Chapter 9 - The Granite Cove
The Camden property was everything David had described in his letters, and more than I had dared to dream.
It sat on a high granite bluff overlooking Penobscot Bay, surrounded by ancient balsam firs and stands of silver birch that hissed softly in the ocean wind. Below the cliff, the dark Atlantic water surged into a protected cove, deep enough to moor a schooner, clear enough to see the white sand thirty feet beneath the surface.
And there, rising from the raw rock like an organic extension of the earth, was the foundation.
David had laid it using massive blocks of local gray granite, pinned directly into the bedrock with two-inch steel rebar. The walls of the lower level were already three feet high, square, true, and plumb, filled with gravel and sealed against the winter frost.
I stood in the center of what was meant to be the great room, the wind whipping my hair across my face, the salt spray cold against my cheeks.
Maya was already running along the perimeter of the stone, her arms outstretched like an osprey riding the updraft.
“Mom! Look!” she shouted, pointing toward the eastern horizon. “The lighthouse! You can see the light!”
Two miles out across the gray water, the white tower of Curtis Island Light stood against the breakers, its red beacon flashing rhythmically in the gathering twilight.
Julian walked up behind me, carrying a heavy wool blanket. He draped it over my shoulders, stepping close enough that I could feel the solid warmth of his chest against my back, sheltering me from the offshore gale.
“He was an artist,” Julian said, looking down at the joinery of the granite cornerstones. “Most men would have used poured concrete and faced it with stone veneer. David used solid quarry blocks. This house will still be standing two hundred years from now.”
“He wanted something that couldn't be washed away,” I whispered, leaning back slightly against Julian’s coat. It was the first time I had allowed myself to lean on anyone in four years, and the relief was so profound it made my throat tighten.
“We’ll bring the framing crew in on Monday,” Julian said, his arm settling naturally around my shoulders, holding the wool blanket closed against the wind. “I’ve already contacted the timber yard in Bangor. We have sixteen-inch Douglas fir beams arriving by barge on Wednesday.”
I turned my head to look at him. In the fading northern light, his gray eyes looked dark, steady, and entirely sure.
May you like
“Julian,” I said softly. “This is our home. Mine and Maya’s. You don't have to buy our affection.”
“I’m not buying anything, Elena,” Julian said, his fingers reaching up to brush a strand of hair back from my forehead. His touch was hesitant, respectful, entirely different from the possessive grip I had seen him use with Charlotte. “I’m investing in the only thing I’ve seen in forty years that isn't for sale.”
