Read Online The House by the Lake by Ella Carey - Free Book Online

young.”
    Anna leaned against the back of the sofa.
    “Still, the past is best left in dreams, Anna. I would like only my little remnant. That is all.”
    Anna kept her voice quiet. “Are you able to tell me what it is that you’re looking for?”
    “Anna. Please.”
    “The problem we have is that your reasons sound sentimental, Grandfather. We are talking about a lawyer here. They don’t tend to deal in sentimentality.”
    “Anna.”
    This was the closest she had come to having an argument with Max. The feeling was odd and uncomfortable, and yet, something was rising in her chest that was becoming hard to push down.
    In a way, Max’s past was her past too. She had a right to know about her ancestors. Who were Max’s sisters and brothers? Surely he was not an only child. What could he possibly not want her to know? The question of trust, of his faith in their relationship, kept bubbling away in her head, but then they were talking about a war. She had to try to put herself in his position, no matter how hard that was at times. He hadn’t lied to her—but he hadn’t told her anything for decades.
    “You are thinking too hard,” Max’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “I know you too well, my dear.”
    “This place is haunting me, even though I haven’t even walked into that Schloss yet. I’m not leaving until I’ve got you what you want. But you have to help me. I have to convince a lawyer, for goodness’ sake, that I have a legitimate reason for wanting to enter that estate. I can’t even convince the owner of the local shop to let me past the barbed wire fence at the moment.”
    “Anna,” he said. “Darling. Okay.”
    “Okay?”
    “Yes,” he said. “Okay.”
    Anna rested her head against the cushion. She was exhausted from jet lag and fresh air and lack of food. She would have to go down and eat something in the restaurant soon, or she would faint.
    There was a long silence down the line. But when Max finally spoke, he sounded as if he were in the next room. “It’s to do with that apartment in Paris,” he said. “I knew the girl who lived there when I was young.”
    “Didn’t it belong to a courtesan?”
    “Yes, Anna, and I knew her. But it was her granddaughter whom I . . . loved.”
    “Ah.”
    Max stayed quiet.
    “But, hang on, wasn’t the granddaughter the one who locked up the apartment for seventy years and never went back?”
    There was a silence.
    “And you had a love affair with her?” Anna stood up and paced around the room.
    “It wasn’t just an affair, darling. It was real. You know when it’s real.”
    Anna’s insides fluttered. She walked over to the window. It had become dark outside and a couple of streetlights had been switched on in the square.
    “A Parisian love affair?”
    “It began in Lake Geneva. I knew from the moment I first spoke to her. Her name was Isabelle de Florian.”
    “Lake Geneva?”
    “We were holidaying there,” he said.
    “Oh!”
    “Don’t sound so surprised.”
    “But what happened? Why did it . . . end?”
    Max went quiet again. “Too much happened. Far too much.”
    Anna’s head was spinning. Perhaps she could tell the lawyer about the apartment in Paris, the love affair, Max’s need to retrieve something. What if she could get her hands on a copy of the article about the abandoned apartment and show him?
    But she had more questions. “What happened, though? What did you do? Why do you have regrets?” Her words came out almost as a squeak.
    “It was an engagement ring that I hid under the floorboards of my bedroom.” Max fell silent again. He coughed.
    He sounded exhausted now. How valiantly he had tried to push aside thoughts that would take him back to a time that he needed to forget.
    But still Anna’s mind filled with questions. What about his relationship with her grandmother, Jean? They had never seemed very happy together. They always seemed to just get by. Max was often withdrawn around his American wife. And