denial, but Rachel and Jill had suspected their grandmother wouldn’t be returning to her summer home again.

Sadly, they’d been right. Nana never did regain enough mobility and strength to live independently again. In March, she’d died of congestive heart failure, leaving her granddaughters grief-stricken and without any surviving blood relatives except each other and the children.

Shortly after her burial service, Nana’s attorney had informed the three sisters that they’d inherited their grandmother’s summer estate, just as she’d told them they would. “Rose knew that her time had come,” he’d said candidly. “She was aware that her current tenants are preparing to move out in mid-June. It was her final wish that after they leave, the three of you spend two weeks together on Dune Island while you come to a unanimous decision about what to do with the house next.”

At this, the sisters had raised their eyebrows at each other in puzzlement.

“Just be sure to let me know the dates you’ll be there and what you end up deciding,” the lawyer had continued.

“Why would Nana feel it was necessary to put a formal request like that in her will?” Jill had asked her sisters later, as they were eating lunch in a nearby bistro.

“She knew how difficult it’s going to be for us to go to Sea Breeze Lane without her. This was probably her way of making sure we return as soon as possible, no matter how sad we are,” Brooke had guessed.

“Yeah, that sounds like Nana’s reasoning. But what I meant was why did she require us to make a unanimous decision about what to do next with the house? Obviously there’s no need to cover her assisted living facility expenses any more. It’s not as if we have to rent the house out again, so what is it we’re supposed to decide?”

“Well, I think…” Rachel had hedged. “I think Nana wanted to give us the option to sell the house. Otherwise, she would have stipulated that we keep it in the family.”

“Sell it?!” Jill had exclaimed so loudly the man at the table beside them had whipped his head around to look at her. She’d lowered her voice and repeated incredulously, “You want to sell Nana’s house?”

“It’s not that I want to,” Rachel had sounded a little put upon, a little defensive, even though she’d kept her volume down to match Jill’s. “But it is something I think we need to consider. Derek and I can barely afford to pay our mortgage and property taxes in Maryland. And they’re even higher in Massachusetts, especially on Dune Island.” Rachel and her husband were making boatloads of money from their furniture restoration and importation business; recently they’d even expanded to include an additional shop. But they’d struggled when they were first starting out, so she had a tendency to act as if they were still living paycheck to paycheck.

“We’d be splitting the expenses three ways,” Jill had pointed out.

“Can you realistically afford that? Aren’t you saving up so you can put a down payment on a house or a condo or something?”

Jill was a tech writer for a major appliance company and although she earned a decent salary, she lived in Boston, where housing costs were through the ceiling. At Rachel’s urging, she’d looked into buying a place of her own in the suburbs. But the only houses Jill could afford were so far outside the city that she would have had to commute over an hour each way for work, as well as to go out on the weekends.

Not that she’d really felt like socializing very much that spring. In addition to losing her beloved Nana, Jill had been reeling because Brandon, her boyfriend of eight months, had just dumped her in favor of his twenty-three-year-old personal trainer. That was one more reason she couldn’t wait to retreat to Sea Breeze Lane: experience had taught her that there were few problems in life that couldn’t be alleviated at least a little by spending time at the ocean with her family.

“I could be happy renting forever as long as I have Nana’s place to go to,” she’d said.

“For two weeks out of the year?”

“And on weekends, like I used to do when Nana still summered there.” Although Jill had moved several times since graduating college, for the past five years, she’d lived in Boston. So during the two summers before Nana’s accident, Jill had travelled to the island almost every weekend, as well as the two weeks she’d spent there vacationing with her sisters. All that time had made her grow even closer to her grandmother, and to the island.

“That might work out okay for you, but what about for Brooke and me and our families? It’s an eight-hour drive from my house—and the flight from Oregon is almost six. It’s not as if we can just drop everything and pop over to the island for a couple of days of vacation whenever we want.”

Somehow, the way Rachel had put it made it seem as if Jill didn’t have a care in the world compared to her sisters. True, it was to her advantage that she lived closer to Dune Island than they did, but they had more flexibility in their summer schedules than Jill. As business owners, Rachel and Derek relied heavily on their staff to carry out the daily operations, so they were free to take their vacations as they pleased. Brooke was an occupational therapist at an elementary school, so she had a long summer break. Her husband Todd was a graphic designer who worked remotely anyway.

Suddenly, Jill had an idea. “If you guys stayed for a month or two every summer, would that make it worth it to keep the house?” she’d asked eagerly.

Brooke sounded equivocal. “It might… although I don’t know if Todd and the kids would be on board with that plan. We’ve kind of gotten used to vacationing in the mountains for the past few summers.” Before Rachel could voice her thoughts on the matter, Brooke questioned, “But why are we discussing this already? Nana wanted us to spend two weeks in Hope Haven while we make up our minds one way or the other.”

At the mention of their grandmother’s request, both Jill and Rachel had fallen silent and resumed eating their lunches. Before departing for their homes, they’d all promised not to talk about the subject with each other until they arrived on Dune Island in June.

But Jill had worried about it constantly since then. Although she and her sisters had had their squabbles and minor sibling rivalries over the years, they’d never disagreed about anything as important as this. The possibility that either Rachel or Brooke would even consider selling Nana’s place had put Jill on edge for the past three months.

And if all that wasn’t stressful enough, the week before she’d left for Hope Haven, Jill had heard through the grapevine that her department at work was being downsized. Although her manager hadn’t confirmed whether the rumors were true yet, she’d been on tenterhooks waiting to find out whether her position might be eliminated.

Yet as she stood on the lip of the dune breathing in the faintly briny air, Jill felt considerably calmer. Nana’s place had always had that effect on her; it was one of many reasons she couldn’t bear to give it up. Not for any amount of money.

As soon as Rachel and Brooke are here again, they’ll feel as strongly about keeping the house as I do, she told herself. We’ve been away for so long that they’ve probably forgotten how beautiful it is.

Nana’s parents had purchased a little cottage on this property in the 1940s specifically because of its remote location. In the sixties, the cottage had been claimed by the bay during a winter storm, so she’d had the current house constructed farther back from the edge of the dune. By the mid-1980s, the island’s summer population had increased exponentially and much of its land had been developed, but Sea Breeze Lane was still very secluded.

Nana’s house was the last of four residences on the one-sided dirt road; the closest neighbor was two acres to the right. To the left was a half-mile expanse of uninhabitable dunes, which were eventually interrupted by a tidal river and marshland. Except for an occasional boater who’d come ashore to fish, it was rare to cross paths with anyone at that end of the beach. Jill had always felt a little smug that Nana’s modest patch of property offered more privacy than some of the most exclusive waterfront communities on the island.

She turned and squinted in the opposite direction, toward town. Dune Island was made up of five villages, collectively forming Hope Haven. While they were all breathtaking, each one had a unique identifying feature. Benjamin’s Manor was an historic fishing village with a small, quaint harbor. Port Newcomb, the island’s largest town, was home to the major ferry dock. Highland Hills’s plunging oceanside cliffs were spectacular, and the cranberry bogs in Rockfield were as scenic as they were fruitful.

And then there was Lucinda’s Hamlet—also called “Lucy’s Ham” by the locals—which was where Nana’s house was located. Lucy’s Ham was known for its bayside boardwalk about a mile and a quarter north of where Jill stood now. She used to love browsing its shops and playing games at the arcade or getting a cone at Bleecker’s Ice Cream Parlor with her family when she was a kid. But as an adult, she rarely went into that part of town any more. In fact, she rarely went anywhere beyond her grandmother’s place if she could help it.

As Nana used to say, pointing to the scenery, Why would I leave when I have all of this right at my doorstep?

Jill kicked off her sandals and hurried down the stairs, fingering the thick rope handrail strung from post to post on her way down. She hopped off the bottom step into the warm, fine sand. Although the sky was supposed to cloud over later in the day, the sun was currently blazing, so she scurried to the water and waded in until it reached the hem of her cotton capris.

As a girl, she would have worn a bathing suit beneath her shorts and shirt so she could have flung them off and raced her sisters into the water. Brooke usually was the first to submerge herself and Jill would dive in second. Even though Rachel was the oldest and succeeded at nearly everything she did, she was always last in this particular contest because it took her a long time to adjust to the chilly water.

A lump swelled in Jill’s throat as she remembered how Nana used to drape fresh towels over the deck railing so they’d be warm from the sun by the time her granddaughters—and later, her great-grandchildren—came upstairs to dry off. Jill glanced over her shoulder, wishing her sisters would arrive soon so she wouldn’t feel so lonely.

Brooke was flying from Portland into Annapolis, because Rachel didn’t want to drive all the way from Maryland to Massachusetts by herself. Their husbands and children were involved in work, various end-of-year school activities, trips and camps. So it would just be the three sisters for the start of the vacation.

Jill was really going to miss hanging out with her nieces and nephews—there was never a dull moment with them around—but she had to admit she was relieved that no one else was coming for a while. She remembered how emotional they’d been the first time they’d visited Sea Breeze Lane without their father. Being at Nana’s house had triggered so many memories of him that it had felt as if they’d just lost him all over again. So Jill was glad she and her sisters would have time alone to try to adjust to their grandmother’s absence.

And although she was genuinely fond of her sisters’ spouses, she was also glad that they wouldn’t be there while the trio discussed what they wanted to do with the house. Nana would have specified if she’d wanted Todd and Derek to have a vote in the matter, she reasoned.

Her grandmother may not have always been politically correct—after all, she still referred to Jill and her sisters as girls. But she was a strong, independent woman who didn’t think men should be in charge of making all the financial decisions, the way they usually were when Nana was growing up.

Jill also figured her grandmother hadn’t wanted Brooke and Rachel to have an unfair advantage in the event the three of them didn’t agree on what to do about the house. Nana had always been sensitive to Jill’s heartache over the fact that she hadn’t met a man she considered her soulmate yet. A man she’d loved enough to marry, and vice versa.

I knew from the start that Brandon and I didn’t have a future together, so why did I waste so much time with him? she brooded.

“You beat me into the water for once!” someone called, interrupting her self-recrimination.

Jill spun around to see Brooke bounding down the stairs, her hair flying out behind her. She didn’t have time to wade to shore before her sister splashed out to greet her. “I’m so glad to see you,” Brooke said over Jill’s shoulder, enveloping her tightly.

“So am I.” As Jill returned her hug, she could feel Brooke’s scapula sticking out. She pulled back to look at her and was surprised at how sharp her features appeared, too. Brooke’s shoulder-length locks, once threaded with gray strands, were thoroughly brunette—almost as dark as her teenage daughters’ hair. Yet instead of making her appear younger, the coloring job had aged her beyond her forty-one years. Or was that only the effect of taking a red-eye flight?

After they released each other, Brooke looked Jill up and down and declared, “You look beautiful, as always.”

Jill knew she didn’t look beautiful. She looked puffy and pale and her dishwater-blond hair was in need of highlights and a trim. Physically and emotionally, she was thoroughly washed out. But she understood that Brooke’s remark was a reflection of how happy she was to be with Jill in person again. She twisted sideways to point to the bay. “Now that’s beautiful…”

“Mmm,” Brooke murmured, her eyes brimming. Of the three sisters, she was the most sentimental, so Jill assumed they were happy tears, but it was just as likely that she was on the brink of crying because she missed Nana. If she started, Jill would, too, and she didn’t want that to happen already. Or to happen again.

“Where’s Rachel?” she asked.

“She was calling Derek to tell him we’d arrived safely and then she was going to have to take off her sneakers and socks, and I didn’t want to wait for—oh, look, here she comes now.”

Jill glanced up to see her lithe, willowy sister descending the staircase, her sunglasses perched atop of her cropped auburn hair and her pants legs rolled up to her kneecaps. “Hi, Rach,” she called, waving. “C’mon in. The water’s fine.”

“It’s freezing,” Rachel exclaimed as soon as she dipped her toes in, but she continued inching forward.

“Here, I’ll warm you up.” Jill quickly splashed through the shallows until they were close enough to wrap their arms around each other.

“Together again at last,” Rachel said.

Then Brooke came up from behind them and elbowed her way into their embrace, the waves lapping at their ankles. They used to call this kind of hug a “sister-braid” when they were girls. It had always made Jill feel three times as strong as she was on her own and today was no exception; after they let go of each other, she finally felt ready to enter Nana’s house.

“Before we unload the cars, let’s go inside to get a drink and open the windows,” Jill suggested. After they’d climbed the stairs, she retrieved the key from its usual hiding place beneath a large quahog shell on the deck. Then she went around to unlock the front door so she could come through and open the sliders for Rachel and Brooke.

Nana’s house originally was one story tall, with two bedrooms and a bathroom in what everyone considered the back of the house, the side closest to the road. In the front, the open-concept kitchen, dining area and “great room” faced the bay. Bordered by floor-to-ceiling windows on both ends, the large space also contained four sets of sliding doors, which opened to a deck stretching across the length of the house.

When Jill and her sisters were young, Nana had added a second story to the house. It had two bathrooms and four bedrooms, each with its own balcony. Whether upstairs or down, the expansive views from the front and sides of the house were so spectacular that Nana hadn’t seen any reason to fill the house with paintings or other ornamental accessories.

Her sparse décor was both functional and el. . .