The next magical novel from <New York Times< bestselling author Ashley Poston.

Autorentext

Ashley Poston

Klappentext

**AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! ∙ The new head gardener at the enchanting Lilymoor House stumbles upon a secret garden . . . with a mysterious man trapped inside, in the next magical novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Sounds Like Love and *The Seven Year Slip.

As featured in The New York Times ∙ People ∙ Cosmopolitan ∙ Parade ∙ E! News ∙ Woman's World ∙ and more!*

When Sophie Drear plans her escape to coastal Maine for the summer—for a temporary job revitalizing the storied grounds at Lilymoor House—she doesn’t expect to fall in love.

But she does: With the beguiling land, the fragrant flowers, and the towering hedge maze. With the quirky staff and the enigmatic woman who owns the place.

And then, the door appears. Never in the same place twice, it leads her to a secret, and unfinished, garden with a frustrated thundercloud of a man trapped inside.

This mysterious garden is not the only sign that the future of Lilymoor is unstable: the foliage resists Sophie’s careful nurturing, vines threaten to strangle the hedges, and the manor’s owner has wild ideas about who will take over when she retires—including her inconveniently attractive nephew who is also there just for the summer.

Despite herself, Sophie has come to care for the residents of Lilymoor just as much as she cares for its grounds. With the help of one man on the outside of the secret garden, and one man on the inside, she might be the only person who can figure out exactly what Lilymoor needs to bloom once more.

Leseprobe
Lilymoor

There was once a house on the cliffs that grew the most beautiful flowers.

It grew peonies, daisies, sunflowers, marigolds-wild and colorful and lush, while honeysuckles climbed their way over the high walls, and roses held court in secret alcoves. The house itself was drafty and charming, the way old and storied places were, a jumble of scalloped eaves and repurposed shipyard lumber, bone white and moss green and gray, often dressed in a cloak of midmorning fog.

The house had outlasted two of its owners, refusing to be tamed, though there was something special about its third-and current-owners that gave it pause. It was in the way the couple held hands as they strolled through the gardens in the evenings, and the way they tended to its overgrown flower beds with the patient sort of reverence reserved only for wild things. The house watched as its new owners celebrated occasions, and mourned losses that bit all the way to the bone, and decided that if they couldn't have their own, they'd make a family a different way.

So they paved the driveway up to the house and dug a parking lot against the cliffs, and gently placed paths through its sections, putting order to its seasons. Then they placed a beautifully carved piece of driftwood on its door with a word painted in lovely looping letters-a magical name for a magical house by the sea.

Lilymoor

And of all the gardens in the world, it was here where I fell in love.

1

fernweh

Lilymoor House and Gardens sat on the cliffs over Odette, Maine, like a haunting.

"Oh, she's beautiful," Harriett whispered as we rounded the twisting drive up to the historic property. She leaned out my Jeep window and took a photo with her disposable camera. "Look at her, Soph!"

"I'm driving!" I reminded her with a laugh. I'd look in a minute when I wasn't trying to keep us on the road. My knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel too tightly up the curving drive.

But then, at the roundabout in front of the house, I did take a glance.

After close to five hundred miles, a flat tire, and some dodgy gas station food, we'd finally made it.

The road trip had started as an idea our freshman year at Duke, when I lamented in a study group about a documentary I once saw about a beautiful garden on a cliff. Another girl-a brunette who always wore her hair in pigtails and her cat eyeliner sharp-perked at the mention of it.

"Wait, the one that used to air on PBS?" she had asked. We hadn't talked in class, so I didn't even know her name. "The documentary with the cute old couple who have tended the garden for, like, forty years? They're in Maine?"

I gasped. "You know Lilymoor?"

"Do I know it? I love that place! I want to write about it one day."

As it turned out, she'd taped that same documentary on VHS and watched it so many times the tape wore out. She sighed about all its gardens, its regal house, its owners-the Becks. Lilymoor felt fictional. It might as well have been, with the stories people whispered about it. That the gardens were magical, that sometimes you could hear the voice of your truest love. Obviously, it was just the sound of the wind coming up the cliffs-loads of people, from travel guides to paranormal hunters, had debunked it over the years. Still, Lilymoor sounded like a fairy tale, and maybe that was why Harrie loved it so much.

I told myself I just liked the flowers.

After study group, I admitted to her, "I've wanted to visit so badly ever since I first saw it on TV. Like, more than normal. It's like homesickness but . . . away." I frowned, thinking on it. "Far-sickness, I guess, for somewhere I've never been. I can't explain it. It sounds silly, I know."

"I don't think so," she replied with a thoughtful look. "There's a word for far-sickness. It's German-fernweh, I think."

"Fernweh," I repeated, chewing on the word. It tasted bittersweet in my mouth.

"We should go," she said, though it sounded more like a challenge as she looked me dead in the eyes. "We should make a plan."

"What, really?"

"Really really."

And that was that.

Her name was Harriett Fisher, and she collected untranslatable words in a little journal, like other people collected bottle caps or baseball cards. She was an English major who wanted to write novels, though she wasn't yet sure what kind. I was a biology major who, frankly, just wanted to play in the dirt.

We couldn't be more different, but there is this feeling when you meet someone special. Like finding a lost puzzle piece and clicking it into place-there's a certainty to it. A Yes, you are my person. The person you're going to grow old beside. The person you want in your commune when the world goes to hell. The person who inherits the solemn duty of deleting your internet history when you die.

That person.

I knew it would be Harrie the moment I met her.

So, for our graduation present to ourselves, we planned a road trip up the East Coast, hitting a few national parks, museums, and a haunted bed-and-breakfast or two, and ending in the place that had brought us together: Lilymoor House and Gardens in Odette, Maine.

Lilymoor sat on the cliffs side facing the sea, like it had been waiting all this time for us. It was a gentle house the color of bleached driftwood, with rounded architecture and a myriad of wide windows and sparrows clustered in the eaves. It looked otherworldly, some bygone ship captain's house right out of a storybook, from its sweeping front porch to its lovely moss-colored front door to the additions cobbled together with dredged bits of half-built ships-portholes and sea-crusted hulls, colorful buoys hanging from the doorway and from the rooftop like memories left out to warm in the sun. One side of the house was sheathed in brown shingles; the other was built up into an A-frame roof. The manor was mismatched, like two warring pairs of socks.

It was perfect.

The house and gardens attracted people from all around the world. Like the Jardins de Quatre-Vents in Quebec, it was privately owned and curated, and like …