Chapter Two

“So you threw him out?” Parker’s voice asked through the pops and crackles of the cell phone he was using half a world away. “Are you two done, Polls? I mean, seriously?”

“I don’t know,” Polly said, running a frustrated hand through her fiery red hair and flopping back onto the guest room bed. She’d decided after glancing at the master bed that she couldn’t bring herself to change the sheets and sleep there tonight – not with the vision of Matthew and the housekeeper playing on repeat in her brain. “It sure feels like it, but it also feels like I have enough emotion and adrenaline to cut his balls off with a spoon, so it’s possible I’m not totally subjective right now.”

Polly could hear Parker audibly gulp on the phone and laughed. “Ooh, sorry about that visual, twin,” she apologized with a laugh in her voice.

“I’m going to suggest something, and I want you to NOT spontaneously freak out, okay?” Parker said evenly after he had taken a second to recover from his sister’s startling visual. “Okay?”

“What could you possibly suggest that could freak me out any more today?” Polly replied, toeing off her stilettos and curling up against the down pillows beneath her head. “I mean, really?”

“I need you to go up north,” Parker said. “Please,” he added as an afterthought.

Polly bolted back up on the bed, ready to argue that under no circumstances was she going back north, but before she could open her mouth to object, Parker’s voice came back on the line.

“Before you spontaneously freak out,” Parker said, already imagining her reaction, “hear me out. Carl Kershaw’s mother is going downhill, so he’s made the decision to move back to Arizona to be with her, for however long she has left. We’re in the middle of several construction projects, plus now the books are just sitting there empty with no one to coordinate anything, and we’re facing a serious loss if we don’t get it turned around. He’s offered to let me buy him out, but I can’t even get that organized, much less take bookings. I can’t exactly handle things from here, Polls, I’m in a war zone,” he said, putting special emphasis on the last two words in a bid for sympathy.

“Park, I’m in a marriage crisis zone,” Polly mimicked, making him laugh. “And besides, I don’t wanna.”

“That’s mature,” Parker said. “Are you thirty seven, or are you five?”

“Shuddup.”

“Oh, mature, Polls,” Parker said with an almost audible grin. “Seriously – help me out. I can’t exactly interview a new property manager from here, and besides… you could use a break, right? A change of scenery? A chance to get away from Matthew for a while to figure things out?”

“A change of scenery, sure. But I was thinking I could leave Santa Monica for a couple of days to go to Malibu, not some backwater filled with moose and Yoopers,” Polly shot back. “Malibu is CIVILIZED.”

“Malibu is artificial and boring. Up north will put hair on your chest,” Parker said, and Polly groaned.

“Now I REALLY don’t wanna,” she whined until Parker cut her off.

“Pull yourself together. Go up north, get your head on straight, work out some deals for me, check on the construction, and then move on with your life. There. Sorted. Stop whining.”

Polly sighed, flopping back against the pillows again, idly twisting a curl of hair around her index finger. “If I do this…”

“When you do this…” Parker corrected before she continued. 

“If I do this, how long do I have to stay?” Polly asked. 

“Just until things are running smoothly and you’ve booked up the winter season. It’s always the most lucrative, you know and we’re always stupidly busy with the snowmobilers. After that, go back to LA for all I care. Hang with celebrities. Get skin cancer. Whatever.”

“How disdainful you feel about LA is how disdainful I feel about the U.P.,” Polly murmured, sighing again, knowing already that she couldn’t let her brother down, but unable to just give in.

“Polly, if it weren’t for the properties up there… if Mom and Dad hadn’t kept the cottages going all those years… we couldn’t have afforded college. You couldn’t have afforded law school. We owe our livelihoods to those properties. Please. If Mom and Dad were still alive, you know they would never ask you to go up there, but I will. Please? Keep the family business going, will ya?” 

Parker’s voice always took on a tone of sadness and adoration when referring to their parents, both of whom died too young, he of cancer, and she of a heart attack, both within months of each other and leaving Polly and Parker as orphans, no matter their age. Parker had always had such an attachment to the family land and all that roamed on it, while Polly didn’t see what all the fuss was about, but Parker was right – without the cottages, law school wouldn’t have happened, even with her scholarship.

“Can you email me the specs on who you’ve hired, contacts, whatever? I’ll… I’ll figure something out. And I’ll send you a carrier pigeon to let you know when I get there, since God knows there’s no cell coverage up there…” Polly said bitterly, but acquiescing to his request.

“Listen up, twin. I think this will be good for you, I really do,” Parker said, his voice suffused with sincerity and appreciation.

“Yeah. It’ll be great – right up until the moment I get eaten by a moose,” Polly said, sighing again as Parker laughed.

**

Polly couldn’t wait to touch down at Sawyer Airport, straining to look at the window as the ground crept closer and closer. It had been a job just finding flights that would take her from LA to Marquette – the closest airport to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, home of the Royston clan for generations.

And a place that, after high school graduation, Polly didn’t ever think she would be inhabiting again.

Closing her eyes, she thought back to her childhood, filled with lazy days of fishing and hiking in the woods, helping her father chop firewood for the winter, kayaking on Lake Superior with Parker, walking on the beach and looking for fossils.

To any kid, it sounds like the perfect childhood, but to Polly, it was filled with a need for more – more people, more action, more sounds, more excitement. She longed for the sunny days in LA she saw on television, the bustle of people on a college campus, the constant hum of human activity surrounding her. She and Parker had been thick as thieves growing up, sure, but kids their age were few and far between, and loneliness was a frequent companion, at least until high school.

But by then, Polly had been bitten by the California bug, and after graduation, she packed her bags for UCLA, then on to USC Law School, not once looking back to the Keweenaw Peninsula she had called home since she was born.

Within months of graduation, she’d landed a cushy job with an LA law firm, and only a few months after that, she’d met Matthew at a dinner party thrown by a colleague. They had been seated next to each other for dinner, and he’d sat down, introduced himself, proclaimed her the most beautiful woman in the room, and demanded to know her life story right then and there, ignoring his first two courses while she stammered out her own introduction.

She had been immediately smitten.

He was older than her by a decade, and seemed so sophisticated and worldly to her 25 year old eyes. They dated for two years before tying the knot in a lavish beachfront ceremony in front of hundreds of guests and clients, a ceremony in which Matthew had spared no expense to give her exactly what she wanted.

A year after that, North & North was established, and the two of them were off living the dream – a beautiful home, sexy cars, no children to hold them back from an evening out or a bottle of merlot, and enough money to be frivolous, charitable, and secure, all at once.

But over the last year, Matthew had definitely taken on an air of… well, boredom, if Polly was honest. He grew increasingly distant, and increasingly eager to have the latest car, the latest television, the latest Blackberry, and his eyes seemed to wander more than they did before…

Now she knew what the signs were pointing to, but then… then, Polly didn’t want to believe that anything could topple her perfect life with her perfect, worldly, sophisticated older husband.

And now she was winging off to a cottage on the shores of Lake Superior, back to the isolation of the north, surrounded by… silence. A dapple of waves on the sand and wind in the trees, and that was the only sound she could potentially hear for days at a time.

Polly wasn’t sure that after fifteen years she could stand the silence, but for Parker’s sake – and the memory of their parents – she was willing to try.

She only hoped she’d packed enough long underwater.

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