Her blinds were often open as she lay in her bed I can only hope the beauty of the mountains eased her pain. My mother took her last breath in that house. The immense windows along the western façade, so we were seldom out of sight of the rippling blue silhouette of the mountain range that formed our horizon, thirty miles away. The spacious open-plan living/dining room, because my parents disliked the tradition of separate “formal” rooms that sat mostly unused. One big bathroom for the three of us to share, but separate his-and-hers art studios for them. And partly because the house had been designed according to my parents’ specifications, I was always aware of the way my physical environment reflected who our family was. By the time construction was completed, though, I was as bewitched as they were. Before then, we had been living among clinking sailboat masts and dapper white-clad midshipmen in Annapolis, Maryland, and my six-year-old self utterly failed to see what had so enchanted my mom and dad with this steep and unruly hillside in the boondocks. It may not have been happy, but it’s still our origin, and for better or worse, we can’t forget it, or carve away the imprint it left upon us.įor me, this home was the ten acres in the Blue Ridge foothills where my parents built their dream house. Our oldest, most fundamental place the place we really began.

Most of us begin with the same kind of home: Where we come from. The thing is, though, that each of our homes, and the people who share them with us, shape us in ways it takes years to fully understand. But, unthinkable as it is to ourselves as children, what happens to all of us is that our definition of home changes over time. Just the phrase “keep the home fires burning” conjures a place we can return to after wandering, where someone we love will be waiting .

On one hand, it’s such a universal concept that, in its broadest terms, it ought to mean the same thing to everyone-a place of shelter, safety, belonging. Home is one of those simple ideas that gets more complicated the harder you think about it. But what I soon began to realize, as the book developed, is that it’s equally a story about home.

So that’s what was foremost in my mind when I started working on The One That Got Away. Darcy, is the story of Anne of Green Gables’ Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe. My lifelong favorite, over even Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. As an incurable romantic, I’ve always had a soft spot for those stories that are as warm and gooey as the center of a molten chocolate cake.

The one that got away by bethany chase